Prayer to Mother Earth

A gravestone from Dalmatia, and the verse on it was not composed but taken ready-made.

Set it beside card terra-funerary-005, an inscription from Rome. The distich there is the same word for word, only the stone is whole and two further verses are added to it. The Dalmatian one is broken, and the first words of each line are the editor's restorations. One and the same epitaph in Illyricum and at Rome, in different volumes of CIL: this is not a coincidence but a model reproduced twice.

This is how the monumental masons worked. A cutter kept a stock of finished verse endings from which the customer chose by price and by the length of the stone; the personal names were inserted, the verse stayed. The Latin verse epitaph is a predominantly stock genre, and coincidences of this kind run into the hundreds in Buecheler's collection.

That does not make the inscription insincere. Grief always uses ready-made words — which is how it is recognised as grief rather than as literature.

Sentiat ut pietas praemia quae meruit — that piety may feel the reward it has earned. The reward for the dead man's pietas is the lightness of the earth; recompense beyond the grave is measured by weight.

The editor says so himself. Buecheler prints the inscription as no. 1047 and notes on it: sed distichon sumpsit ab alio — "but he took the distich from someone else". The man who set up the stone did so for his partner, dead at twenty-five, and took the verse from elsewhere; a nineteenth-century editor noticed it by comparing no. 1048 — the Roman inscription that stands on card terra-funerary-005.

The card's text follows Buecheler: the square brackets are his, the stone is broken, and Et te, Terr]a, [super], senti]at and [prae]mia are the editor's restorations.