Prayer to Mother Earth

A Roman inscription, and this is the full recension of the same stock verse that stands in shortened form on the Dalmatian stone (terra-funerary-003); the workshops that dealt in ready-made endings are discussed there.

Here there is an addition the Dalmatian version lacks, and a remarkable one: "and may whoever sincerely renders honour to his own carry a happy course through to the gods above".

The blessing is directed not at the dead but at an outsider — at whoever honours his own dead. That is, at the reader standing in front of the stone. The inscription pays the passer-by for reading it: you stopped, you remembered, take a fortunate journey for it.

This is precisely how a Roman tomb was constructed. It stood beside a road, addressed the man walking past, often spoke in the voice of the dead, and nearly always wanted something from the passer-by — attention, a kind word, the observance of a rite. Here a fee has been fixed for it.

Checked against Buecheler, where the inscription stands as no. 1048, immediately after the Dalmatian one (terra-funerary-003) — the editor placed them together precisely because he saw the borrowing. The card's text agrees; the scanned edition gives leniter for leviter in the first line, but that is evidently the usual scanning substitution of n for u: in no. 1047 the same word is printed leuiter.