Prayer to Earth

A gravestone with several names: a family or collegial tomb, and the plea is made for all at once, "whose names are on this stone".

The request is inverted relative to the usual one. The Earth is not told to be light — she is asked to embrace: aevo … sancta ossua, forever the holy bones. Instead of a weight to be eased, an embrace to be asked for. One and the same action of the earth is described now as pressure, now as tenderness, and the choice between those descriptions is the whole content of the genre.

Ossua for ossa is a colloquial form, and common in inscriptions. Cutters wrote as they spoke, and vulgar forms in epigraphy are more reliable than literary ones: they show the language rather than the standard.

Sancta ossua — holy bones. Remains at Rome were res religiosa, a thing withdrawn from commerce: a grave could be neither sold nor dug over, and what protected it was not piety but law.

The reading has been corrected. The card had completere; Buecheler, who prints this inscription as no. 1217, has complectere, embrace — which the sense requires and which the Russian already rendered. Corrected against the edition. The stone was found near the Porta Latina and is in the Capitoline Museum; the names on it are those of Flavius Ophelio and Flavius Bebryx.