Prayer to Mother Earth

An infant's grave in Roman Africa.

The earth is called fertile — Terra … fecunda — and the word stands over a child's ashes. The epithet is an ordinary one, out of the vocabulary of farming, and here it is unbearable: the very power that bears and rears is being addressed at the burial of one who did not grow. It was probably not chosen on purpose; which makes it worse.

The request is the usual one — lie lightly — but the reason given is physical in the extreme: "that the infant's ashes may not be tormented by the weight". Aestuare means to be in distress, to burn, to gasp. Ash is conceived as capable of suffocating under a mound.

Here lies the whole difference between the Roman attitude to death and later ones. There is no consolation of any kind: no reunion, no recompense, no better world. There is a body in the ground which may be uncomfortable, and the only thing that can be asked for is a reduction of pressure.

The child has a name. Buecheler prints the inscription entire as no. 1153, and its opening lines say: here is laid Flora, daughter of Ingenuus, who lived a year and nine months, and the funeral rites a daughter owed her parent her father performed for her instead — aduersis casibus, by the reverse of chance. The card keeps only the last couplet.

Above the inscription, by the editor's description, a waxing crescent is carved, and below it a girl holding a pomegranate and a bunch of grapes.