Asparagus foraging mission yields Roman tombstone

A hiker on the hunt for wild asparagus in the woods outside Livorno harvested a Roman funerary marker instead. Retired firefighter Roberto Tessari was foraging last Wednesday after heavy rains when he spotted a rectangular stone slab at the water’s edge of a canal. He turned it over and saw that it was a funerary inscription.

An active member of the Livorno Archaeological Paleontological Group, Tessari knew to report the find to the Superintendency of Archaeology, Fine Arts and Landscape for the provinces of Pisa and Livorno and sent the official archaeologist, Dr. Lorella Alderighi, whom he knows personally, pictures of the slab. He then called his firefighter brethren to help him pull it out of the water. They lifted the stone safely and transferred it to the Superintendency. In a happy coincidence, Tessari’s son was on the firefighting team dispatched to the scene.

The slab is 45 cm (17.7 inches) wide, 9 cm (3.5 inches) thick and 29 cm (11.4 inches) high, exactly one Roman foot. It dates to the 2nd century A.D. and is in excellent condition, with an intact inscription framed by a deeply carved cornice. The letters are 4 cm (1.6 inches) high and expertly carved in capital letters carefully laid out to make three even lines.

The three lines of Latin text read:

T ANCONIUS SEVERUS
ANCONIVS PRISCVS
ET SABINIA SEVERA
V F

It is a dedication to one Titus Anconius Severus from his parents, father Anconius Priscus and mother Sabinia Severa. The abbreviation V F stands for Vivi Fecerunt, meaning that the parents had the tomb and marker made while they were still living.

The names are not documented in any known sources, but there are interesting details in . Young Titus, for example, bears his father’s family (gens) name of Anconius and his mother’s family name Severus as a cognomen (the third personal name). The cognomen started out as a nickname to distinguish people from the same family since there were so many repeated praenomen (first names) and eventually became inherited as well. They were almost always inherited along the paternal line, but the mother’s family name could be passed down to a son as a cognomen on occasion. The emperors of the Flavian dynasty, for example, used the mother’s name as cognomina for the second sons — Vespasian after his mother Vespasia Polla, Domitian after his mother Flavia Domitilla. One reason for including the mother’s name in a son’s name was if her family more distinguished, so not necessarily adopting the mother’s name per se, but rather including the name of the maternal grandfather.

“The discovery is extremely interesting as it is one of the rare Roman inscribed tombstones with perfectly preserved text found in the Livorno area,” emphasizes Dr. Alderighi. “Given the site’s isolation, today as perhaps in the past, with its wooded and uncultivated nature, it cannot be ruled out that the tombstone may indicate the location of a stonemason’s workshop, or that it was never connected to a funerary structure, as the roughly hewn marble back shows no traces of mortar to the naked eye. The inscription likely dates to the 2nd century AD.”

The male names (Titus Anconius Severus, Anconius Priscus) and the female figure (Sabinia Severa) do not belong to known individuals, and only the first male figure has a praenomen cited. Furthermore, the males lack patronymics and tribe names, and the gentilic name is copied from the name of a city (Ankòn/Ancon). These are all factors that could indicate the status of freedmen, or those economically important social groups that left traces of themselves in the epigraphic documentation of northern Etruria between the 2nd and 3rd centuries AD.

The slab is now being cleaned and conserved by Superintendency experts who will conduct an in-depth analysis of the stone, carving and inscription.

* This article was originally published here