Shropshire Routes to Roots

4. The tombstone

The tombstone

In addition to leaving us the type of dedicative inscription we see on the forum, the Roman letter-cutters also left more numerous examples of their writing - tombstones.

This is a photograph of the tombstone of a Roman soldier of the Twentieth Legion, which was found at Wroxeter.

Wroxeter Tombstone Larger image, transcription and translation, in a new window [40kb] [Shropshire Archive reference: PH/W/38/3]

The quality of the inscription is obviously not as good as that of the forum inscription. A local stonemason probably had many tombstones to cut and was very busy! Notice how the memorialised soldier had three names (his tria nomina), and quite an important job. Tombstones such as this can reveal a lot of historical information:

The presence of Legio XIV at Wroxeter was known long ago from the discovery of tomestones of soldiers of this legion in the cemetary north-east of the city when the ground was being brought under cultivation in the eightennth century...There is a stone of GAIUS MANNIUS SECUNDUS of Legio XX, but he was a beneficiarius on the governor's staff where he would have administrative duties which could have taken him anyway in the province.

[Webster, p35]

Notice how a lot of the Latin words are often abbreviated (shortened). The letter-cutter only had a limited space within which to work so had to shorten the words to make them fit. The people reading the inscriptions would have understood what words the abbreviations referred to. For example, H S E written on a tombstone means HIC SITUS EST, or 'He Lies Here'.

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