Edges

This little inscription is a simple one: it's the tombstone of a man probably 35 to 55 years old. (His son dedicates it on his own — unlike the epitaph of Publius Caprilius in Hispellum there is no guardian — so his son must have the toga virilis and be at least 15; but his mother is still living.)

The puzzle here is to figure out the names, and I've met with limited success. I'm not an epigrapher, just an amateur; but the process below involves several typical facets of epigraphical identification, and may thus be of interest.

In a first stage, it looked fairly straightforward. We're missing the D of the opening Dis Manibus; put it somewhere on the left. The most common praenomen with Calpurnius is Lucius, pop that in (just for size: there's no shortage of other names it could be), plus the missing I in Calpurnio. The last three lines take care of themselves, all we're missing is the son's name. Epictetus is by far the most common Roman man's name beginning with EPIC, but it won't fit; Epicadus is the next commonest.

Bingo: plausible inscription.

But wait a second. Nicely cut inscription tries real hard to be symmetrical — spacing out the last line for example; and here I've gone and messed it up with an ugly third line, indented and starting with -IO; surely something's missing.

Resist the temptation to lengthen the name of our deceased by calling him Calpurniano (his mother wouldn't be Calpurnia); hunt around for a short cognomen, tentatively restore the third line as IO PIO FILIVS EPIC. I don't like that at all: for one thing, Pius was a rather rare cognomen; and realize that the problem is solved if I center the inscription a bit better:

So finally, I may not know the name of the deceased, but at least his stone has the tria nomina, and the cognomen is long enough for there to be a wide choice. Now there is also room enough on the third and fourth lines for his son to have the much more common name of Epictetus, although there's no guarantee of it.

Date: early imperial, probably no later than A.D. 150; the elegant open shape of the P's is a dead giveaway.