Poor but Dignified:
The Funerary Plaque of a Freedwoman

You may be seeing this woman's inscription larger than true size: it is only 6 cm high and 21 cm wide (the blue pen is exactly 14 cm long). The inscription has been carefully executed, its letters deeply cut and rather evenly spaced, its lines fairly well centered; notice also the correct elegant form of the P's, which date her death to no later than about A.D. 150, and probably much earlier.

This funerary marker surely came from a loculus in a columbarium: a niche in a communal burial vault. For details about columbaria, loculi and how they were paid for and apportioned, see this detailed passage of Rodolfo Lanciani's Pagan and Christian Rome.