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The stone appears to be a fragment of an earlier structure, reused as a funerary plate. The stone was found in the ruins of a church, and the inscription begins and ends with a cross. But the text of the epitaph contains nothing specifically Christian. Such ‘neutral’ epitaphs are not uncommon in Christian epigraphy.The text begins on a personal note, with a vocative: ‘O Antoninus, my sweet son’. It continues with three successive fragments of dactylic verse:- quem fata tulerunt, ‘who were taken away by fate’,- cum octauo carperet anno ‘as he (sic) was enjoying the eight year (of his life)’;- then, in what seems to be a new sentence, disrupit mors inuida uitae, ‘death, jealous of life, severed’; what was severed from what? we are never told. There follows a sudden shift to plain prose: fecit uero etc., ‘as for the his date of death, it was the month of September of the ninth indiction’. The earliest year of the ninth indiction is 320 AD (then 335, 350, an so on). The letter shapes point at a relatively later date. Traits of language include not only non-standard spellings (uite for uitae and perhaps octauo .. anno for octauum .. annum) but also vulgar morphology (meus for mi) and slips of syntax (carperet, 3Sg, for carperes, 2Sg; disrupit without an object). The language, too, suggests a late date.
N. Vulić, Spomenik 77, 1934, 48, n. 39, photo.
Inscriptions de la Mésie supérieure 4, 050, photo.