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The funerary inscriptions often inform us of the last post a Roman veteran held in the army. Here we have a ueteranus ex mensore tritici, a former soldier who ‘ retired from the position of a wheat measurer’. Many inscriptions end with a philosophical message or reflexion of sorts. In this case the message is twofold. Its first part is given from the viewpoint of the deceased: Quod nescientes accepimus, inuiti reddidimus, ‘What we had been given unwittingly, we gave back unwillingly’ – life, that is. For the second part, Ταῦτα, ‘This!’, cf IMS 1.71 (which is entirely in Greek). The formula is pregnant: ‘This is all there is’, ‘This is what life amounts to’. The epigraph contains non-standard phonetic spellings: memoria for memoriam and fabrikabimus for fabricauimus. Spellings such as these were considered vulgar. The form coniux, too, was regarded as less correct than coniunx (although not as vulgar as coiux). In the sense of ‘tombstone’ memoria is an ‘epigraphic word’, and a rather common one. Literary Latin would have none of it before the Christian authors of the 4th c. Fabricare (-ari) ‘construct, build’ (a monument) as compared to facere or ponere is not frequent in epitaphs but still has several dozen attestations all over the Empire; more specifically, memoriam fabricauit is found in an inscription from Arabia (AE 1913.145). In our inscription built may well be the right word: the inscribed plate was probably just one part of a larger monument. [Vojin Nedeljković]