6 ) ME.

1 )

The epigraph gives the impression of sobriety and restraint. The few words are well chosen: rarissima femina ‘the woman of the rarest kind’ is common enough but not the most trivial praise of a deceased wife; similarly, bene de se meritae (‘well deserving of him’, i.e. ‘who was very good to him’) is common but less frequent than bene merenti, and the same goes for quae uixit instead of the simple uixit. We are invited to appreciate these choices, and above all to infer as much as we can from the two reliefs: he is in the military; his wife was an ideal homemaker; they were very fond of each other. Technically, the language traits that we have noted would be vulgarisms, but in reality those are light deflexions from the standard that are found everywhere in the inscriptions and were probably considered passable within the ‘epigraphic idiom’—which is why no conclusions should be based on them in this particular case. [Vojin Nedeljković]