Tulane University Ph.D. student Daniella Santoro’s husband was raking through their New Orleans backyard when he found something strange under a tree: a stone inscribed in ancient Latin.
At first, Santoro’s husband thought it was a pet grave marker, but its unusual Latin inscription prompted Santoro to investigate.
The stone, indeed, was a grave marker — but it wasn’t the resting place of someone’s family pet: It was the long-lost Roman tombstone of Sextus Congenius Veris, a sailor for the Roman navy. The 1,900-year-old stone had been missing from an Italian museum since World War II.
“My curiosity peaked, and I sort of became obsessed with it, because it’s certainly not something you find every day in your backyard,” Santoro said.
When Santoro first recognized the stone was transcribed in Latin, she contacted her mother, who has a masters in Latin from Columbia University. But even Santoro’s mother couldn’t translate the stone.
“[The stone] is in a type of Latin that people who study Latin don’t necessarily recognize because there’s variations that are kind of strange… it definitely confounded people,” Santoro said.
Determined to pinpoint the stone’s origins, Santoro sent Tulane classics professor Susann Lusnia a picture of the stone.
“I got that weird sensation you get when you see something that’s kind of extraordinary… it looked genuine to me as a Roman inscription,” Lusnia said.
The letters DM, inscribed on the top of the stone, stand for Dis Manibus, which translates to “to the spirits of the departed,” a traditional phrase inscribed on Roman grave markers. These letters indicated to Lusnia that it was a funerary inscription.
According to Lusnia’s translation, the tablet read that Sextus Congenius Verus had served as a Roman soldier for 22 years before dying at the age of 42. The tablet was inscribed for him by his “heirs,” or his shipmates.
Through searching key phrases from the inscription, Lusnia found pictures of the tablet in the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum, one of the largest existing catalogs of Roman inscriptions. Armed with only her translation and the tablet’s reference number, Lusnia determined the artifact was missing from a museum in Civitavecchia, Italy.
“It’s the most random thing. … It took me a moment to process that it was real,” Santoro said.
Lusnia quickly contacted representatives from the museum, who confirmed the tablet had been missing for decades. Once the stone was identified, the question became: how did the stone end up in a New Orleans backyard?
According to Lusnia, the museum was almost entirely destroyed during World War II, and she assumed the tablet had been lost during the mayhem. But it was not until the former homeowner, Erin Scott O’Brien, recognized the tablet on the local news that the mystery was solved.
When O’Brien’s husband spotted the tablet on TV, he immediately recognized it as his wife’s family heirloom. O’Brien had inherited the stone from her grandfather, Master Sergeant Charles E. Paddock, who served in Italy during World War II. It is speculated that Paddock found the tablet and brought it home with him as a souvenir after the war.
Assuming the artifact was just an odd piece of art, O’Brien and her husband planted it under a tree in 2004 to commemorate purchasing the home, but forgot about it when they moved homes over a decade later.
The stone “could have been found by somebody who just didn’t care about it. A lot of good things fell into place at the right moment, at the right time to make it happen,” Lusnia said.
The discovery has been featured in national news, from The New York Times, NBC News, The Washington Post and FOX News, and in international news, in The Guardian, La Repubblica, Avvenire and Bluewin.
Now, after being rediscovered, the ancient grave marker is finally on its way home to Italy.
“For a Roman, the way in which you achieve your immortality or your afterlife is through memory,” Lusnia said. “We’re really talking a lot about [Verus]. He’s been memorialized a lot lately. I think he would have been happy to know that.”