Sunday, May 31, 2009
More on a Pious Man
This post supplements A Pious Man.
The inscription translated by Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969; rpt. 1975), p. 20 as
A friend and pious man writes in an email (from "das Land wo die Zitronen blühn"):
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The inscription translated by Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969; rpt. 1975), p. 20 as
Here lies Dion, a pious man; he lived 80 years and planted 4000 trees.can be found in Dominique Raynal, Archéologie et histoire de l'Eglise d'Afrique: Uppenna II. Mosaïques funéraires et mémoire des martyrs (Toulouse: Presses Universitaires du Mirail, 2006), pp. 539-541 (photograph at 539, transcription at 540).
P V DionUnfortunately, the expansion of the abbreviation P V as "pius vir" is uncertain. Alfred Merlin, Inscriptions Latines de la Tunisie (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1944), p. 45 (no. 243) suggests that it "peut représenter soit un prénom et un gentilice, soit p(ius) v(ir)."
in pace
bixsit
annos
octoginta
et instituit
arbores
[q]uat(t)uor milia
A friend and pious man writes in an email (from "das Land wo die Zitronen blühn"):
I don't know if you know this variation on the topos from Oliver Wendell Holmes' Autocrat of the Breakfast Table (1858) chapter 7 "He [the grandfather of the young farmer who refused to plant apple trees] had nothing else to do,—so he stuck in some trees. He lived long enough to drink barrels of cider made from the apples that grew on those trees."
I planted two trees last week - a Judas tree (Cercis siliquastrum) which future Judases from far and wide are welcome to avail themselves of; and an olive tree, which I'll certainly not live to see as anything much more than a sapling. Even so, two thousand years hence - dis immortalibus volentibus - it may still be there.
