Monday, October 18, 2021

 

Symbols of Other-World Potations

J.M.C. Toynbee (1897-1985), Death and Burial in the Roman World (1971; rpt. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), p. 253 (note omitted):
A strange form of gravestone, peculiar, so it seems, to Roman sites in modern Portugal, is the wine barrel lying on its side on a low base, generally with its hoops, and sometimes with rows of wineskins, rendered in relief on its curving surface and a panel reserved for the funerary inscription in a central space between the groups of hoops. The Evora (Ebora) Museum has one, the Conimbriga Museum, near Coimbra, one (without hoops), the Beja (Pax Julia) Museum as many as thirteen and fragments of a number of others; and there is a particularly well preserved example from Algarve in the National Archaeological Museum at Belém on the outskirts of Lisbon. Many more must still exist or have existed. It would appear to be improbable that all the dead persons above whose remains these objects stood had been in the wine trade. The piece at Belém is, in fact, inscribed with the name of a woman who died at the age of twenty-five. These barrels must be symbols of other-world potations or of the wine of new life beyond the grave. Whether they stood directly on the ground or were mounted on pedestals is not known. At any rate they provide a very unusual type of free-standing stelai. (Pl. 81)
Id., plate 81:
Below, the gravestone of a young woman, Eppatricia [sic, read Patricia], in the form of a wine-barrel adorned with hoops and wine-skins—a type of monument apparently peculiar to Roman sites in what is now Portugal (p. 253).
The inscription is Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum 2.5143:
D(is) M(anibus) s(acrum) / et Patriciae / vixit ann(is) / XXV mens(ibus) / VII dieb(us) VIIII / s(it) t(i)b(i) t(e)r(ra) l(e)b(i)s
See also José d'Encarnação, Inscrições Romanas do Conventus Pacensis: subsídios para o estudo da Romanização (Coimbra: Instituto de Arqueologia da Faculdade de Letras, 1984), pp. 95-96, number 50. Here are more photographs, from d'Encarnação:



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