“He (or they) who dispatch me binds the gods (by his offering) that Proserpine shall not be kind to thee unless thou wilt make terms with (or “for”) Opetos Thesias (?). Duenos made me against Manus, but let no evil fall to Duenos on my account.”
41. Between these two inscriptions lies in point of date the famous stele discovered in the Forum in 1899 (G. Boni, Notiz. d. scavi, May 1899). The upper half had been cut off in order to make way for a new pavement or black stone blocks (known to archaeologists as the niger lapis) on the site of the comitium, just to the north-east of the Forum in front of the Senate House. The inscription was written lengthwise along the (pyramidal) stele from foot to apex, but with the alternate lines in reverse directions, and one line not on the full face of any one of the four sides, but up a roughly-flattened fifth side made by slightly broadening one of the angles. No single sentence is complete and the mutilated fragments have given rise to a whole literature of conjectural “restorations.”
R. S. Conway examined it in situ in company with F. Skutsch in 1903 (cf. his article in Vollmöller’s Jahresbericht, vi. 453), and the only words that can be regarded as reasonably certain are regei (regi) on face 2, kalatorem and iouxmenta on face 3, and iouestod (iusto) on face 4.[4] The date may be said to be fixed by the variation of the sign for m between
and
(with
for r) and other alphabetic indications which suggest the 5th century B.C. It has been suggested also that the reason for the destruction of the stele and the repavement may have been either (1) the pollution of the comitium by the Gallic invasion of 390 B.C., all traces of which, on their departure, could be best removed by a repaving; or (2) perhaps more probably, the Augustan restorations (Studniczka, Jahresheft d. Österr. Institut, 1903, vi. 129 ff.).
(R. S. C.)