A Wedding, A Funeral...and a Curse

A lot of people have this idea of Ancient Rome as being full of these erudite figures philosophizing and giving speeches. Men at the top of their game, who sound suspiciously like stodgy Victorians (there is a reason for that, which I will discuss in a future post!). The reason for this is simple: rich men could write, and did so. And those rich men who were successful in their endeavors had works that survived. Sometimes “winners” destroyed the records of their losing opponents. not only that, but they spread propaganda that was untruthful about them. When was the last time you heard Mark Antony’s perspective of things, for example? Octavian’s smear campaign was so strong against him that his voice has been all but lost. But Antony’s voice isn’t the only one that has been lost. The voices of millions of regular, everyday Romans are, at best, trapped between the lines. Rome was not just full of rich and educated philosophers, politicians, and strategists. It was a huge and diverse city, full of every type of person imaginable, people like you and me and the guy down the street. Today I’m going to talk about a family that would have been forgotten had it not been for a single piece of stone. But what that stone contains is remarkable.

A stone funeral altar once stood along the Via Flaminia in Rome. This wasn’t unusual—we have remains of many such artifacts. Funeral altars, or cippi in Latin, could hold the ashes of the deceased, though this seems to have not been the most common practice. More often than not, they were places where people came to leave offerings to the dead, to ask them for favors, and to remember them. This stone altar offers us some unusual tidbits of information, however, which allows us to piece together some bits of the lives involved in this monument of death.

Junia Atte's Funerary Altar at the Uffizi Galleries

The altar seems to be from between 69-96 CE, and is made of marble. It’s about 39 inches tall and 25 inches wide, which seems fairly typical of similar altars I’ve seen, though I have not seen this particular one in person. On the front, there is the face of the young person this altar commemorates, Junia Procula. Then there are a lot of carvings of symbolic images, which we can get into in a subsequent article if readers are interested. What interests me most is the inscription below all of the artwork:

In English, this reads:

To the divine shades of Junia Procula, daughter of Marcus. She lived eight years, eleven months and five days. She left her wretched father and mother in grief. Marcus Junius Euphrosynus made (this) for himself and for [name erased]. Let the bones of the daughter and parents rest in one (place). Whatever you have done for us, may you hope for the same yourself. Believe me, you will be a witness to yourself. (Huemoller, 124)

The text, at first, is a fairly typical remembrance of a child who died young. From the text, we can infer some things. Marcus Junius Euphrosynus could have been a freedman, the former slave of a man named Marcus Junius. How could we know that? Because the last part of his name (cognomen, the name he was known by), “Euphrosynus,” is derived from Greek, which was a common practice for people who were once slaves. This freedman led a successful life, as we can see from the fact that he could afford such a monument for a very young child, a girl, no less. We can tell this girl’s parents valued her. Children died all the time in Rome. There was no penicillin, no vaccines, none of the medical care that we take for granted now. Children died all the time, and it is thought that girls, sadly, were not often valued as highly as boys (though there is much evidence against that last point). There is something very interesting on the third line of text, however, that reveals a great deal more about this family. The name of the child’s mother has been all but wiped out. Why would that be? In Ancient Rome, this generally meant that someone had broken a sacred law, and was therefore condemned to erasure.

Normally, we would be left to puzzle what this woman’s crime could have been. But the person who scratched out her name left us a present. There is writing on the back of the stone, presumably carved at the same time her name was scratched out.

What is this, then? In short, it’s a curse on the woman, whose name was erased but thanks to this writing, we know to be “Acte.” The text in English reads:

Here are written the eternal marks of disgrace of the freedwoman Acte, sorceress, faithless, deceitful, hard-hearted. A nail and a hemp rope to hang her neck and boiling pitch to burn up her evil heart. Manumitted for free, following an adulterer, she cheated her patron and she abducted his attendants — an enslaved girl and boy — from her patron while he lay in bed, so that he, alone, despaired, an old man abandoned and despoiled. And the same curse for Hymnus and those who followed Zosimus. (Huemoller, 126)

This type of curse is called a damnatio memoriae, a condemnation of memory. Most examples we’ve seen of this are in cases where an emperor or another important figure has done something terrible, and their name is stripped from all official records. People have had their images scraped from frescoes, their names removed from monuments, and more. In this case, the woman in question didn’t commit a crime against the state, but against her former master. Who was this former master? Most scholars agree that it was Euphrosynus himself. From the curse, it can be ascertained that Acte was a freedwoman. “Freed without payment” suggests that Euphrosynus freed her in order to marry her. In Rome, when a slaveowner decided to marry the enslaved person, the payment for their manumission didn’t have to be paid. The general interpretation is that Acte, at some point after the death of her child and while Euphrosynus was ill, took a lover and ran off, while at the same time taking two other slaves from the household.

This begs the question, how much “free will” did Acte have in this marriage? Did she marry Euphrosynus as a means to gain her freedom, and not out of love? This seems a perfectly reasonable thing for someone involved a relationship with such an uneven power balance. Despite the fact that even now there are those who romanticize the massive power imbalance of slaveholder/enslaved, prison guard/prisoner, etc, these stories are a disturbing way to look at history—it makes the slaveholders out to be kind benefactors rather than people who are benefiting from the institution of slavery. The curse on this monument give a more clear picture of the actual history: A woman went along with a marriage to a man who clearly still believed he owned her (note how the curse still calls him her “patron,” not husband), but when she saw her opening, when he was ill or sleeping, she escaped from him along with two young enslaved people who could well have been her friends. For all we know, they could have been her own children. The lover himself might have been a person she had considered herself attached to for a long time, the husband of her choosing rather than the one forced upon her.

There is some disagreement over who wrote this curse. It might have been Euphrosynus himself, or it might have been his heirs. Perhaps he died from his illness and his heirs blamed Acte. We’ll probably never know. But we can see from its verbiage that it was expected that the freedwife of a slaveholder was still very much beholden to him and was not expected to have the freedom to leave at will. Divorce was very easy in Ancient Rome. Clearly this was not the case for this woman, and she had to “escape” rather than simply divorce. Her husband’s words (or those of his heirs) confirm this. The curse implies she was not indeed free to leave even from the perspective of the man who claimed to love her. Her status was somewhere between freed and enslaved.

Artifacts like this funerary altar are a historian’s treasure—more valuable the finding gold. We can infer a lot about not just events, but attitudes and behaviors of every day people from them. They give us a lot of food for thought, for debate, and for puzzling.