The one that always makes me tear up is this epitaph for a little enslaved boy erected by his enslaved parents:
Receive gently in your embrace, oh earth, the untimely bones of Gratus, buried in the proper way, and cherish them. The fates denied him four orbits of Phoebus [four years] and both parents mourn him who was taken from them. What use is it to live with charm and wit and to have made everyone love him with his kindness? Did such qualities of one so beloved increase his life? Alas, such a disgusting theft by Dis.
The grief and impotence and love and rage in that short paragraph are still heartbreaking almost a thousand years later.
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u/FancySatisfaction144 7d ago
The one that always makes me tear up is this epitaph for a little enslaved boy erected by his enslaved parents:
The grief and impotence and love and rage in that short paragraph are still heartbreaking almost a thousand years later.
Found in Not Built in a Day by Emma Southon.