Leiden conventions rendered as EpiDoc: restorations as supplied(reason=lost), gaps as gap, abbreviations as expan(abbr+ex), omitted letters as supplied(reason=omitted), surplus as surplus, corrections as corr. Critical apparatus as listApp. The facing translation is div type=translation; the historical commentary is div type=commentary.
… of my wife.
[You were] suddenly orphaned of both parents [on the eve of your wedding day], in the country villa, alone, by a crime which was carried out not in my sight, but in yours and your sister's (she was married to C. Cluvius), through the act of the very same guest-hosts; you yourself, [as I had gone away — being the daughter of your one father] — and the husband of your sister, C. Cluvius, had gone away to Africa on business. [As soon as] you heard, as soon as you discovered, that this great crime had been committed, you returned to piety and virtue. [...] you stood firm against, indeed you even exacted [the penalty from the murderers]. Such and so great were the outcomes of their deaths. [Of the penalty exacted], no greater protection could have been brought to our house were my father present in Rome — he was traveling in Macedonia. Letters were written to him by your sister's husband Cluvius, urging him to take up your cause unwillingly though he was an upright man. At home you obtained the paternal honour. Boldly afterwards you drove out the plunder of our patrimony. Old friends you did not allow to be placed in the hands of those who had deserted you, but rather in the hands of those who could help. You restored yourself to the tutela legitima of the gentiles, against the adversary acting in your name. You stood firm in your judgement, that we should hold the inheritance partly through your action rather than lose it whole.
(English translation after Durry 1950 (French) + Wistrand 1976 (English); some reconstructions follow Mommsen CIL VI 1527 ad loc.)
Why should I speak of your domestic virtues — your modesty, your compliance, your affability, your easy disposition, your devotion to woolwork, your religion without superstition, your unconspicuous adornment, your modest manner of dress? Why should I [recount] your love for your relatives, your piety towards the family, since you cared as much for my mother as for your own parents [---]
Rare are marriages so long that death and not divorce ends them; it was our good fortune that ours lasted to its fortieth year without offence. Would that the older part of our shared life had been the one to yield, and that it had fallen to me in justice to yield to you in time, since I was the elder — which would have been more fitting. Why should I recount, why speak of, the domestic blessings of your modesty, your compliance, your affability, your easy disposition, your assiduity in woolwork, your religion without superstition, your unconspicuous adornment, your modest dress?
When you despaired of your own fertility and grieved at my childlessness — lest by keeping you in marriage I should lay aside the hope of having children, and on that account be unhappy — you spoke openly of divorce; that you would hand over the empty house to another woman's fertility, with no other intention than that, given our known concord, you yourself would seek out and prepare for me a worthy and fitting match, and would affirm that you would hold any children of mine yet to be born as your own; that you would not bring about a separation of our patrimony, which up to that point had been common, but that it would remain in the same arrangement as before — in my power, or, if I should so wish, in yours — and that you would perform the duties of a sister or a mother-in-law to me, and that I should experience your affection. I must confess: I was so kindled that I almost lost myself; so I shuddered at your proposal that I scarcely came back to myself. That you would set on this idea, before I should conceive in my own mind that divorce could come between us — had you not put off (the proposal) out of grief at your barrenness, I would never have been able to bring myself to entertain the thought. What more desirable thing could have come to me than that I should be as dear to you as you were to me — that we should live as equals, sharing the same fortune — and that, when you outlived me, you should rather take up widowhood than lay it on me by leaving me sighing for you? What was this counsel of yours, this thought you let go, but providence for the future or a sake of gain by exchange? Could I, on any account, do without the form of a wife in any guise — while you yet lived — could a new wife succeed to your place? More that I might say of yours must be passed over. [Enough that I have written this]; now I turn to your greatest deed, by which you saved me from the worst danger.
Now I turn to your greatest deed, by which you saved me from the worst danger. When I was in flight, you provided the most ample aid — you stripped from your own body every piece of gold and pearl ornament you wore, and you handed it over; and then with household-slaves, with money, with the harvest, having cleverly deceived the enemies' watchmen, you made my absence financially supported. When the danger was still that whatever avarice might have sought, while my Caesar was dismissed from Caesar Augustus at Brundisium, you came (to me) with equal courage to wrest a message; with your warnings and your aid you intervened, and led me safely back. (We were as if given to you by Caesar.) After friends had been summoned: at the feet of the triumvir Lepidus (then a consul, his colleague present), you prostrated yourself on the ground; not only were you not raised up, but you were dragged about and brutalised as if a slave, your body covered in bruises, you with the firmest spirit reminded him of Caesar's edict together with the congratulations for my restoration; and although you suffered the most insulting and cruel words and bore the wounds inflicted, you displayed them openly so that the author of my dangers might be marked out — and who not long afterwards reaped benefit even from this evil. What could be more effective than this virtue? — to offer Caesar the occasion for clemency, and at the same time, by your outstanding patience, to brand the unseasonable cruelty of Lepidus with the preservation of my life.
What would have become of me, who have outlived you, had no provision been made for my longing through Caesar's indulgence, that I should shield myself with your danger? With one ransom I emerged, while I wished you to live, so that the length of my life should not be drawn out further. You truly lived while you lived; I have endured the time after. Why should we now endure with hardened spirit, at one time, when I might return to share life with you? [Farewell forever, well-deserving (wife); farewell, best of wives.]
Why the heading. The Laudatio was cut as two columns of text under a single dedication heading set in noticeably larger letters. Of that heading only the final word, [u]xoris (“… of my wife”), survives. It is preserved on the top-right corner of Fragment F (the Vaglieri or Portuense fragment, found 1898 near the Via Portuense; CIL VI 37053; Plate 1a in Wistrand 1976). Arthur E. Gordon, who in January 1949 recognised a fourth piece of the stone in the same Museum, sized up the four extant fragments together and observed that “the known fragment (-XORIS) comes from the highest part of the stone (it contains the right end of the heading), whereas the new fragment is from lower down” (Gordon 1950: 226). He noted the predominant letter-height of the heading at ≈ 1.9–2.1 cm — visibly larger than the body-text below, where letters decrease about 1 mm per line going down the stone. That visible size-difference is what tells us the surviving -xoris belongs to a heading and not to a body line. The dedicand’s name and the dedicator’s case-and-relationship phrase (karissimae ux]oris? amantissimae ux]oris? de virtutibus ux]oris?) are irretrievable: the upper-left of the original tablet is gone with the left column itself, of which fragments A, B, and C survived only as Renaissance transcripts (Wistrand 1976: 12–13).
The left column of the original tablet survived through three fragment-pieces — A, B, C — all of which were known to Mommsen only through 17th-century transcriptions and are now physically lost. A was once embedded in the wall of a Cistercian abbey just north of the Theatre of Marcellus (per Suarez's Vatican transcription Vat. lat. 9140); B was said to come from the vicinity of Caecilia Metella's tomb (Horsfall 1983 p. 86 notes the place of origin is in fact uncertain); C was preserved in Sirmond's copy, which de Rossi rediscovered in the Bibliothèque Nationale in 1856 and made available for Mommsen's foundational CIL VI 1527 of 1863.
The opening surviving lines narrate the legal crisis on the eve of the marriage: the parents of the future wife are murdered (rural villa, late-Republican violence), and the bride and her sister must defend the inheritance against relations who would dispossess them under intestate succession. Per Durry 1950 pp. xliii–xlvi and Wistrand 1976, the left column originally bore some 35–40 lines; complete on the left, broken on the top, right, and bottom.
Recent scholarship's framing. Osgood 2014 ch. 1 gives the clearest synthesis of the fragment-transmission history; Mantzilas 2017 places the virtue-catalogue at I.30 in the genre-conventional sequence shared with Murdia (CIL VI 10230) and Magnia (ILS 8398). Per Horsfall 2001 p. 357, Flach 1991's apparatus is not always reliable on the question of which lines were directly visible in 1991 vs which rest on Wistrand 1976's photographs — a caveat the present edition inherits.
The right column survives across four physical pieces — D, E, F, and the Gordon-rediscovered fragment — together preserving about three-fifths of the column.
D + E are the two main slabs Mommsen examined in person at the Villa Albani; they had been cut from the original tablet as loculi-lids in the catacombs of Sts. Peter and Marcellinus c. 260+ CE, and were recovered there in the late 17th century. F is the Vaglieri or Portuense fragment, found 4 km down the Via Portuense in 1898 during sewerage works and published by Dante Vaglieri; it preserves the top-right corner (with part of the last word of the original title) and bears a gaming-board for xii scripta on its verso, incised c. 260+ CE. The Gordon fragment, adjoining E at the top right, was rediscovered in 1949 by A. E. and Joyce Gordon in the magazzini of the Museo Nazionale Romano delle Terme; A. E. Gordon's publication (AJA 54.3 (1950), pp. 223–226) gave endings for the first nine lines of the right column and anchored the line-length calculation.
Per Osgood 2014 + Mantzilas 2017, the proscription-episode and divorce-offer narratives that make this column historically valuable are exactly the slots the genre supplies for distinguishing-event praise (slot 5) and counterfactual closer (slot 6). The textual reconstructions presented below follow Wistrand 1976, Flach 1991, with Gordon's 1949 additions integrated. Horsfall's 2001 review notes that the cement of the frame at Villa Albani is damaging D and E — a conservation concern that has not been resolved.
The Vaglieri / Portuense fragment (F) had been excavated in 1898 and published the same year by Dante Vaglieri in Notizie degli Scavi (414–417). Otto Hirschfeld identified it as a piece of CIL VI 1527 in 1902 (republished in his Kleine Schriften 1913). After that the story falls quiet for almost half a century. Marcel Durry’s monumental Budé edition went to press in 1950 with the inscription represented in essentially its 1902 state — A, B, C (lost; transcripts only) + D, E (Villa Albani) + F (Vaglieri).
Then, “spiteful Fortuna directed that a few months after the appearance of Durry’s book a new fragment of the stone should be identified and published” (Wistrand 1976: 10). Arthur E. Gordon’s account is unambiguous about the circumstances:
Wistrand 1976, the standard text-and-translation, employs three distinct lacuna markers visible on his text pages, each with a different epistemic weight. Reading them as a system reveals how much of the surface is editorial restoration even after Gordon’s contribution.
The takeaway: even Wistrand — writing 26 years after Gordon’s contribution and with every piece of marble that survives in front of him — cannot fill the gaps between the physical pieces with continuous text. The lacunae are not just at the broken-edge of each slab; they are between the slabs. The white space on the page is the honest record of what is gone.
This is the most direct demonstration of the apparatus’s instability. Gordon’s 1949 fragment supplied the line-endings of right‐column lines 0–9 — exactly the lacunae that Mommsen had filled in 1863. We can now grade Mommsen line by line. Gordon himself laid out the comparison on pp. 225–226; we reproduce it here, adding the “verdict” column.
The Gordon fragment did more than catch eight bad guesses. It established, for the first time, the lettercount of a complete right‐column line: between 13 and 18 letters in the missing stretch (Della Corte 1951, summarised at Wistrand 1976: 11). Della Corte then re‐examined Mommsen’s supplements throughout the right column and found that in 15 lines Mommsen’s restorations — reproduced unchanged in CIL, Dessau, and Durry — are either too short ( <13 letters) or too long ( >18 letters) for the now‐measured slot. He proposed alternatives, drawing on prior suggestions by Vollmer, Bücheler, Siebourg, and others, and added some of his own.
Wistrand 1976 retains Mommsen’s text as default but flags every divergence in his apparatus criticus with the author’s name. A small but representative sample (left‐column lines, from his apparatus pp. 20–22):