Latin lines to a beloved wife beside the Tyne

South Shields at the mouth of the river Tyne is seldom associated in imagination with the culture and sunshine of Rome, let alone the fiercer climes of Syria. But it was here that was found a well made memorial (pictured) from about AD 200, with a touching inscription.

Carved in sandstone, it shows a young woman, whose face has not been preserved through the centuries, seated on a wicker chair. She is dressed in a linen shift beneath a loose woollen dress. She holds in her left hand a spindle and distaff for spinning wool, of which there is a basket at her feet. Her right hand holds a strong jewellery box. She wears a solid necklace and a fashionable bracelet on each wrist.

The inscription beneath reads: D(is) M(anibus) Regina liberta(m) et coniuge(m) Barates Palmyrenus natione Catuallauna an(norum) XXX – “To the spirits of the dead, and to Regina, his freedwoman and wife, of the Catuvellauni, aged 30 years, Barates of Palmyra erected this.”

This memorial features in Peter Jones’s fascinating Memento Mori: What the Romans can tell us about old age and death, published at the end of the month. It is learned but an easy read, a rare combination. He explains that the woman commemorated, only 30 when she died, was called Regina, “Queen”, but must have been thought of more as a Queenie, for she was a freed slave. She came from nowhere near South Shields, but from a tribe that lived near St Albans.

Her homeland was not as far south as that of her husband, Barates, who came from Palmyra, in Syria, a fabulously prosperous city in the ancient world, known to us for its travails in the current war there. Perhaps he was a merchant supplying the Romans stationed in Britain.

Poignantly, there is a short additional inscription, “Alas, Regina freedwoman of Barates” carved on the memorial in the Palmyrene language. This was a kind of Western Aramaic, like the language spoken by Jesus.

This is all remarkable in itself, and Dr Jones wrote something about it in The Spectator last year. In his book, he discusses the themes that Romans touched on in their epitaphs. We are used to the stiff, dry public memorials of Roman statesmen, noting victories and offices held, but Regina’s memorial, like many, conveyed something of the home life that meant so much to the Romans.

Other themes are to be found, he observes, in the song that Orpheus sang to the gatekeepers of the Underworld in Ovid’s tale of his journey to fetch his beloved Eurydice: “In everything we’re in your debt. We linger here brief space. And soon or late we find our way to your one resting place. We are all bound for there, that place our final home, while your long empire ruling human kind continues ever more.”

The debt run up by life is unfamiliar to us, I think, but the way or path of life, the resting place and final home are better known to us, accommodated to Christian presuppositions about death. Even the “DM” on Roman pagan tombstones like Regina’s, Dis Manibus, “to the spirits of the dead” were carried over on to Christian tombstones, and in Britain revived with the classical revival of the Renaissance

As for what the Romans believed about the afterlife, Dr Jones makes the point strongly that it varied from person to person. For him, “things do not change. We still know no more about any afterlife than the ancients did”. He settles for the spirit of lines by Ausonius expressed neatly in a couplet by Wendy Cope: “If we were never going to die, I might / Not hug you quite so often or so tight.”