150 CHAPTER FOURbelow. The failure of Jews to inscribe pious expressions and iconographic,
linguistic, and other markers of Jewish group identity on their gravestones
therefore may tell us nothing about the character of their adherence to the
central ideology of Judaism.
The Tiberian inscriptions, though, are characterized not merely by a pre-
dictable lack of distinctive Jewish content. They are all in Greek, and some
of them contain absolutely normal Greco-Roman religious and moralistic
content.^73 In their implications they thus complement and extend what we
learnfromthecoins,thesmallfinds,andtherabbinicliterature,addingsome
verisimilitudetowhatappearsabstractinthearchaeologyandflatlystereotypi-
calintheTalmud.Evensomeoftheepitaphsthatlackpaganreligiouscontent
areofgreatinterestasindicationsofwhatsomeTiberiansthoughtworthcom-
memorating about themselves and their relatives. For example, a basalt slab,
now lost, probably carved in the third century, to judge fro mthe na me of the
deceased and the way it is abbreviated,^74 reads as follows:
To Aur(elius) Marcellinus, (centurion) of the Tenth Le[g(ion)] Fret(ensis), who
lived seventy-four years, five months, fifteen days. Aur(elia) Bassa, his spouse
andheir,toherincomparablemate,inmemoriam. (Schwabe,no.17=diSegni,
no. 10)^75Legionary soldiers normallyserved for twenty-five years afterjoining the army
in their late teens. This means that Marcellinus, who had been an officer in
the southern Palestinian legion based near Aelia Capitolina (Jerusalem), had
been retired for over thirty years at the time of his death. His military service
had made him rich: in the earlier third century a legionary centurion was
are [theois kat]achthoniois—the customary dedication to the gods of the dead: A. Kloner, “A
Burial Cave fro mthe Early Ro man Period at Givat Seled in the Judaean Shephelah,”Atiqot 20
(1991): 159–63; L. di Segni, “A Fragmentary Greek Inscription from the Givat Seled Burial
Cave,” ibid., 164–65, regarded the inscription as proof that the cave was pagan. For some addi-
tionalexamplesthatconformtothepatternsdescribedhere,see’Atiqot33(1997),entitledBurial
CavesoftheRomanandByzantinePeriodsinWesternGalilee. On late antique Jewish burials in
the Diaspora, see below; and L. Rutgers,The Hidden Heritage of Diaspora Judaism(Leuven:
Peeters, 1998), pp. 83–91.
(^73) The two Latin epitaphs commemorate troops who were probably garrisoned in or near the
city. One of these is the only Tiberian epitaph headed with the formula D(is) M(anibus) (To the
gods of the dead), but see previous note for the use of its Greek equivalent in a Jewish (?) burial
cave.
(^74) AVRsuggestsadateafter212,whenthenomenAurelius,assumedbythevastnumberofnew
Roman citizens, became so common that it was often abbreviated: see A. E. Gordon,Illustrated
IntroductiontoLatinEpigraphy(Berkeley:UniversityofCalifornia,1983),p.145(earliestattesta-
tion of the abbreviation in 158C.E.), 174 (vastly more common later).
(^75) I follow Di Segni, who prefers the reading ofIGRRP3.1206, to the slightly different one of
Schwabe. In the latter’s reading, Marcellinus was not a soldier; but the Greek letters FRE seem
to have been unambiguously present in the second line of the inscription and seem best under-
stood as part of the legionary name. Schwabe ignores them.