The Jews of the Graeco-Roman Diaspora
between Paganism and Christianity,
..–
*Introduction: Aurelius Samohil
In the year in Catania in Sicily a Jew named Aurelius Samohil bought a
tomb in which to lay the remains of himself and his wife, and recorded the
fact for posterity in an inscription in Latin, with an introductory line in He-
brew, while adorning the stone with two incised representations of meno-
rahs. The text, written in a rough approximation to Latin, runs as follows:
Shalom to Israel, amen, amen; Shalom Shmuel [in Hebrew], I, Aure-
lius Samohil have bought [this] tomb [memoria] for myself and my wife
Lasiferina, who died on the th day before the Kalends of November,
on Friday [diaeVeneris], on the eighth day of the month, in the consul-
ship of Merobaudes for the second time and of Saturnus. She lived
years in peace. I adjure you by thehonoresof thepatriarchae, and simi-
larly adjure you by the Law (or the Light—licem) which the Lord gave
to the Jews, that no-one should open the tomb and put in another body
over our bones. But if anyone were to open it let him give pounds
of silver to thefiscus(the imperial treasury).^1*First published in J. Lieu, J. North, and T. Rajak, eds.,The Jews among Pagans and Christians
in the Roman Empire(London, ), –.
An earlier, and much different, version of this paper was given as a Martin and Hélène
Schwartz Lecture in the Department of Jewish Studies at Harvard University in . I was
grateful for comments and corrections to the editors and to Professor Jacob Neusner and
Dr.N.R.M.deLange.
. J.-B. Frey,Corpus Inscriptionum JudaicarumI, ed. B. Lifshitz (), no. ;AE(),
no.;D.Noy,Jewish Inscriptions of Western EuropeI (), no. . Given the importance
of the epigraphic evidence from the diaspora, note the publication in of the three vol-