Epitaph or honours for a gladiator
created: Transcription from stone (CDL).
source date: Second or third century AD
language: ar; en; fr; de; grc; grc-Latn; el; he
availability: CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 Deed Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. All citation, reuse or distribution of this work must contain a link back to DOI: https://doi.org/10.60760/unibo/igcyrgvcyr2 and the filename (IGCyr000000 or GVCyr000), as well as the year of consultation. (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/)

[...], n. 493, p. 247, fig. 79, whence [...], 9.363; [...] 018. Cf. [...], p. 124, n. 69; [...], n. 835.

Τούτους μὲν κατέπεφνεν Ἄρης καὶ φύλοπις αἰνή·
ἐμὲ δὲ νῦν κατέπεφνε νόσος σωθέντα σειδήρου.

κατέπεφνεν[^a1] κατέπεφνε[^a2]

[^a1: κατέπεφνεν | κατέπεφνε]

[^a2: κατέπεφνε | κατέπεφνεν | κατέπεφνε]

Ceux-là ont été tués par Arès et son atroce mêlée;

moi, c'est la maladie qui m'a tué quand j'avais réchappé au fer.

Those have been killed by Ares and his dread din of battle;

me, it was disease that killed me after having escaped iron blades.

Questi li ha uccisi Ares e la sua atroce pugna;

quanto a me, la malattia mi ha ucciso dopo che ero sfuggito al ferro.

هؤلاء كانوا قد قُتِلوا على يد آريس وضَّجَّتهُ (جَلَبَتهُ) المُرْعِبة (المُخِيفة) في المعركة؛ لي (بالنسبة لي)، المرض هو الذي قتلني بعد أَن نجوت (هربت) من شفرات الحديد (أداوات حادة في عجلة العربة تقتل الرجال في المعركة).

At Ptolemais, were found three other steles for gladiators (IRCyr2020 P.215, IRCyr2020 P.216 and GVCyr017); only the latter and this one were composed in verse and mention a reason for death. The findspot of GVCyr017 is unknown, whereas the three others were found together.

This inscription has been incorporated into the epitaphs ([...] and [...]). However, [...] reported that this one, IRCyr2020 P.215 and IRCyr2020 P.216 were found in the cavea of the amphitheatre. [...], p. 110 thus thought that «they were presumably not connected with funerary structures». Differently, Ghislanzoni (see [...], pp. 122-124), who visited the place before Oliverio, had been told that the two others (the inscription of which gives no clue for or against a funerary function) were found in the West necropolis, re-used as lids of later tombs. As the amphitheatre and the West necropolis were situated not far from one another on either side of the city wall, stones might have been moved here and there. However, the use of τούτους as first word of this one shows that all three steles stood originally together. Either the spot was really the amphitheatre and the inscription is honorary in spite of the funerary topic, or gladiators were buried in a common area and we should thus consider the inscriptions as epitaphs.

Metrical analysis. Two hexameters. At the beginning of line 2, the short syllable is metrically lenghtened; σειδήρου has a ει for a short iota because of iotacism. Both hexameters are quite regular.