While quietly busying themselves in their garden on a beautiful spring afternoon, Daniella Santoro and her husband Aaron Lorenz came across an archaic stone decorated with a Latin inscription with letters worn by time. According to experts, it is the funerary stele of Sextus Congenius Verus, a Roman soldier who served in the Roman imperial fleet Classis Misenensis. The relic would be more than 1,900 years old, explains an article published in the Smithsonian magazine.
The couple discovered it behind their home located in the historic Carrollton district of New Orleans, United States. Concerned that they might have settled on an old cemetery, they contacted the New Orleans Resource Preservation Center (PRC). Their fear was not absurd: New Orleans is famous for its buildings, sometimes erected on old cemeteries.
The Latin inscription quickly caught the attention of Ryan Gray, an archaeologist at the University of New Orleans. With the help of a fellow Latinist, he deciphered the text: “To the spirits of the dead for Sextus Congenius Verus, soldier of the Praetorian fleet Misenensis, of the tribe of Bessi, lived 42 years and served 22 years in the army, on the (trireme) Asclepius. Atilius Carus and Vettius Longinus, his heirs, did this for him who deserved it.”
The deceased would thus be from Thrace – an ancient Balkan region – and would have served on a warship named Asclepiushomage to the Greco-Roman god of medicine.
The relic belonged to an Italian museum
What is surprising is that the stone matches the description of a missing artifact from the National Archaeological Museum in Civitavecchia, 65 km northwest of Rome. The item had been reported missing since World War II, when the port city was heavily bombed. The tomb of the Roman soldier would therefore have crossed the Atlantic to end up in a Louisiana garden.
The stone was entrusted to the FBI’s division specializing in artistic crimes, which will be responsible for returning it to Italy. But the investigation does not stop there. Ryan Gray and his colleagues want to understand how this stele could have landed in New Orleans.
Census records reveal that at the time of the war the house was owned by one Frank Simon, director of a shoe company. A priori there is no obvious link between him and the stele, especially since Simon was 59 years old in 1940 and died in 1945, so he was not able to bring the object back from Italy. His neighbor did work for the United States Navy, but, according to the archives of the National World War II Museum, he only fought in the Pacific, not in Europe. White cabbage, then.
Researcher Susann S. Lusnia, friend of Daniella Santoro, decided to investigate on site in Italy. At the Civitavecchia museum, she got her hands on an inventory dating from 1954 mentioning the stone found in New Orleans. According to Ryan Gray, “this makes it all the more likely that the object was lost in the post-war chaos“.
The mystery remains: no one knows by which route the stele crossed the ocean, nor why it ended up buried in Daniella and Aaron’s garden. An antique dealer sold it to an American tourist? Ryan Gray puts forward another hypothesis: “A family member or someone who was cleaning the house after the sale simply saw a large stone handy for stabilizing a muddy yard“. Which would explain why she ended up in the garden, but nothing about how she got to New Orleans. For the moment, it is impossible to determine what really happened!
