Phill Brant-Simmons takes a look at some of the mistakes found on Latin inscriptions found in Corinium
Roman inscriptions are relatively rare to come by in Britain, but they do lurk in various corners. Anyone who has studied Latin at school will know just how difficult and complicated a language it is to learn to read, let alone write. Latin has a lot of different rules about tenses and cases and gerunds and all the thousands of other grammatical terms that change how words look and behave in minute ways.
What is fascinating to me is that it is not just us today who writes Latin incorrectly, but even the Romano-British people living in Corinium didn’t know how to write Latin properly. Latin was imposed upon the British people by the Romans as the language for everyone to speak and communicate with. For the people living in Britain, Latin was their second language and so their grasp of it was often not as good as those who spoke it in Rome. The inscriptions that survive in Britain are often littered with mistakes. We are not quite talking about something as incorrect as Romanes eunt domus (Monty Python’s Life of Brian), but more that the letters might be wrong and spellings not quite right.
One of the most important and impressive objects in the Corinium Museum’s collection is that of the tombstone of the cavalry soldier Genialis. He has a very interesting story. We are told that he came from the Frisiavones tribe, in modern-day Netherlands, and that he died at 40 after 20 years of military service. He was also a Roman citizen since he had three names. That aside, his tombstone also contains several errors! His name is misspelt initially as Genalis and only further down on the tombstone is it written as Genialis. They also misspell Thrace, the area where his cavalry regiment is from by spelling it Trhaec instead of Thraec(um). Names are difficult but they also misspelt the Roman word for cavalryman eques as eqes. There are some omissions of parts or whole of words as well.
However, Roman tombstones were written in various shorthand to avoid requiring too much carving, much in the same way when someone reads “RIP” on a tombstone today we know it stands for Rest in Peace. So the next time you are feeling worried about whether your spelling is correct, remember that the Romans made mistakes too!
