The Epitaph Of Helvia Prima

Bücheler assigns this epitaph to the Caesarian epoch: and it is clearly not of later date. The fifth line is corrupt. Bücheler suggests tentatively the insertion of the word dilecto after Cadmo . That will indeed give us a verse of six feet. But we shall not be much the happier. We shall still have to believe that a member of the gens Heluia married, circa 100&50 B.C, a husband of the name of Cadmus Scrateius. He must have been the public executioner: for I know of no other Cadmus in Rome; and he bore no very good reputation, and very little deserved the epithet dilectus , for the commentators upon Horace 5. i. 6. 39 speak of him as ‘ notae crudelitatis.’ He must be supposed to have taken the name Scrateius to make himself more terrible. But where in all the Graeco-Roman world he found it, it is impossible to guess

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