When visiting churches and graveyards in and around Munich, I was always on the hunt for Latin inscriptions. Gravestones and memorials often have good ones, and I especially like those that speak to the living, usually with some kind of request to the “viator” to pause for a moment to ponder the memorialized dead.
There are countless examples: the picture above is from St. Peter’s Friedhof in Salzburg, the one below is from Regensburg in Bavaria.
Although such graveyard inscriptions are mostly from the early modern and even modern eras, the practice of addressing cemetery visitors is an ancient one. A quick search through any epigraphic database will give scores of results. One example in Etruria asks the passerby to lament that the interred had died too young:
resiste viator et
lege non dignus
morti abreptus sum
iuvenis annorum XXVIII
Another example for which an available image shows the weathered letters of viator above a recorded lifespan—“five little years, ten months”—forces us to pause not just out of its request but out of curiosity. Were fourth-century children often honored with epitaphs? Do these few words suggest we’re looking at the memorial of a young imperial aristocrat? What story did not survive along with this chunk of stone?
Like their more recent counterparts, these ancient inscriptions barely sketch the whole lives of which we see only a small fragment. Next time you find yourself in a graveyard, you viator of the information age, consider taking a moment to listen to these stones that still speak on behalf of the silent.