Unexpected Find in New Orleans Backyard
NEW ORLEANS — While clearing out an overgrown backyard, a family stumbled upon something quite unexpected: a marble slab covered in Latin inscriptions, including the phrase “Spirits of the Dead.”
“Finding Latin was a bit of a shock, for sure,” noted Daniela Santoro, an anthropologist at Tulane University. “I mean, it really made us think, ‘Okay, this is definitely out of the ordinary.’
Cautiously intrigued, Santoro reached out to her colleague, classical archaeologist Susan Rusnia. Once Rusnia saw the image of the slab, she quickly recognized it as the 1,900-year-old tombstone of a Roman sailor named Sextus Congenius Verus.
“I felt a shiver when I first saw that image,” Rusnia recalled, clearly still surprised by the discovery.
Digging deeper, Rusnia found that the tablet had been missing from an Italian museum for many years. Sextus Congenius Verus died under unknown circumstances at age 42 after more than two decades in the Imperial Navy aboard a ship named for Asclepius, the Roman god of medicine. The inscription described him as “worthy” and noted that two of his so-called “successors,” likely his fellow sailors, commissioned the tombstone, as marriage was prohibited for Roman military members then.
The stone was originally part of an ancient burial ground containing approximately 20 military graves discovered in the 1860s in Civitavecchia, northwestern Italy. Recorded in 1910, the inscription’s exact location had been a mystery since. The tablet was previously housed at the National Archaeological Museum in Civitavecchia before WWII, when the museum suffered significant damage from Allied bombings. It took years to recover, and museum staff later confirmed the slab had been lost for quite a long time. Remarkably, its measurements—1 square foot and 1 inch thick—matched the backyard find.
Rusnia remarked, “You can’t have better DNA than this.”
The FBI is reportedly in discussions with Italian authorities about returning the tablet. However, a spokesperson said they couldn’t provide further details due to the ongoing government shutdown.
A fascinating twist emerged as news broke about the find. Erin Scott O’Brien, who previously owned the home, received a call from her ex-husband suggesting she check the news. Realizing it was a block of marble she once considered a “cool piece of art,” O’Brien recalled how her grandparents, an Italian woman and a New Orleanian stationed in Italy during the war, had gifted it to her. They had used it as a garden decoration, forgetting all about it until well after they sold the house to Santoro in 2018.
“None of us knew what it was,” O’Brien said, still in disbelief as she watched the news coverage.
O’Brien explained that her grandparents were the ones who initially brought the tablet from Italy. It seems that, perhaps, no one is more thrilled about this rediscovered piece of history than Sextus himself. Rusnia emphasized that tomb markers held significant cultural importance in ancient Rome, serving to preserve the legacy of even average citizens.
“Sextus Congenius Verus is quite the hot topic these days,” Rusnia commented. “If there is an afterlife and he’s aware of this rediscovery, he must be really pleased. This is what the Romans wanted: to be remembered for eternity.”
