By Paul Shore

Description

Touching tomb inscriptions from the ancients, in Greek and Latin, with English tranlsations.
The universal sentiments expressed in this anthology of inscriptions and epitaphs portray a poignant slice of ancient lives: their joy in the temporal life, their grief at its passing, and their faith in an eternal life of bliss. Rest Lightly includes 29 tomb inscriptions and an additional 13 plates/illustrations from the 1st through the 7th centuries with transcriptions, annotations and verse translations into English.

Join hearts with our ancient family as they celebrate the lives and mourn the deaths of their beloved children and friends, sisters and brothers, wives and lovers.

Special Features

• Introduction with chapters on the Value of Tomb Inscriptions, the Underworld, the Study of Tomb Inscriptions, and Women and Children
• Edited text of thirty inscriptions
• Line drawings
• Notes and English translations
• Thirteen plates

Comments and Reviews

We heartily recommend this book for the excellent way that it has combined layout and content. The themes of the epitaphts are universal, and in this way they reveal a transcendent viewpoint to the reader. The ancients are brought closer in a clear and unhurried milieu.

—Inner Journeys
Volume VII, No. 1 & 2

The charm, poignancy, timelessness, and beauty of these epitaphs will immediately remind us of the brevity of life and of the everlastingness of the emotional response to loss, suffering and grief.

—Edith M. A. Kovach
University of Detroit

A collection of various epitaphs, this brief volume offers interesting insights into the feelings of ancient people, their emotional response to loss, their approach to death, with the grief and suffering it entails. They are real human documents of a timeless beauty and poignancy...

—The Journal of Indo-European Studies
Vol. 26, No. 1 & 2
Spring/Summer 1998

Professor Shore's survey will serve the interested reader in two important ways by offering not only concrete evidence concerning Greco-Roman antiquity, but also valuable insight into an ineluctable aspect of our common humanity, mainly, our morality.

—Michele V. Ronnick
Wayne State University

This is a scholarly yet accessible work...We heartly recommend this book...

—Inner Journeys
Vol. VII, No. 1 & 2