D(is) M(anibus) Regina liberta(m) et coniuge(m) Barates Palmyrenus natione Catuallauna an(norum) XXX
‘To the spirits of the dead, and to Regina, his freedwoman and wife, of the Catuvellauni, aged 30 years, Barates of Palmyra erected this.’
There Regina sits, in all her Roman finery. You cannot make out her face because the great stone funerary monument in which she has been sculpted is 1,800 years old, very worn in places and the face mutilated. She looks straight out at you from her wicker basket-chair — a nursing chair, perhaps? Uncomfortable, too: she sits on a cushion.
She is dressed in a linen shift, which protrudes under her woollen skirt at the ankles (Roman women liked the ‘layered’ look); she has a torc (a sold neck-ring, for luck) around her neck and, fashionably, a bracelet on each forearm.
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