Nota Bene - University of Chicago

adornaverunt). 88 On one side panel, inscribed above a griffin, is the inscription Prosenes
receptus ad deum ... scripsit Ampelius lib (“Prosenes was received into God ... Ampelius, his
freedman, wrote this”). The composite nature of this sarcophagus is manifested in that the 2
inscriptions are physically discrete (and discreet, perhaps, in the case of the second) and the
two third person authors (the liberti of the first dedicatory inscription, and the Ampelius of the
second, informative one). The words themselves have a very different physical disposition and
public voice. And the juxtaposition of the words Prosenes receptus ad deum with the elaborate
griffin on the side panel, while it may surprise us from this distance, apparently did not concern
or confuse Ampelius who comfortably added them to honor his patron. Much may have been
true of the full decorative program of the Abercius monument. Between “crypto” and “phanero”
Christian inscriptions lies the complex world of lived realities and cultural embeddedness of
Christians of the early third century. 89
Conclusion
Much more work remains to be done to lift study of this important Christian inscription
out of blank space and back into various reconstructions of the monument of which it was a
part. This paper is only a start on that task. We need better imagistic models to try to
reconceive this monument within its various contexts -- biographical, physical, artistic,
monumental, literary and geographical -- and, we must insist, each of those models must itself
be a time-lapse one rather than a single snap shot. The exercise is invaluable, even if we
cannot reach certainly, or perhaps especially because we cannot reach certainty, and should
not prematurely curtail our imagination of what the “queen of the Christian inscriptions” may
have signified at any point in history.
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88 My interpretation of this sarcophagus is dependent upon Peter Lampe, From Paul to Valentinus:
Christians at Rome in the First Two Centuries, trans. M. Steinhauser (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2003) 330-34.
89 MacKechnie’s essay presumes an either/or which such epigraphicly complex monuments as Prosenes