Roman spelling again

There are several Roman inscriptions that mention the Ninth Legion. I was able to include images of a few of them in my book The Fate of the Ninth. But one — a rather beautiful metre-wide marble slab — remained unavailable to me. This is the memorial set up by Gaius Julius Erucianus Crispus “to his excellent friend” Lucius Aemilius Karus.

The inscription (shown above) has long been known, and appeared in the usual epigraphic compendiums as far back as Gruter (1603). It is most conveniently consulted in Dessau’s Inscriptiones Latinae Selectae (1892) as no. 1077.

One vitriolic Amazon reviewer has written, “PS It’s Carus not Karus, the Romans didn’t use Ks — a rather unprofessional mistake”. Perhaps if he’s looking in on my “pretty nasty blog site” (another quote from his rather bitter review), he’ll see that he was wrong, because it’s perfectly clear from the above image that this particular Roman preferred to spell his cognomen Karus, not Carus (on the first line).

Nor was he alone. For example, a grave-marker from Ostia carries the name of Publius Nonius Karus, who lived for only 8 years, 9 months, and a few days (AE 1971, 70). There are other instances of the same spelling and the same distinctive letter-shape.