Cool Finds

A Married Couple in New Orleans Found a Stone in Their Backyard. It Turned Out to Be an Ancient Roman Soldier’s Gravestone

The piece bears a Latin inscription describing the legionary’s service aboard a warship

Sonja Anderson | Daily Correspondent

October 9, 2025

Share

Copy linkEmailSMSFacebookXRedditLinkedInBlueskyPrint

Add as preferred source

Editors’ note, October 15, 2025: After this story’s publication, a former owner of the home came forward with new information about the gravestone. Read more about the investigation into the artifact’s origins.

While tending their home garden in New Orleans last spring, a married couple found a stone that looked archaic and was engraved in Latin. Experts say it’s a 1,900-year-old headstone from Italy, which once marked the grave of a Roman soldier named Sextus Congenius Verus.

Daniella Santoro, an anthropologist at Tulane University, and her husband Aaron Lorenz found the stone behind their home in New Orleans’ historic Carrollton neighborhood. At first, Santoro worried that the stone indicated her house was built atop a cemetery, so she contacted the Preservation Resource Center of New Orleans (PRC).

New Orleans does have a history of building over graveyards, according to a PRC report by D. Ryan Gray, an archaeologist at the University of New Orleans. But many of these hidden cemeteries have already been mapped, and there probably isn’t one under Santoro’s house.

Looking for answers, Gray focused on the stone’s Latin inscription. He sent a photo of the piece to Harald Stadler, an archaeologist at the University of Innsbruck in Austria, and Stadler shared it with his brother, a Latin teacher. Simultaneously, Santoro shared pictures with Susann S. Lusnia, a classicist at Tulane.

“They quickly came independently to the same conclusion,” Gray writes. “Not only was this a Roman funerary inscription for a sailor named Sextus Congenius Verus, but the circa second-century inscription had been reported before.”

According to the report, the stone’s inscription roughly translates to: “To the Spirits of the Dead for Sextus Congenius Verus, soldier of the praetorian fleet Misenensis, from the tribe (natio) of the Bessi [i.e., a Thracian], (who) lived 42 years (and) served 22 in the military, on the [trireme] Asclepius. Atilius Carus and Vettius Longinus, his heirs, made (this) for him well deserving.”

Apparently, the deceased was from Thrace, an ancient region in the southeastern Balkans. And he spent over two decades serving on a trireme—a warship propelled by oars—named Asclepius, for the Greco-Roman god of medicine.

The stone matches the description of an artifact once reported missing from the National Archeological Museum of Civitavecchia, about 40 miles northwest of Rome. The port city was heavily bombed by Allied forces during World War II, and the museum and its collection was destroyed—not to reopen until 1970.

Santoro and her contacts spoke with Tess Davis, the executive director of the Antiquities Coalition, a nonprofit specializing in the repatriation of cultural heritage. They decided to hand the stone over to the FBI’s Art Crime Team, which will take over the process of returning the stone to Civitavecchia.

With the stone itself out of their hands, Gray and his colleagues “came back to the question of how it ended up in a backyard in Carrollton,” he writes. Through census records, they found that the house was owned by one family for much of the 20th century: that of Frank Simon, a shoe company manager.

The researchers figured the stone was brought back from Italy by an American who served in Europe during World War II. Recently, two 17th-century paintings by a Dutch artist resurfaced in Texas, and experts had the same theory, that a U.S. soldier brought them home from the war as souvenirs.

However, Simon was 59 years old in 1940, and he died in 1945, according to the PRC. Researchers thought they had a lead when they found that Simon’s neighbor served in the U.S. Navy during the war. But he only fought in the Pacific, according to records at the National World War II Museum.

This summer, Lusnia traveled to Italy, having already planned to conduct research there, and she visited the museum in Civitavecchia. Lusnia learned that a 1954 museum inventory mentioned the inscribed gravestone, but it was compiled based on earlier documents—not an actual observation of the piece. Gray writes, “This made it all the more likely that the item was lost in the chaos after the war.”

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Preservation Resource Center (@prcnola)

Still, the researchers aren’t sure exactly who brought the gravestone to the U.S., or how it came to be embedded in a home garden in New Orleans. Gray writes that it might have been acquired by an antique dealer and sold to a tourist.

“Perhaps a family member or someone cleaning out the house after a sale saw it just as a convenient paving stone for a muddy yard,” he writes. “Right now, it is impossible to say, though we’ll continue to look for new possibilities.”

Sonja Anderson | Read More

Sonja Anderson is a daily correspondent for Smithsonian magazine who covers art, archaeology and culture, from newly discovered artifacts to the latest art heists.