The Scipio family included some of the most famous names of Roman history, as well as its fair share of also-rans and ne’er-do-wells. Eight of their epitaphs survive more or less complete, and several of those commemorate the kind of Romans usually hidden from history: the ones who did not quite make the grade or who died young, and the women. ‘He who has been buried here was never surpassed in virtus. Just twenty years of age, he was entrusted to the tomb – in case you ask why no political office was entrusted to him,’ the text on one sarcophagus of the middle of the second century BCE
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