Posted on Thursday 24 April 2003

Fortunata means "lucky"



Receipt of sale:

"Vegetus, assistant slave of Montanus the slave of the August Emperor, has bought the girl Fortunata, by nationality a Diablintian (from near Jublains in France), for 600 denarii¹. She is warranted healthy and not liable to run away ..."

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Here we have a slave of a slave buying himself a slave in first century² Roman Britain.

This receipt for the purchase, discovered in London in 1996, was originally written on a wax writing tablet using a stylus. The wax has long since vanished but because the scribe had been so heavy handed, the text has been preserved scratched into the wooden backing board.

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¹ - 600 dinarii at the time was the equivalent of two years wages for a Roman soldier or in today's money, according to the Torygraph, enough to buy a rilly cool little sports car!
² - But we could tell that already just from a quick glance at the script, right, Readers? After all, we're all expert paleographers now.