A perpetual enigma in Fountain City
by Jack Neely
I'd been by them a dozen times, but never looked up. The twin white stone columns stand over 20 feet tall on West Adair Drive at the main entrance to Lynnhurst Cemetery; they're just a half-mile off Broadway, in Fountain City, almost in the shadow of Sharp's Ridge. They look as if they were once connected by an iron gate which is long since gone, now just rusty stumps in the rock.
One of the columns lists a little bit to the west, away from the other. Each is topped with a stone sphere much bigger than a cannonball.
It's easy to drive past them, or through them, without looking up and seeing the inscriptions. They're up there, carved into a bas-relief marble scroll: TIBI, DI, HAS TERRAS SACRAMUS, says the eastern column. On another scroll the western one answers solemnly, PER ANNOS TUUM SEPULTUM ERIT VIRIDUM.
I'd never read those inscriptions until a few months ago, when a reader, Dr. Bob Richmond, asked me what I knew about it. At first it was difficult to admit I don't know about something, but I've gotten into the habit.
I didn't find much in the library about Lynnhurst, except that it was established here in 1921 or '22, depending on which source you credit. It was originally called Maple Hurst. By 1921, Fountain City's balmy days as a high-toned tourist resort were behind it, but the neighborhood was suddenly more popular than ever, easily accessible but still well outside of the noise and soot of city-limits Knoxville.
Like most pathologists, Dr. Richmond has a passing acquaintence with Latin, but says he couldn't quite figure out this passage. I got the gist of the first column, and part of the second, but like Dr. Richmond I was stymied by a couple of unfamiliar words.
I called up the management at Lynnhurst to ask them about it. Two people in the office both said they've seen an explanation of it on a piece of paper left to them years ago by a previous proprietor, but weren't able to put their hands on it right away. Neither could remember what the columns on the entrance to their cemetery said.
So I did what I should have done to begin with: I called up my high-school Latin teacher. I hadn't talked to her in years, and was grateful to have this excuse to ask her a question without some anxiety about how she would answer it. The last time I asked her a question, I think, it was when I asked if there was any way I could retake my final exam.
She's retired now, but I was glad to hear she's still in town, still active, still up on her ancient languages. (She's too modest to want her name attached to a column of this nature.) Unfamiliar with the monument, she had me carefully spell the inscription on the first column.
The beginning was simple enough; she didn't even have to look anything up. She read the translation in the same sweet accent she always used to correct my translations of Caesar, 25 years ago. "To you, God, we sanctify this ground," says the eastern column.
"Of course," I said. "That's what I thought." (I didn't want her to think she'd wasted her time with me, all those years ago.)
Anyway, that part of the inscription makes perfect sense, except that di is usually a contraction for dei, which is plural: "the gods"; she'd never seen it used in the singular. However, a more puzzling part comes on the western column, and it sent her to her unabridged Latin dictionaries, which have lists of Latin words that are so obscure she never even tried to teach them to us. She worked on it for quite a while and gave me a call back. She had a puzzled note in her voice that I'd never heard before. There are apparently a couple of misspellings, she said. SEPULTUM, a form of the verb to bury, doesn't fit here; she assumes it must refer to SEPULCRUM, which means tomb. And VIRIDUM, a word that doesn't exist in her dictionary.
She wondered if VIRIDUM might be a misspelling of the word vividum. She offered that translation. "Through the years," she said slowly, "your tomb will be lively." She paused, tentatively.
I wrote it all down and looked at it.
"That sounds crazy," my old teacher said.
Fortunately, she had an alternate translation, based on what might be a more likely misspelling. Add an I, and VIRIDUM becomes VIRIDIUM, which is the genitive of viridia, which means, "green trees."
Her best guess at the translation, with the two corrected spellings, is "Through the years your tomb will be of green trees."
She found that translation a little peculiar, too. It's not the sort of comment you hear every day, anyway. Have a look around, though. These tombs are definitely of green trees. There are plenty of trees here, in full leaf on an August day. The prettiest graveyards I've ever seen are all of green trees, and making a promise like that might be a sort of a promise of perpetual care. Considered with some poetic license, it might be a reassuring thing to say to somebody who's buying a burial plot.
At her suggestion I called Harry Rutledge, former head of UT's classics department. He says the word sepultum is a form of the verb sepelire, "to bury," and could refer to something buried, but that it doesn't agree with tuum. He suspects viridum is a misspelling of viridem, which just means "green." His interpretation, which he admits is generous, is, "Through the years your grave will be green."
Dr. Richmond, who first brought the mystery to my attention, is especially fond of Lynnhurst, and, charitably, would like to assume maybe the inscription is some arcane Masonic motto, or maybe some schismatic variant of Latin. Somehow I like them more than I did when I first saw them. As far as I'm concerned, anything we can keep to confound 30th-century archaeologists is worthwhile.
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