A New Orleans family cleaning up their overgrown backyard made an extremely unusual find: Under the weeds was a mysterious marble tablet with Latin characters that included the phrase “spirits of the dead.” Intrigued and slightly alarmed, Santoro reached out to her classical archaeologist colleague Susann Lusnia, who quickly realized that the slab was the 1,900-year-old grave marker of a Roman sailor named Sextus Congenius Verus. Further sleuthing by Lusnia revealed that the tablet had been missing from an Italian museum for decades. As media reports of the find began circulating this week, Erin Scott O’Brien says her ex-husband called her and told her to watch the news. She immediately recognized the hunk of marble, which she had always seen as a “cool-xxx piece of art.” They had used it as a garden decoration and then forgot about it before selling the home to Santoro in 2018.
