A Note on the Duenos Inscription

0. Introductory The well-known Archaic Latin “Duenos Inscription”,1 conventionally dated to the 6th or early 5th c. B.C.E.,2 requires no detailed introduction; nor is there any question of surveying the immense bibliography devoted to the many enigmas — archeological, cultural, epigraphical, linguistic — surrounding this celebrated and frustrating text and the unique object on which it is inscribed.3 It will be helpful for present purposes, however, to provide several preliminary remarks by way of orientation. Apart from one or two unresolved paleographical indeterminacies (such as the interpretation of the vertical stroke between IOVE and SAT in the initial sequence), it is generally agreed that the text consists of three units (here referred to, for convenience, as “lines”), to be read as follows: