Ichthys

In my previous post, I typed the final word of the inscription as "IXQYS".  This represents the Greek word for "fish", which is transliterated as "ichthys", and was used by early Christians as a code word (and symbol) to identify each other.

Because the blogging software does not allow me to use characters of the Greek alphabet, I substituted the letter Q for the Greek letter Theta, which looks somewhat similar.  (BTW, if anyone knows how I might get around this restriction, please let me know).

Here is a scanned document which shows the Greek text of the word, and what each letter represents:

So the inscription for Caecilia Placida could have been a regular funerary inscription, except for the inclusion of the final word.