Faimon Roberts: Changing one ideology with another abad move

Historically speaking, Sextus Congenius Verus was nobody special.

He died nearly 2,000 years ago in what is now Italy. He was a sailor in the Roman navy, serving on an oar-powered warship called a trireme. He didn't lead a legion, seize a throne or start a new worldwide religion.

Verus' story, such as it is, is only known to us because his heirs, Atilius Carus and Vettius Longinus, commemorated his life in several lines of Latin text on a stone when he died. That stone, in a remarkable series of events, was uncovered earlier this year in a New Orleans backyard . But for this text, we might never know anything about Verus, who died when he was 42.

It would be easy to dismiss the story of Verus' tombstone as a quirky tale of an artifact's rediscovery. But it illustrates something import