This distinguished marble monument contains portrait busts of Petronia Hedone and her son in a niche, below which is a simple dedication written in well-formed Roman capital letters. While she is depicted as an elegant Roman matrona (note her hairdo described as similar to Marciana's, the sister of Trajan), her name suggests that she is a freedwoman of the Petronius family (see names). It is possible that her son, who wears toga-like clothing but not the bulla of the freeborn young male, is also a former slave named Philemon, freed by Lucius Petronius and perhaps his son born in slavery (for another opinion see Kleiner's article on mothers and sons in I, Claudia II, Companion Bibliography). Judging from the quality and decoration of the stone which she ordered, Hedone was wealthy. In addition, she made provision in her family tomb for the freedpersons that she herself manumitted, as well as their families. There is no mention of a husband (he may have pre-deceased her) or of a patronus (from the mid 1st century CE freedperson status was increasingly omitted from inscriptions), nor any indication of the source of her money from which she gave herself and her household so grand a funerary monument.