the future husband (or he/those who had potestas over him). This is testified by the fact the virgo had no right of pronouncing the nupta verba. The passage which presents the greatest difficulties is the central group of letters in the string . Proposed interpretations include: iubet orders for ; futuitioni sexual intercourse for , the cut / or / so that would be the only recognisable Latin word. Dumézil attributes a peculiar semantic value to the syllabic group : a moral instrument that is nothing else than a form of the power the males of a family group (father, tutors) exercised on a girl, i.e. a variant or alteration of the word tutelae, similar to tu(i)tela. Since this interpretation has been proposed no critic has been able to disprove it. Authoritative scholars on the grounds of the lexeme toitesiai have proposed a theonym (Coarelli), a feminine proper name Tuteria (Peruzzi, Bolelli), or even a gentilicium, the gens Titur(n)ia (Simon and Elboj) mentioned by Cicero. In the 1990s, two further contributions have discussed once again the interpretation of the second part of the first grapheme, particularly morpheme toitesiai. Even though doubts have been cast over its correspondence with the technical Roman legal word tutela, Dumézil's intuition of recognising in the destination of the vase a juridical function, namely a matrimonial sponsio, was accepted and taken on. G. Pennisi reconstructs the text as follows: "Iovesat deivos qoi med mitat: nei ted cosmis virgo sied ast ednoisi opetoi pakari vois. Duenos med feced en manom einom duenoi ne med malos tatod". Segment is deciphered recurring to Homeric έεδνα in the meaning of nuptial gifts and the speaking token would be a marriage compact or promise by a young man in love to a girl to whom the vase is presented as a gift. The inscription would thence exhibit an oath structure consisting in an archaic form of coemptio: "Swears for the gods he who buys me": mitat = *emitat (the future bridegroom would be speaking in the third person). Then passing to the second person the compact would be set out in the second line by the offering of the nuptial gifts as a guarantee. The third line would complete the legal formula of the compact (Duenos / ne med malos tatod). Leo Peppe has proposed to interpret the inscription as a primitive form of matrimonial coemptio different from that presented in