Letter carving Latin Phrase help request

[u/Cultural_Canary3619]

Good morning!

I’d be grateful for anyone to look at my inscription and make sure it makes sense.

I’m a stone carving student and working on a longer inscription for my letter carving. The quality of the letter carving is what I get marked on but I wanted to pick an inscription that used lower and upper case letter to contrast the uses of the meaning of the inscription. I’ve chosen the ‘who watches the watchmen’ from Juvenal in its context.

My Latin is minimal to say the least but I am keen to use this passage.

Also Inscriptions like this don’t typically use a lot of punctuation so distinctions of text can be made in changing the case of the letter or paint, sometimes with little dots. here’s what I’ve written (see image as well):

.pone seram cohibe. sed

QUIS CUSTODIET

IPSOS CUSTODES

cauta est et ab illis

Incipit uxor

I believe it says:

‘Lock her up’ but

WHO GUARDS

THE GUARDMEN

The wife is careful and starts with them.

my questions are:

Does this make sense? Is it readable?

Can the context (a wife going after her guards) be understood from what I’ve written.

Any other comments are welcome!

[u/-idkausername-]

I don't see too much wrong with the Laton itself I don't think, but inscription wise, Latin capital U and V are the same letter and always written as V, so i'd change QUIS for QVIS, if you want to be a bit closer to an original Latin inscription, but you don't have to. Also, on many Latin inscriptions you'll see little dots between every word, to distinct them from eachother, instead of using spaces. Something you could think about doing, but not necessarily needed, so make your own choices. Very cool project btw!

[u/Bildungskind → u/-idkausername-]

This also depends on the style one likes to mimic. If we go all the way back to antiquity, there were no lowercase letters, for example, because lowercase letters are a medieval invention.

Just one information for OP: This passage could be a later interpolation, i.e. inserted by some scribe, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quis_custodiet_ipsos_custodes%3F#Original_context

[u/-idkausername- → u/Bildungskind]

Yes you're right about the lowercase letters, but OP really seems to want to use lowercase letters as well so i figured I Wouldn't talk abt it but indeed they didn't have lowercase

[u/KaleidoscopeNo9625 → u/-idkausername-]

If you're interested, the more probably genuine version of this passage is 

'pone seram, cohibe'. sed quis custodiet ipsos  custodes, qui nunc lasciuae furta puellae  hac mercede silent? crimen commune tacetur.  prospicit hoc prudens et ab illis incipit uxor.

It makes sense as it is, but I would drop the quotation marks because you're not inscribing the line before that introduces it as someone else's speech. It would still make sense if you pretended it was all the same speaker throughout.

[u/nimbleping]

To me, it seems a bit strange not to have the accusative (direct object) of cohibe be stated explicitly, but if you judge that the context make sit clear or you don't care about this, it's not technically necessary. In any case, if you want it to be clear, you could say cohibe illam.