2  K


Digitized  by  CjOOQIC


498  THE  REVIVAL  OF  PAGANISM  book  iv

received  among  the  number  of  the  gods."  ^  There  are  others,
impregnated  with  the  prevalent  philosophy,  which  speak  of
the  soul  returning  to  its  source,  or  of  being  dissolved  into  the
infinite  ether,  or  of  passing  to  a  distant  home  in  the  stars.'
This  however,  as  M.  Boissier  says,'  must  have  been  the  dream
of  a  small  minority.  The  funerary  inscriptions  leave  the
impression  that,  down  to  the  final  triumph  of  the  Church,  the
feeling  of  the  Romans  about  death  was  still  in  the  main  the
feeling  of  their  remote  ancestors  of  the  Sanmite  and  Punic
wars.  It  was  a  social  feeling,  in  the  prospect  of  a  dim  life
dependent  on  the  memory  of  the  living,  a  horror  of  loneliness
and  desertion,  the  longing  for  a  passing  prayer  even  from  a
stranger.  Blessings  are  heaped  on  him  who  will  not  forget
the  pious  duty  to  the  shade.  On  him  who  refuses  it  is  invoked
the  bitterest  curse  to  Roman  imagination — ''  May  he  die  the
last  of  his  race."

But  no  dogmatic  ecclesiastical  system  deterred  the  Roman
from  expressing  frankly  his  unbelief  in  any  future  stata
And  the  rejection  of  all  hope  for  the  future,  sometimes  coupled
with  a  coarse  satisfaction  with  a  sensual  past,  is  the  note  of
not  a  few  epitaphs  of  this  period.  Matrinia,  the  wife  of  one
0.  Matrinius  Yalentius,  an  Epicurean  philosopher,  dedicates  a
tablet  to  his  ''  eternal  sleep,"  which  in  this  case  is  no  conven-
tional phrase.^  And  others,  in  even  more  decided  language,
parade  their  withering  ftdth  that  this  brief  life  is  only  a
moment  of  consciousness  between  the  blank  of  the  past  and
the  blank  of  the  future,  and  record  their  indifference  at  pass-
ing again  into  the  nothingness  from  which  they  came.
