For many miles out into the Campagna around Rome extend these strange cemeteries--not in seclusion, but passed by incessant traffic. Some of the monuments are magnificent, some simple; they illustrate almost every type of sculpture--but the object of nearly all is the same, to remind the living of the one-time existence of the dead, and so to provide a kind of spurious immortality often for very commonplace persons, in an age when the immortality of the soul seems no favored doctrine. [Illustration: VIEW ALONG THE APPIAN WAY SHOWING FUNERAL MONUMENTS. _Restored after Von Falke._] =156. The Funeral Pyre and Its Ceremonies.=--At last the funeral procession has reached the great mausoleum of the Gordiani. The pyre of choice wood, sprinkled with perfumes, unguents, and costly spices is ready at a safe distance. The sides of the pile have been covered with dark leaves, while cypress boughs have been set upon the top. Amid these the bier and the corpse, just as they have been borne, are now planted and various articles of clothing, jewelry, trinkets, etc., used by the deceased are next placed upon the pyre. If the ex-consul had been a younger man fond of hunting, deer nets and boar spears might have been added; or favored horses and dogs slaughtered and their carcasses added to the pile. [Illustration: STREET OF THE TOMBS AT POMPEII, SHOWING TYPICAL MONUMENTS OF THE SMALLER CLASS.] At length all is ready. Young Gordianus is handed a torch, and with averted face he touches it to the wood impregnated with perfumed oils. Instantly a great blaze shoots up, the smoke from the aromatic wood smelling most sweetly. The company waits in mournful silence until the tall pyre collapses and the bier has been utterly consumed. Then as the fire glows away, several loyal freedmen dash forward and quench it with great jars of chilled wine. Certain calcined bones and ashes are collected, wrapped in fine linen cloths and placed in a superb funeral urn, blue and white glass cut into exquisite designs, showing boys piping and treading the grapes in a festival of Bacchus. The last mortal remains of the departed senator are, therefore, at rest amid scenes eminently cheerful. =157. Funeral Monuments. Memorial Feasts to the Dead.=--The ceremony is over. “_Vale!_”--and again “_Vale!_” cries all the company ere departing. The urn will now be placed in one of the niches in the columbarium; but in Gordianus’s honor they will erect a special statue, at its base chiseled a peaceful ship gliding steadily toward a distant shore; the son and widow evidently recalling the peaceful thoughts of Cicero in his essay “On Old Age”--“I find the nearer I come to the time of death the more I feel like one who begins to see land, and knows that sometime he will enter the harbor after the long voyage.”