On Gordianus’s birthday, on the anniversary of his death, and also for eight days in February sacred to the honored dead, his heirs and loyal freedmen will visit the spot, deck his statue with wreaths of roses, violets, and other flowers, sacrifice a black sheep or pig to the “Manes,” and indulge in a feast in his honor. This will be kept up, perhaps, until his own son is placed on the pyre and the fame of the “great Gordianus” has sunk to the barest memory. =158. Funerals of the Poor. “Funeral Societies.”=--We have witnessed obsequies of a rich senator. Less favored persons, of course, are buried with ever-increasing degrees of simplicity. There is almost no religious element in Roman funerals. The bodies of unfortunates can be disposed of with brutal abruptness and lack of decorum, but the great host of plebeians and of those freedmen who cannot hope for an urn in the columbarium of a noble family have a recourse. They often club together in a “Funeral Society.” Everybody pays a fixed assessment into a common chest; out of these funds space is hired in one of the great public columbaria which are often erected as legitimate speculations. When a member dies he is assured of a respectable procession of buffoons and weepers (imagines being out of the question), a private harangue in his honor, and a thoroughly adequate funeral pyre. Funds not needed for this purpose are spent on feasts once or more a year in which the names of dead members are solemnly commemorated. Some of these funeral “colleges” are really elaborate affairs, with considerable ritual, a permanent hall, and a corps of elective officers, “prætors,” “curators,” etc., whose tinsel pomp makes the wearers forget that most of the time they are humble plebeians or even slaves. The collegia, in other words, appeal to those who in another age may find a certain inferior type of “lodge” very congenial. They are grandiloquently named for some patron god, calling themselves “The Worshippers (_cultores_) of Apollo,” or perhaps for an Oriental deity, “The Servants of Serapis”; but their fundamental purpose is the same; to insure against the horrid thought of having one’s body flung into the open pits of the potter’s field and then perhaps having one’s ghost wander in misery over sea and land instead of finding a calm oblivion in Hades. CHAPTER X CHILDREN AND SCHOOLING