The motive of these testamentary dispositions is obvious; they were made in the vain hope that by these means the name and memory of the deceased might not utterly perish. And the Roman law did all that it could to secure the realisation of so natural a wish; it fenced every place of burial round about with divers safeguards, and punished its violation with the severest penalties. First of all, the burial of a single corpse (or the deposit of the little urn of ashes if the body had been burnt) sufficed to impart a sort of religious character to the spot where these remains had been laid for their last resting-place, provided the burial had been made with the consent of the owner of the soil. Henceforth that place no longer belonged to the category of ordinary landed property, but became subject to new and peculiar laws of its own. It did not pass by will as part of the inheritance; no prescriptive right had any power to alienate it; if at any time some undutiful descendant should secretly obliterate all visible tokens of its use as a place of burial, and fraudulently effect a sale of the property as though it were common land, the law would interfere to annul the contract as soon as it was discovered, no matter after what lapse of time; it would oblige the purchaser to surrender his purchase, and the vendor or his heirs to make restitution of the purchase-money, together with interest at a very high rate; and the money thus forfeited was devoted to some public use of beneficence. Even this penalty, severe as it is, fell short of what the law prescribed in the case of those who had themselves violated a sepulchre. This was accounted so heinous a crime, that it was punished by banishment or perpetual labour in the mines, according to the condition in life of the offender; and the acts of violation subject to this penalty were such as these:—the breaking open of a sepulchre, the intrusion into it of a stranger’s corpse, _i.e._, of one not belonging to the family, or not included in the list of those to whom the concession was made by the original testator, the carrying away of any stone, pillar, or statue, or even the erasure of an epitaph.