We repeat, then, that the most ancient inscriptions on Christian gravestones in Rome consisted merely of the name of the deceased; ordinarily his _cognomen_ only, though in some of the very earliest date the name of the _gens_ was also added; not, we may be sure, from a motive of vanity, but merely for the purpose of identification. Large groups of inscriptions of this kind may still be seen in some of the oldest portions of subterranean Rome; traced in vermilion on the tiles, as in the Catacomb of Sta. Priscilla, or engraved in letters of most beautiful classical form, as in the Cœmeterium Ostrianum and the Cemetery of Pretextatus. The names are often of classical origin; nearly a hundred instances of Claudii, Flavii, Ulpii, Aurelii, and others of the same date, carrying us back to the period between Nero and the first of the Antonines. Very often there is added after the names, as on Pagan tombstones, such words as _filio dulcissimo_, _conjugi dulcissimo_, or, _incomparabili_, _dulcissimis parentibus_, and nothing else. In fact, these epitaphs vary so little from the old classical type, that had they not been seen by Marini and other competent witnesses—some of them even by De Rossi himself—in their original position, and some of them been marked with the Christian symbol of the anchor, we might have hesitated whether they ought not rather to be classed among Pagan monuments; as it is, we are sure that they belonged to the earliest Christian period; that they are the gravestones of men who died in the Apostolic, or immediately post-Apostolic age.