This religious philosophy, which, by a symbolism transforming the meaning of the traditional beliefs, reconciled these with men’s intelligence, did more than any other to revive faith in immortality. Many enlightened men, like Cicero and Cato, had sought consolation for the misfortunes of this world and a hope for the Beyond in reading Plato, but Plato’s proof of immortality could convince only those already convinced.[74] Pythagorism, on the other hand, offered to restless souls a certainty founded on a revelation made to ancient sages, and it satisfied at once the Roman love for order and rule, and the human love for the marvellous and the mysterious. The evidence of the effect of this philosophy is still recognisable, although it often has not been recognised, in the compositions decorating many sepulchral monuments and in the wording of several epitaphs. A tombstone found at Philadelphia in Lydia is particularly curious.[75] It bears a representation of the Y symbol, that is, of the diverging roads between which man must choose when he leaves childhood behind him. On the one side earthly travail leads the virtuous man to eternal rest; on the other softness and debauchery bring the vicious man to a gulf into which he falls. A metrical epitaph, found at Pisaurum (Pesaro), hints covertly at the ideas of the school. This commemorates a child who, in spite of his youth, had learnt the dogmas of Pythagoras and read “the pious verses of Homer” as well as the philosophers, and had studied in Euclid the sacred science of numbers. His soul, runs the inscription,[76] “goes forward through the gloomy stars of deep Tartarus towards the waters of Acheron,” a sentence which can be understood only on the supposition that Tartarus and Acheron had for the author a figurative meaning and lay in the depths not of the earth but of the sky. * * * * *