This picture has a quality which reminds one of the frescoes in the Campo Santo at Pisa, but which is much more terrible because no hope of paradise atones for the horror. The reliefs on contemporary cinerary urns tell the same tale. To be sure, the dead reclines fat and finely bedecked on the lid of these cinerary urns, holding a drinking-bowl, or, if female, a fan. This is only tradition and has nothing to do with actual feeling. It is clear enough that the old confident conception of the hereafter as an eternal symposium has been exploded. To this the reliefs on the urns bear witness. These reliefs, if they do not directly evade the problem by choosing neutral scenes from Greek mythology, reveal a demoniac possession of appalling intensity. We need no literature in order to realize that the Etruscans under the pressure of disaster became another people, pessimistic, in terror of death, and devoid of any resiliency which would allow them to indulge in the pleasures of life. If this spiritual incubus descended upon the masses of the Roman people we can better understand how it is that the poet Lucretius can feel enthusiasm, and can arouse it in others, when he preaches the gospel of godlessness and the annihilation of the soul in death.[120] For of the Etruscan people, at any rate, the words of Lucretius[121] hold good: Omnia perfunctus vitai praemia marces. All that life had to give, thou hast enjoyed, And now thou fadest. FOOTNOTES: [114] Trumpets at Roman funeral processions are known from reliefs on sarcophagi. _Röm. Mitt._ xxxiii. 1908, pl. iv (pp. 18-25), and Cagnat and Chabot, _Manuel d’Archéol. Romaine_, p. 586, fig. 315. Notice in the second relief from Amiternum, _Röm. Mitt._ 1908, pl. iv, at the bottom, how the banquet with the members of the family reclining on festive couches is also preserved in early Rome (second to first century B.C.). [115] Contemporary and akin in subject is the Tomba Bruschi at Corneto. _Monumenti_, viii, pl. 36. Stryk, _Kammergräber_, p. 101. The processions here have quite a festive look; a woman finds time to look at herself in a glass, but the devils, who appear in the crowds or lurk in the corners, show that the occasion is a serious one. [116] Caylus, _Recueil d’antiquités_ iv. (Paris, 1761), 112 f. [117] Tiraboschi, _Storia della lett. ital._, Venezia, 1795, i. 13 ff. footnote. [118] Similar motives on tombstones and Etruscan gems. Cp. Grenier, _Bologna villanovienne et étrusque_, p. 447. Ducati, _Monumenti dei Lincei_ xx. pp. 607-12. Beazley, _Lewes House Collection of Ancient Gems_, p. 33, no. 36 (pl. 3). [119] Badly illustrated in Inghirami, _Monumenti etruschi_ iv. pl. xxvii. [120] _De rerum natura_ iii. 912 ff. [121] iii. 956. INDEX The * indicates that the citation is in the notes. A Achilles, 9, 52. Acrobats, 28. Aeschylus, 19*, 54*. Agamemnon, 51, 52. Ajax, 52. Altars, 55. Amphitheatres, 25.