There are also shorter old poems in this measure. At the funerals of the Romans, _Neniæ_, as they were called, were sung to the flute, which were not doleful sentimental songs, but must have been of the same character as the _Laudationes_. The dead had now passed over to their illustrious ancestors; their glory was made the theme of pride and exultation; and therefore in these Neniæ praise was simply given them. When Horace says, _absint inani funere neniæ_, &c. this refers, if there was any singing at all at funerals, to the dirges of the later age. The Romans were not originally tender-hearted. They made even the dead man of use to the State, and from the grave itself he exhorted others to follow him in his deeds. Neniæ and Laudationes were therefore quite plain and simple, in that old style which did not yet know of any construction of periods, and they are no way to be compared to the λόγοι ἐπιτάφιοι in Thucydides and the later Greeks. Two such poems are evidently still preserved to us, in the tombs of the Scipios, which were discovered in 1780, by the Appian road. The upper story, where the sarcophagus of the younger Africanus and the statue of Ennius were, is wanting; but the lower one, which was scooped out of the hill side, was found choked up with rubbish. Here was the sarcophagus of L. Scipio Barbatus, who had been a consul in the fifth century (454). At an earlier period,[38] this tomb had been already entered from the top, and a tablet taken out, which is now built into the wall of the Barberini palace; yet this had fallen into oblivion. The bodies of the Cornelii down to Sylla were not burned in the Pelasgian, or Greek manner, but buried in coffins. On these noble sarcophagi there are verses, written indeed like prose, but divided by dashes; and on the sarcophagus of the son the verses are even arranged in lines. That they are verses is to be seen from their unequal length, as otherwise the Romans always wrote every line to its full length. These are quite plain and simple verses, yet there is still some metre in them. _Cornéliu’ Lúciu’ Scípio Barbátus,_ _Gnáivo prognátu’, fortis vír sapiénsque--_ _Consúl, censor, aédilis, quí fuit apúd vos, etc._ These are surely the _Neniæ_ which were sung at the time, and then inscribed on the tomb. The old songs at the banquets, were for the most part quite as simple.