No small part of old Roman piety consisted in a scrupulous reverence for the dead, and a care to prolong their memory by solid memorial and solemn ritual, it might be to maintain some faint tie of sympathy with the shade which had passed into a dim and rather cheerless world. The conception of that other state was always vague, often purely negative. It is not often that a spirit is sped on its way to join a loved one in the Elysian fields, and we may fear that such phrases, when they do occur, are rather literary and conventional.(1438) The hope of blessed reunion after death seldom meets us till we come to some monument of a Christian freedman.(1439) But two of the deepest feelings in the Roman mind did duty for a clear faith in the life beyond the tomb: one was family piety, the other the passionate desire of the parting spirit to escape neglect and oblivion. Whoever will cast his eyes over some pages of the sepulchral inscriptions will be struck with the intensity and warmth of affection, the bitterness of loss and grief, which have been committed to the stone. The expressions, of course, are often conventional, like obituary memorials in every age. The model wife appears again and again, loving, chaste, pious, a woman of the antique model, a keeper at home, who spun among her maids and suckled her own children, who never gave her husband a moment’s vexation, except when she died.(1440) Good husbands seem to have been not less common. And the wife’s grief sometimes far outruns the regular forms of eulogy or regret. In one pathetic memorial of a union formed in earliest youth, the lonely wife begs the unseen Powers to let her have the vision of her spouse in the hours of night, and bring her quickly to his side.(1441) There is just the same pure affection in the less regular, but often as stable, unions of the slaves and soldiers, and the _contubernalis_ is lamented with the same honourable affection as the great lady, although the faulty Latin sometimes betrays the class to which the author belongs. The slave world must always have its shame and tragedy; yet many an inscription shows, by a welcome gleam of light, that even there human love and ties of family were not always desecrated.(1442) The slave nurse erects a monument to her little foster child; or a master and mistress raise an affectionate memorial to two young _vernae_ who died on one day. A freedman bewails, with warm sincerity, a friendship begun in the slave market, and never interrupted till the last fatal hour.(1443) The common tragedies of affection meet us on these slabs, as they are reproduced from age to age with little variation. The prevalent note is, _Vale vale in aeternum_, with thoughts of the ghostly ferryman and the infernal stream and hopeless separation. Now and then, but seldom, a soul passes cheerfully from the light which it has loved, happy to escape the burden of old age.(1444) And sometimes, too, but seldom, we meet with a