The foundation law of the college of Diana and Antinous betrays some anxiety lest the continuity of the society should be broken. And in many a bequest, the greatest care is taken to prevent malversation or the diversion of the funds from their original purpose.(1569) We feel a certain pathetic curiosity, in reading these records of a futile effort to prolong the memory of obscure lives, to know how long the brotherhoods continued their meetings, or when the stated offerings of wine and flowers ceased to be made. In one case the curiosity is satisfied and we have before our eyes the formal record of the extinction of a college. It is contained in a pair of wooden tablets found in some quarry pits near Alburnus, a remote village of Dacia. The document was drawn up, as the names of the consuls show, in the year 167, the year following the fierce irruption of the Quadi and Marcomanni into Dacia, Pannonia, and Noricum, in which Alburnus was given to the flames.(1570) Artemidorus the slave of Apollonius, and Master of the college of Jupiter Cernenius, along with the two quaestors, places it on record, with the attestation of seven witnesses, that the college has ceased to exist. Out of a membership of fifty-four, only seventeen remain. The colleague of Artemidorus in the mastership has never set foot in Alburnus since his election. The accounts have been wound up, and no balance is left in the chest. For a long time no member has attended on the days fixed for meetings, and, as a matter of course, no subscriptions have been paid. All this is expressed in the rudest, most ungrammatical Latin, and Artemidorus quaintly concludes by saying, that, if a member has just died, he must not imagine that he has any longer a college or any claim to funeral payments! The humble brothers of the society, whom Artemidorus reproaches for their faithless negligence, may probably have fled to some refuge when their masters’ lands were devastated by the Marcomanni, or been swept on in the fierce torrent of invaders which finally broke upon the walls of Aquileia. BOOK III. _NEC PHILOSOPHIA SINE VIRTUTE EST NEC SINE PHILOSOPHIA VIRTUS_ CHAPTER I THE PHILOSOPHIC DIRECTOR