From a distrust of posterity many erected their monuments during their life-time, and wrote their own epitaphs, leaving only a space for the age. This is sometimes expressed by the words, SIBI VIVVS FECIT, or, SE VIVO, SE VIVIS, or even by such solecisms as ME VIVVS, or SE VIVVS. The following records the strange fact of the erection of a funereal monument by one living person to another: SEMIRAMIAE LICINIAE QVAM 62 LOCO FILIAE DILIGO OB MERITA EIVS VIVVS VIVAE FECI--“To Semiramia Licinia, whom I love in place of my daughter: on account of her merits, alive, I made this to her alive.” These classic usages have been thus detailed because traces of their influence may be observed in many practices adopted by the primitive Christians, and because they furnish an explanation of those remarkable immunities and privileges which the Catacombs so long enjoyed. These latter were constructed in separate and limited areas, in like manner as the pagan sepulchres. De Rossi has given a map of the Catacomb of Callixtus, in which these areas are accurately defined. They vary in size and shape, that of the crypt of St. Lucina being one hundred feet _in fronte_ and one hundred and eighty _in agro_, that of St. Cecilia two hundred and fifty feet _in fronte_ and one hundred _in agro_, and others still larger. By the very tenor of the law these areas enjoyed the same protection as those of the pagan sepulchres, of which protection it required a special edict to deprive them. Even when Christianity fell under the ban of persecution that freedom of sepulture was not at first interfered with. Having wreaked his cruel rage upon the living body, the pagan magistrate at least did not deny right of burial to the martyr’s mutilated remains. A beneficent Roman law declared that the bodies even of those who died by the hand of the public executioner might be given up to any who asked for them.[56] So that even the sentence of outlawry against the Christians did not affect the bodies of the dead. Indeed, we know from ecclesiastical history that frequently the faithful received the remains of the martyrs and gave 63 them Christian burial. It was not till the third century, when the pagan opposition to Christianity became intense and bitter, that the persecutors waged war upon the dead. Although both Diocletian and Maximian confirmed the decree just cited, it often happened that, in order that the Christians might not have even the melancholy consolation of gathering up the martyrs’ bones, and honouring the remains of their fallen heroes, those sacred relics were denied the rites of sepulture which were freely accorded to the body of the vilest malefactor.