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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.— SUPPLEMENT. 



able men of recent times have read into them 

 most of the doctrines of Christianity. But to the 

 common people they were probably a string of 

 outward observances with little inner meaning. 

 Like the sacraments of Christianity, to which in 

 many respects they were parallel, they had a 

 strong tendency to lose all life and become mere 

 form. That their secret was so well preserved 

 can be attributed to but one cause — that their 

 secret, such as it was, was not of a kind that 

 could be communicated. It is certain that 

 throughout Greece, in antiquity, the future life 

 was by the common people looked upon with dis- 

 taste, if not with dread ; and that they had no 

 doctrine tending to soften its repulsion. 



Moral reflections and words of advice form 

 a not unfrequent ending to Athenian epitaphs. 

 Sometimes in these nothing more is expressed 

 than a kindly wish for the reader. Thus one 

 stranger, after stating that he was shipwrecked, 

 adds in genial spirit, " May every sailor safely 

 reach his home ! " Another wishes for all way- 

 farers who read the stone a prosperous journey. 

 Sometimes there is a general observation : " It is 

 rare for a woman to be at once noble and dis- 

 creet ; " or a quotation from a poet, as in the 

 case of the well-known line of Menander, "Those 

 whom the gods love die early." Sometimes the 

 occasion is improved, as a Scotch minister would 

 say, and a little sermon read to the passer-by, 

 who is advised to live virtuously, " knowing that 

 the abode of Pluto beneath is full of wealth and 

 has need of nothing " — virtues, that is to say, 

 and not riches, are the only things which will 

 avail after death. 



So far with regard to metrical inscriptions. 

 The long inscriptions which are not metrical are 

 nearly always of the same kind as the well- 

 known epitaph of Shakespeare — curses pro- 

 nounced against those who shall in future time at- 

 tempt to move or destroy the grave, curses of 

 which the modern explorer makes very light, 

 apparently supposing that their virtue has in the 

 course of centuries departed. But in ancient 

 time they might be more effectual. They are 

 always of a very late date ; so long as the peo- 

 ple of Athens had a common feeling and a com- 

 mon pride in their city, there was small fear of 

 the violation of the grave of a citizen, but under 

 the Roman emperors the Athenian citizenship 

 and Greek nationality fell to pieces, and no one 

 felt sure of the future. Herodes Atticus, the 

 wealthiest citizen of Athens in the reign of 

 Hadrian, who built the Athenians a splendid 

 marble Odeum, set up a monument to his wife 



Appia Annia Regilla, " the light of the house," 

 which he thought it necessary to fence by a very 

 unpleasant string of threats : 



" By the gods and heroes I charge any -who 

 hold this place not to move aught of this : and 

 if any destroy or alter these statues and honors 

 (Tipcs), for him may earth refuse to bear fruit, and 

 sea become unsailable, and may he and his race 

 perish miserably ' " 



The inscription goes on to heap blessings on 

 those who keep the tomb in its place and pay it 

 honor. A lady who bears the Eoman name of 

 Antonia hands over, in her epitaph, her tomb to 

 keep, to Pluto, and Demeter, and Persephone, 

 and all the nether gods, calling down a curse on 

 all who violate it. In another epitaph we find a 

 formidable list of diseases which are likely to 

 seize the violator — palsy, fever, ague, elephanti- 

 asis, and the rest. In another instance the di- 

 mensions of the curse are curtailed, and it is put 

 neatly into two hexameter verses : " Move not 

 the stone from the earth, villain, lest after thy 

 death, wretch, dogs mangle thy unburied body !" 



In the last-quoted epitaph it is evidently the 

 writer's intention to threaten a punishment ac- 

 cording to the lex lalionis. To move a tomb- 

 stone was an offense of the same class, though 

 in degree of course slighter, as to leave the body 

 of a dead man unburied. It is well known how 

 keenly every Greek dreaded that his body should 

 after his death be deprived of burial-rites, and 

 how bitterly he condemned all who through fear 

 or carelessness abandoned dead friends to dogs 

 and vultures. No doubt this dread was connect- 

 ed with the very ancient and wide-spread notion 

 that those who remained unburied could not rest 

 in the grave, were repelled from the gates of the 

 world of spirits, and hovered as unhappy ghosts 

 in the vicinity of their corpses. As the first 

 step toward exposing a dead body was the tear- 

 ing down of the stone which covered it, and as 

 the stone was, moreover, closely associated with 

 the dead, some of the mysterious horror which 

 guarded the corpse was transferred to the grave- 

 stone above it. We may consider ourselves 

 happy that among us gravestones are protected 

 not by curses but by blessings, by cherished 

 memories and associations ; and so, perhaps, it 

 was in the better times at Athens, only when the 

 old civilization was falling into corruption, all 

 gentler ties were loosed, and every man fought 

 for himself and his, with any weapons which 

 came nearest. 



One closes the " Corpus of the Sepulchral In- 

 scriptions " with a feeling of surprise — surprise 



