Chap. 2.] THE HONOUR ATTACHED TO PORTRAITS. 225 



wish to live without being known !^^ So it is, most assuredly, 

 our indolence has lost sight of the arts, and since our minds 

 are destitute of any characteristic features, those of our bodies 

 are neglected also. 



But on the contrary, in the days of our ancestors, it was 

 these that were to be seen in their halls, and not statues made 

 by foreign artists, or works in bronze or marble : portraits 

 modelled in wax^* were arranged, each in its separate niche, 

 to be always in readiness to accompany the funeral processions 

 of the family ;^^ occasions on which every member of the 

 family that had ever existed was always present. The pedi- 

 gree, too, of the individual was traced in lines upon each of 

 these coloured portraits. Their muniment-rooms,^^ too, v/ere 

 filled with archives and memoirs, stating what each had done 

 when holding the magistracy. On the outside, again, of their 

 houses, and around the thresholds of their doors, were placed 

 other statues of those mighty spirits, in the spoils of the enemy 

 there affixed, memorials which a purchaser even was not 

 allowed to displace ; so that the very house continued to 

 triumph even after it had changed its master. A powerful 

 stimulus to emulation this, when the walls each day re- 

 proached an unwarlike owner for having thus intruded upon 

 the triumphs of another ! There is still extant an address by 

 the orator Messala, full of indignation, in which he forbids 

 that there should be inserted among the images of his family 

 any of those of the stranger race of the LaeviniJ^ It was the 

 same feeling, too, that extorted from old Messala those com- 

 pilations of his ''On the Families of Eome;" when, upon 

 passing through the hall of Scipio Pomponianus,^^ he observed 

 that, in consequence of a testamentary adoption, the Salvittos'^ 



^3 In obedience to the maxim of Epicurus, AdOe ^iuxtuq — " Live in ob- 

 scurity." 1"* See B. xxi, c. 49, and Note 4, p. 346. 



^^ This appears to have been the usual practice at the funerals of dis- 

 tinguished personages among the Romans : it is referred to by Tacitus, 

 Ann. B. ii. c. 73, in his account of the funeral of Germanicus. — B. 



** " Tabulina." Rooms situate near the atrium. 



^' A cognomen of the Gens Valeria at Rome, from which the family of 

 the Messalae had also originally sprung, 



^^ So called from his father-in-law Poraponius, a man celebrated for bis 

 wealth, and by whom he was adopted. It would appear that Scipio Pom- 

 ponianus adopted Scipio Salvitto, so called from his remarkable resem- 

 blance to an actor of mimes. See B. vii. c. 10. 



^^ They were probably, like the Scipios, a branch of the Gens Cornelia. 



VOL. VI. Q 



