number of inscriptions in which belief in a life after death finds
expression such utterances are few. But how and where that life was to be
passed the Romans were in doubt. We have noticed above how little the
common people accepted the belief of the poets in Jupiter and Pluto and
the other gods, or rather how little their theology had been influenced by
Greek art and literature. In their conception of the place of abode after
death, it is otherwise. Many of them believe with Virgil that it lies
below the earth. As one of them says in his epitaph:[39]

"No sorrow to the world below I bring."

Or with other poets the departed are thought of as dwelling in the Elysian
fields or the Isles of the Blessed. As one stone cries out to the
passer-by:[40] "May you live who shall have said. 'She lives in Elysium,'"
and of a little girl it is said:[41] "May thy shade flower in fields
Elysian." Sometimes the soul goes to the sky or the stars: "Here lies the
body of the bard Laberius, for his spirit has gone to the place from
which it came;"[42] "The tomb holds my limbs, my soul shall pass to the
stars of heaven."[43] But more frequently the departed dwell in the tomb.
As one of them expresses it: "This is my eternal home; here have I been
placed; here shall I be for aye." This belief that the shade hovers about
the tomb accounts for the salutations addressed to it which we have
noticed above, and for the food and flowers which are brought to satisfy
its appetites and tastes. These tributes to the dead do not seem to accord
with the current Roman belief that the body was dissolved to dust, and
that the soul was clothed with some incorporeal form, but the Romans were
no more consistent in their eschatology than many of us are.

Perhaps it was this vague conception of the state after death which
deprived the Roman of that exultant joy in anticipation of the world