rs. The same difficulty
was experienced when cinerary urns had to be placed in their niches;
and the funeral tablets and memorials containing the name, age,
condition, etc., of the deceased, which were either written in ink or
charcoal, or else engraved on marble, could not be read if too high
above the pavement. For these reasons, and to avoid any suspicion of
partiality in the distribution of lots, the shareholders trusted to
chance. The crypt discovered in the Via Latina contained five rows of
niches of thirty-six each. The rows were called _sortes_, the niches
_loci_. Now, as each shareholder was entitled to five _loci_, one on
each row, lots were drawn only in regard to the _locus_, not to the
row. The inscriptions discovered in 1599 and 1854 are therefore all
worded with the formula:--"Of Caius Rabirius Faustus, second tier,
twenty-eighth locus;" "Of Caius Julius AEschinus, fourth tier,
thirty-fourth locus;" "Of Lucius Scribonius Sosus, first tier,
twenty-third locus;"--in all, nine names out of thirty-six. The
allotment of Rabirius Faustus is the only one known entirely. He had
drawn No. 30 in the first row, No. 28 in the second, No. 6 in the
third, No. 8 in the fourth, No. 31 in the fifth.

It took at least thirty-one years for the members of the company to
gain the full benefit of their investment; the last interment
mentioned in the tablets having taken place A. D. 25. This late comer
is not an obscure man; he is the famous charioteer, or _auriga
circensis_, Scirtus, who began his career A. D. 13, enlisting in the
white squadron. In the lapse of thirteen years he won the first prize
seven times, the second thirty-nine times, the third forty times,
besides other honors minutely specified on his tombstone.[123]

The theory that Roman tombs were built along the high roads in two or
three rows only, so that they could all be seen by those passing, has
been shown by modern excavations to be unfounded. The space allotted
for burial purposes was more extensive than that. Sometimes it
extended over the whole stretch of land from one high-road to the
next. Such is the case with the spaces between the Via Appia and the
Via Latina, the Labicana and Praenestina, and the Salaria and
Nomentana, each of which contains hundreds of acres densely packed
with tombs. In the triangle formed by the Via Appia, the Via Latina,
and the walls of Aurelian, one thousand five hundred and fifty-nine
tombs have been discovered in modern t