convenience might not be interrupted by private rites, since
no tombs could be removed without sacrilege when once established,
unless by the state, upon sufficient cause. The civil reasons are to
be sought in the unwholesome exhalations of large burying-grounds, and
the danger of fire from burning funeral piles in the neighborhood of
houses. It is not meant, however, that there were no tombs within the
city. Some appear to have been included by the gradual extension of
the walls; others were established in those intervals when the law of
the twelve tables fell, as we have said, into desuetude; nor does it
appear that these were destroyed, nor their contents removed. Thus
both the Claudian and the Cincian clans had sepulchres in Rome, the
former under the Capitol.

[Illustration: ARTICLES FOUND IN A TOMB.]

If the family were of sufficient consequence to have a patrimonial
tomb the deceased was laid in it; if he had none such, and was
wealthy, he usually constructed a tomb upon his property during life,
or bought a piece of ground for the purpose. If possible the tomb was
always placed near a road. Hence the usual form of inscription,
_Siste, Viator_ (Stay, Traveler), continually used in churches by
those small wits who thought that nothing could be good English which
was not half Latin, and forgot that in our country the traveler must
have stayed already to visit the sexton before he can possibly do so
in compliance with the advice of the monument. For the poor there were
public burial-grounds, called _puticuli, a puteis_, from the trenches
ready dug to receive bodies. Such was the ground at the Esquiline
gate, which Augustus gave Maecenas for his gardens. Public tombs were
also granted by the state to eminent men, an honor in early times
conferred on few. These grants were usually made in the Campus
Martius, where no one could legally be buried without a decree of the
senate in his favor. It appears from the inscriptions found in the
Street of Tombs, at Pompeii, that much, if not the whole of the ground
on which those tombs are built, was public property, the property of
the corporation, as we should now say; and that the sites of many,
perhaps of all, were either purchased or granted by the decurions, or
municipal senate, in gratitude for obligations received.

Sometimes the body was burned at the place where it was to be
entombed, which, when the pile and sepulchre were thus joined, was
called _bustum_; some