A disbelief in personal gods hardly accords with faith in a life after death, but most of the Romans believed in an existence of some sort in the world beyond.  A Dutch scholar has lately established this fact beyond reasonable doubt, by a careful study of the epitaphs in verse.[36] One tombstone reads:[37]

   “Into nothing from nothing how quickly we go,”

and another:[38]

   “Once we were not, now we are as we were,”

and the sentiment, “I was not, I was, I am not, I care not” (non fui, fui, non sum, non euro) was so freely used that it is indicated now and then merely by the initial letters N.f.f.n.s.n.c., but compared with the great 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 beyond which the devout Christian, a hundred years or more ago, expressed in his epitaphs, with the Golden City so clearly pictured to his eye, and by way of compensation the Roman was saved from the dread of death, for no judgment-seat confronted him in the other world.  The end of life was awaited with reasonable composure.  Sometimes death was welcomed because it brought rest.  As a citizen of Lambsesis expresses it:[44] “Here is my home forever; here is a rest from toil;” and upon a woman’s stone we read:[45]