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JOHN KARL EVANS
capacity to generalize from a body of work notable alike for the sophistication of its methodology and the sheer quantity of data unearthed." Nevertheless, used with appropriate caution, the issues raised and methods employed by these anthropologists may still provide the bridge that we so badly need to pass from recapitulation of the forms of Roman institutions to critical analysis of their contents. The balance of this paper will elaborate on this point by focussing on a component central to both systems, namely the cult of the dead.22
The afterlife in ancient Rome
While death is an inescapable part of the human condition, the attitude of the living toward death and the deceased is a cultural response subject to considerable variation. Happily, at both of these focal points the Roman and Chinese response is capable of precise definition.
As the inscriptions briefly invoked at the outset of this paper make clear, some Romans firmly maintained that death did indeed mark the end of all things. The quantity of literary, epigraphic and archaeological material endorsing the concept of a continuing existence after death is far more impressive, however, and it is quite clear that in all periods the overwhelming majority of Romans subscribed to this view. In addition, it should be remarked that this same body of evidence makes it no less clear that, while this continuing existence was spiritual, it was typically associated not with the ghostly underworld of Greek myth or the celestial realm of certain of the philosophic sects, but with the grave in which the ashes or remains were interred. Hence Trimalchio's remark, in Petronius' Satyricon that "it is assuredly wrong to embellish the houses in which we live, and not to trouble about those which we must inhabit for a far longer time."23 The Latin term which Petronius uses is domus, and sepulchral inscriptions also routinely describe the tomb as one's domus aeterna, or eternal home.24 It is this which explains the appearance of the stock phrase sit tibi terra levis "may the earth rest lightly upon you" on so many tombstones," and it is similarly the rationale for the many epitaphs which petition, threaten, or even attempt to engage the