A double tribute is paid to a certain Statilia in this naive inscription:[32] “Thou who wert beautiful beyond measure and true to thy husbands, didst twice enter the bonds of wedlock...and he who came first, had he been able to withstand the fates, would have set up this stone to thee, while I, alas! who have been blessed by thy pure heart and love for thee for sixteen years, lo! now I have lost thee.”  Still greater sticklers for the truth at the expense of convention are two fond husbands who borrowed a pretty couplet composed in memory of some woman “of tender age,” and then substituted upon the monuments of their wives the more truthful phrase “of middle age,"[33] and another man warns women, from the fate of his wife, to shun the excessive use of jewels.[34]

It was only natural that when men came to the end of life they should ask themselves its meaning, should speculate upon the state after death, and should turn their thoughts to the powers which controlled their destiny.  We have been accustomed to form our conceptions of the religion of the Romans from what their philosophers and moralists and poets have written about it.  But a great chasm lies between the teachings of these men and the beliefs of the common people.  Only from a study of the epitaphs do we know what the average Roman thought and felt on this subject.  A few years ago Professor Harkness, in an admirable article on “The Scepticism and Fatalism of the Common People of Rome,” showed that “the common people placed no faith in the gods who occupy so prominent a place in Roman literature, and that their nearest approach to belief in a divinity was their recognition of fate,” which “seldom appears as a fixed law of nature...but rather as a blind necessity, depending on chance and not on law.”  The gods are mentioned by name in the poetic epitaphs only, and for poetic purposes, and even here only one in fifty of the metrical inscriptions contains a direct reference to any supernatural power.  For none of these deities, save for Mother Earth, does the writer of an epitaph show any affection.  This feeling one may see in the couplet which reads:[35] “Mother Earth, to thee have we committed the bones of Fortunata, to thee who dost come near to thy children as a mother,” and Professor Harkness thoughtfully remarks in this connection that “the love of nature and appreciation of its beauties, which form a distinguishing characteristic of Roman literature in contrast to all the other literatures of antiquity, are the outgrowth of this feeling of kinship which the Italians entertained for mother earth.”

It is a little surprising, to us on first thought, that the Roman did not interpose some concrete personalities between himself and this vague conception of fate, some personal agencies, at least, to carry out the decrees of destiny.  But it will not seem so strange after all when we recall the fact that the deities of the early Italians were without form or substance.  The anthropomorphic teachings of Greek literature, art, and religion found an echo in the Jupiter and Juno, the Hercules and Pan of Virgil and Horace, but made no impress on the faith of the common people, who, with that regard for tradition which characterized the Romans, followed the fathers in their way of thinking.