“To the shade of Gaius Julius Filetio, born in Africa, a physician, who lived thirty-five years.  Gaius Julius Filetus and Julia Euthenia, his parents, have erected it to their very dear son.  Also to Julius Athenodorus, his brother, who lived thirty-five years.  Euthenia set it up.  He has been placed here, to whose burial the guild of rag-dealers has contributed three hundred denarii."[112] People of all ages have craved a respectable burial, and the pathetic picture which Horace gives us in one of his Satires of the fate which befell the poor and friendless at the end of life, may well have led men of that class to make provisions which would protect them from such an experience, and it was not an unnatural thing for these organizations to be made up of men working in the same trade.  The statutes of several guilds have come down to us.  One found at Lanuvium has articles dealing particularly with burial regulations.  They read in part:[113]

“It has pleased the members, that whoever shall wish to join this guild shall pay an initiation fee of one hundred sesterces, and an amphora of good wine, as well as five asses a month.  Voted likewise, that if any man shall not have paid his dues for six consecutive months, and if the lot common to all men has befallen him, his claim to a burial shall not be considered, even if he shall have so stipulated in his will.  Voted likewise, that if any man from this body of ours, having paid his dues, shall depart, there shall come to him from the treasury three hundred sesterces, from which sum fifty sesterces, which shall be divided at the funeral pyre, shall go for the funeral rites.  Furthermore, the obsequies shall be performed on foot.”

Besides the need of comradeship, and the desire to provide for a respectable burial, we can see another motive which brought the weak and lowly together in these associations.  They were oppressed by the sense of their own insignificance in society, and by the pitifully small part which they played in the affairs of the world.  But if they could establish a society of their own, with concerns peculiar to itself which they would administer, and if they could create positions of honor and importance in this organization, even the lowliest man in Rome would have a chance to satisfy that craving to exercise power over others which all of us feel, to hold titles and distinctions, and to wear the insignia of office and rank.  This motive worked itself out in the establishment of a complete hierarchy of offices, as we saw in part in an African inscription given above.  The Roman state was reproduced in miniature in these societies, with their popular assemblies, and their officials, who bore the honorable titles of quaestor, curator, praetor, aedile, and so forth.