arly every type of tomb known in Etruria, Magna Graecia, and the
prehistoric Italic stations has a representative in the old cemeteries
of the Viminal and the Esquiline. There are caves hewn out of the
natural rock, with the entrance sealed by a block of the same
material; in these are skeletons lying on the funeral beds on either
side of the cave, or even on the floor between them, with the feet
turned towards the door, and Italo-Greek pottery, together with
objects in bronze, amber, and gold. There are also artificial caves,
formed by horizontal courses of stones which project one beyond
another, from both sides, till they meet at the top. Then there are
bodies protected by a circle of uncut stones; others lying at the
bottom of wells, and finally regular sarcophagi in the shape of square
huts, and cineraria like those described on page 29 of my "Ancient
Rome."

Comparing these data we reach the conclusion that inhumation was
abandoned, with a few exceptions, towards the end of the fifth century
of Rome, to be resumed only towards the middle of the second century
after Christ, under the influence of Eastern doctrines and customs.
For the student of Roman archaeology these facts have not merely a
speculative interest; a knowledge of them is necessary for the
chronological classification of the material found in cemeteries and
represented so abundantly in public and private collections.

The acceptance of cremation as a national, exclusive system brought as
a consequence the institution of the _ustrina_, the sacred enclosures
in which pyres were built to convert the corpses into ashes. Several
specimens of _ustrina_ have been found near the city, and one of them
is still to be seen in good preservation. It is built in the shape of
a military camp, on the right of the Appian Way, five and a half miles
from the gate. When Fabretti first saw it in 1699, it was intact, save
a breach or gap on the north side. He describes it as a rectangle
three hundred and forty feet long, and two hundred feet wide, enclosed
by a wall thirteen feet high. Its masonry is irregular both in the
shape and size of the blocks of stone, and may well be assigned to the
fifth century of Rome, when the necessity for popular _ustrina_ was
first felt. When Nibby and Gell visited the spot in 1822 they found
that the noble owner of the farm had just destroyed the western side
and a portion of the eastern, to build with their materials a
_maceria_, or dr