But why are not tombs placed by the roadside in our
times? "It would seem," says the writer just quoted, "as if these
mementos of mortality were not so painful or so saddening to Pagans as
to Christians; and, that death, when believed to be final dissolution,
was not so awful or revolting as when known to be the passage to
immortality. I pretend not to explain the paradox, I only state it;
and, certain it is, that every image connected with human dissolution,
seems now more fearful to the imagination, and is far more sedulously
shunned, than it ever was in times when the light of Christianity had
not dawned upon the world."[13]
[13] Rome in the Nineteenth Century, vol. ii. letter 36.
The _high-ways_ do not, however, appear to have been the earliest
sites of tombs. According to Fosbroke, "the veneration with which the
ancients viewed their places of sepulture, seems to have formed the
foundation upon which they raised their boundless mythology; and, as
is supposed, with some probability, introduced the belief in national
and tutelary gods, as well as the practice of worshipping them through
the medium of statues; for the places where their heroes were
interred, when ascertained, were held especially sacred, and
frequently a temple erected over their body, hallowed the spot.
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