ABSTRACT
Views about death were affected by religious attitudes in general. Even the most cursory study of literary and epigraphic evidence shows that there was no one Roman attitude to death, even though at times there was some uniformity in custom. The range is from almost total disbelief in anything after this life in the works of the Epicureans Caesar and Lucretius, or in the epitaph on a Wroxeter tombstone, proclaiming ‘drink while your star still gives you time for life’, through a cautious optimism at least in the survival of reputation, as Tacitus enunciated in his encomium on Agricola (Agricola 46), to the sublime hope of immortality expressed in Cicero’s Somnium Scipionis (though elsewhere Cicero is more agnostic), or the Christian slogan on a bone casket-mount from York: S [or]or Ave Vivas in Deo, ‘Sister, hail! Live in God!’.1
