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Rh testified their piety to the gods, their devotion to their princes, their gratitude to their benefactors; that, finally, magistrates and private persons spread abroad in public all they wished to communicate to it. That is why the inscriptions were then so frequent, and explains how they survive to us in so great a number, though so many must have perished; the Corpus inscriptionum Latinarum already comprises more then two hundred thousand and is not yet completed. Sainte-Beueve was quite right in saying: 'The true Moniteur of the Romans must be sought in the innumerable pages of marble and bronze on which they graved their laws and their victories.'

But placards