Roman funerary practices

In Horace's Ode 1.28, the shade of a drowned, unburied sailor, trapped through no fault of his own between the worlds of the living and the dead, implores a passer-by to "sprinkle dust three times" on his corpse and give him rest, or suffer his revenge.

According to Greek and Roman literary commentators, children only acquired full humanity by degrees, with careful teaching and discipline;[20] their ritual purity lasted, at some level, until the onset of adolescence – signalled by a boy's first beard, and a girl's menarche.

[26] At the other extreme, some individuals might attempt to lawfully escape the burden and expense of a funeral obligation, through the courts, or unlawfully avoid even the most basic disposal costs for a dead relative or slave, and risk a fine by simply dumping the body in the street.

Responsibility for their removal and disposal fell to government-contracted undertakers and their servants or slaves, working on behalf of the aediles, the magistrates who oversaw the maintenance of temples, shrines, public buildings, and the streets.

[27] Undertakers (dissignatores, or libitinarii) supplied a broad range of funeral and disposal services, considered demeaning or ritually unclean to most citizens; these included digging graves, building pyres, moving and dressing corpses, applying cosmetics to the deceased to disguise the pallor of death, and organising the procession and cremation or burial; each of these tasks was a speciality within the profession.

[39][40] The affluent town of Lanuvium hosted a burial society called "worshippers of Diana and Antinous", founded in 133 AD and headed, supervised and financially underwritten by a patron, a wealthy local civil magistrate.

[42] The emperor Nerva supposedly introduced a burial grant of 250 HS for funerals of the city plebs (Rome's lower citizen class), perhaps in a one-off bid for popular support during his brief reign (96–98 AD).

[45] Constantine (reigned 306–337 AD) instituted and subsidised 950 "work stations" for the use of undertakers, grave-diggers and pall-bearers (lecticarii) throughout Constantinople, part of a project to provide the poor with free funeral services.

[64] The custom is recorded in literary sources and attested by archaeology, and sometimes occurs in contexts that suggest it may have been imported to Rome as were the mystery religions that promised initiates salvation or special passage in the afterlife.

[85] A portable altar was set up at the place of burial or cremation pyre, and the heir offered sacrifice of a pig in the presence of the deceased, usually to Ceres, Rome's principal grain, harvest and field goddess.

In one of the best-known classical Latin poems of mourning, Catullus writes of his long journey to attend to the funeral rites of his brother, who died abroad, and expresses his grief at addressing only silent ash.

Perhaps in at least partial continued obedience to this prohibition, and perhaps on the understanding that "a part implies the whole", a complete finger could be cut from the corpse before its cremation and either buried separately, unburnt, or burned in a smaller, cooler fire at the end of the mourning period.

The practice, known as os resectum ("cut-off bone") is attested by literary sources [101] and to some extent, by archaeology, in at least one cremation of a named individual of senatorial class, and in several columbaria deposits, likely of freedmen or very ordinary citizens.

Some evidence points to Christianity's preservation of the body, following the example of Jesus' entombment, anticipating resurrection: the veneration of martyrs' physical remains: the proscriptions and preferences of mystery religions, the sheer cost of cremation, compared to burial: or the philosophical influence by the wealthier class in the Roman empire.

[115] Cemeteries containing an unusually high number of infant and child burials could indicate a nearby shrine or sanctuary, since lost, where parents had sought divine intervention and healing for children who had died despite their efforts.

[117] In Roman Britain, many burial and cremation sites of infants who had teethed and died contained small jet bear carvings, lunulae and phallic symbols, beads, bells, coins, and pottery beakers.

[123] Ancient votive deposits to the noble dead of Latium and Rome suggest elaborate and costly funeral offerings and banquets in the company of the deceased, an expectation of afterlife and their personal association with the gods.

[124] As Roman society developed, its Republican nobility tended to invest less in spectacular funerals and extravagant housing for their dead, and more on monumental endowments to the community, such as the donation of a temple or public building whose donor was durably commemorated by their statue and inscribed name.

In the late Republic, a munus held for the funeral of the ex-consul and Pontifex Maximus Publius Licinius in 183 BC involved 120 gladiators fighting over 3 days, public distribution of meat (visceratio data) and the crowding of the forum with dining couches and tents as venue for the feast.

The last day of Parentalia was Feralia (21 February), a somewhat darker affair in which the ancestors (the di Manes) were placated with "an arrangement of wreaths, a sprinkling of grain and a bit of salt, bread soaked in wine and violets scattered about".

[149] Among the non-elite, fond epitaphs for the young, both freeborn and slaves - Dasen gives examples ranging from 2 years old to 13 – tend to make much of their brief lifetimes, tragically wasted talents, the pleasure they gave and what they would have achieved in life had fate not intervened.

[160] Since references to imagines often fail to distinguish between stone or bronze commemorative portrait busts – extant examples of which are abundant – and funeral masks made of more perishable materials, none can be identified with certainty as having survived.

Meanwhile, his veristic wax image lay in state for seven days, during which it was diagnosed as increasingly ill by the imperial physicians, then declared dead by them on the seventh day and cremated on a vast pyre, in a grand public display of deification, including the release of an eagle "bearing his soul to heaven":[161][162] Among the non-elite, child burials were sometimes accompanied by a plaster death mask, or in some cases, the plaster negative mould from which such a mask, or the child's face, could be reconstructed; "the means for constructing the memory of families who invested their ambitions in their descendants and substituted their children for illustrious ancestors".

[171] The discovery of any previously unknown interment on profane (public or private) land created an immediate encumbrance to its further use; it had revealed itself as a locus religiosus, and remained so unless the pontifs agreed to revoke its status and remove the body or bones.

Among Rome's most disruptive and obtrusive building projects were its aqueducts, whose planning and construction involved extreme care in legal negotiation with landowners and landusers, and avoidance of damage, if possible, to tombs, graves, monuments, chapels and shrines.

[182] A funeral ceremony acceptable to the Roman elite might represent several times the annual income of the average citizen, and an impossibility to the very poor, dependent on charity or an unpredictable day-wage, unable to afford or maintain a burial-club subscription.

[192] Some had small cottages built to house permanent gardeners and caretakers, employed to maintain the tomb complex, prevent thefts (especially of food and drink left there for the deceased), evict any indigent homeless, and protect the dead from disturbance and harm.

Many large mausoleums contained indoor crematoria and banks of small, dovecote-like open niches – columbaria – for multiple cremation-urn burials, apparently following a model provided by Etruscan tomb architecture.

[212] The expected afterlife for the exclusively female initiates in the sacra Cereris (the rites of Ceres, likely based on the Eleusinian mysteries of Greek Demeter) may have been somewhat different; they were offered "a method of living" and of "dying with better hope", but what this was thought to mean is now lost.

[217] Tacitus at the end of Agricola takes the opposite opinion to Pliny, and claims that the wise believe the spirit does not die with the body, although he may be specifically referring to the pious – which harkens to the mythological idea of Elysium.

Sarcophagus of Lucius Cornelius Scipio Barbatus , 3rd century BC
Roman memorial stone, 2nd century AD. The translated inscription reads: "Valeria Prisca, daughter of Marcus, who lived as a great delight for 23 years. Her mother made this for her daughter."
Fragment of a relief from a sarcophagus depicting stages of the deceased's life: religious initiation, military service, and wedding (mid-2nd century AD)
The so-called Togatus Barberini in the Capitoline Museums may represent a senator holding two ancestral funerary portraits; these have been claimed in some modern commentaries as examples of the imagines described by some Latin sources.
This funerary stele , one of the earliest Christian inscriptions (3rd century), combines the traditional abbreviation D. M. , for Dis Manibus , "to the Manes gods," with the Christian motto Ikhthus zōntōn ("fish of the living") in Greek; the deceased's name is in Latin.
An inscribed funerary relief of Aurelius Hermia and his wife Aurelia Philematum, former slaves who married after their manumission, 80 BC, from a tomb along the Via Nomentana in Rome
Tomb of the Cornelii Scipios , in use from the 3rd century BC to the 1st century AD, then abandoned. Its fabric was incorporated into the Aurelian walls .
Mausoleum of Augustus , restored
Example of imbrex and tegula flanged roof tiles that were used in "Cappuccina" roofed pit graves. The curved tile is the imbrex .
Flat-roofed tomb made from roof-tiles (tegulae), 4th–5th century AD, Enns (Upper Austria). Museum Lauriacum, from the Roman cemetery of Ziegelfeld.
Sarcophagus of Junius Bassus , 4th century AD, an early example of very high status Christian art, with scenes from the Old and New Testaments
An unoccupied niche in the Catacombs of Domitilla , which were originally commissioned by a Christian family and their allies in the grain trade and bread production. The complex is several miles in length, four levels deep, and contains over 26,000 niches.
Relief panel from a 3rd-century marble sarcophagus depicting the Four Seasons ( Horae ) and smaller attendants around a door to the afterlife [ 201 ]
Tombstone of a Germanic cavalryman (1st century AD, Xanten )
Cenotaph of the Centurion Marcus Caelius, of the 18th legion, flanked by his two freedmen. After an unusually long service of more than 30 years, and an impressive number of military decorations, Marcus Caelus was lost in Varus ' defeat at the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest . The inscription grants permission to inter his freedmen's bones at the cenotaph, which was provided by Marcus's brother. [ 209 ]