Mortality

John Bodel calculates an annual death rate of 30,000 among a population of about 750,000 in the city of Rome, not counting victims of plague and pandemic.^[10] At birth, Romans of all classes had an approximate life expectancy of 20–30 years: men and women of citizen class who reached maturity could expect to live until their late 50's or much longer, barring illness, disease and accident.^[11] Married women, expected to bear children as a duty to family and state, were at particular risk of mortality through childbirth - 25 maternal deaths per 1,000 births (including still-births) is suggested.^[12] The death rate among newborns and young children was very high – around 1 in 4 births, or at worst, up to 50% mortality before age 5. Dietary deficiencies hindered growth and immunity among the poor, whether slave or free. The law prescribed the killing of any newborn by its father, if it was patently "unfit to live". Those less severely deformed, or of doubtful paternity, or born to impoverished or enslaved parents, or simply unwanted, might be exposed "for the gods to take care of". Exposure did not change their status, but if they were freeborn their father automatically lost his legal power over them, having surrendered it through abandonment. The status of an abandoned infant would have been difficult to prove. Some were adopted as foundlings, or sold and subsequently enslaved but many died. Attitudes to this practise varied; it was eventually outlawed, but covertly continued.^[13][14]

Funeral obligations of the familia

Responsibility of the State

Cicero describes the provision of a funeral and rites as a "natural duty", consistent with universal notions of human care and decency.^[24] Those who had rendered special service to the people or the state, in their military or civil career or as an ally, might be voted a funeral at state expense (a funus publicum). Sometimes the honour would be noted and publicly acknowledged by the heir, but the payment of costs refused, as a mark of the family's continued generosity to the people and state.^[25] The state intervened in several public and private aspects of burial and funeral practice. For certain deceased with a very high public profile, the entire population was expected to go into official mourning over a fixed period (and no longer than that). Sumptuary laws, designed to restrain expenditure and conspicuous display of wealth, privilege and excessive emotion, were often ignored or circumvented by the elite. "Excessive" mourning displays – of too great an intensity, cost or duration – were officially frowned on, as was the use of timbers "finished with the axe" for funeral pyres. The sprinkling of wine on the ashes of the deceased had been banned as extravagant and practised as essential for time immemorial.^[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. Bodel (2000) calculates that around 1,500 abandoned and unwanted corpses, not counting victims of epidemics, had to be removed from the streets of Rome every year. 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. Cassius Dio claims that 2,000 died in Rome every day in the plague outbreak of AD 189; and Suetonius, that in one autumn of Nero's reign, 30,000 in Rome died of plague. It is not known how undertakers or aediles dealt with such numbers of dead.^[27]

Undertakers on the Esquiline

The likely headquarters for the City of Rome's official undertakers was on the Esquiline Hill, where a temple in Libitina's sacred grove had been dedicated to Venus Libitina, as a patron goddess of funerals and undertakers, "hardly later than 300 BC".^[32][33] Venus's attested presence on the Esquiline seems to underline a very Roman association between sex, passion and death.^[9] Libitina herself appears to have had no independent cult, shrine or worshipers; her name is the likely source for the usual title of undertakers, "Libitinarii", but it also appears to have been metonymy for virtually all that pertained to undertakers and funerals, including biers ("couches of Libitina") and death itself. The Esquiline contained squared pits, named in the 1st century BC as puticuli ("little pits"), possible remnants of ancient stone-quarrying that sometimes served as dumps for corpses of the destitute, animal bones and household litter. The hill had once been the site of an ancient, aristocratic necropolis, first used around the 9th century BC, then submerged by the city's growth. Despite this ancient usage, the Esquilline seems not to have been a locus religiosus, but a locus publicus - an ordinary, public place, though notoriously unpleasant and malodorous.^[34] Towards the end of the Republic an area just outside the Esquiline Gate was used as a dump for the bodies of executed criminals and crucified slaves. The former were simply left there, or "dragged with the hook" from elsewhere by the undertaker's distinctively red-clad employees for disposal by birds and beasts. The bodies of slaves were usually left to rot on their crosses. The upper echelons of libitinarii (dissignatores, who hosted, organised and led funeral rites) wore distinctive black clothing, including a black hat. They were considered less polluted, and less polluting, than those who came into direct contact with corpses. Despite the public announcement of public executions, and public attendance at the same, the mere sight of a red-clad corpse-carrier or the body he dragged or carried was thought a pollution to be avoided, especially by priests, in particular by priests of Jupiter. Corpse-carriers going about their business were therefore obliged to ring a bell to warn of their approach.^[35][36]

A fee was payable for death certification at the offices of the Esquilline undertakers – a sort of "death tax". It funded the state's contribution to several festivals, including elements of the Parentalia and sacred games such as the Ludi Apollinares and Ludi Plebeii.^[37] The profession of undertaker was simultaneously "purifying and inherently sordid"; a necessary and ignoble trade, whose practitioners profited from blood and death. For contractors, it was almost certainly very profitable.^[38]

Announcing a death

In elite funerals, the body of the deceased could remain in their family home for several days after death, while their funeral was arranged. If the deceased was socially prominent, the death was announced by a herald, in the forum or other central public space. The doors of the family home were closed as a sign of mourning, and cypress branches were displayed outside the entrance, a warning to all, especially the pontifices, that those who entered risked ritual pollution.^[49] The family ceased their daily routines for a nine-day mourning period, during which they were considered untouchable, isolated from their broader community because of their contact with death. They should not wash or otherwise care for their own person and could not offer sacrifice to any deity.^[29]

Preparation of the body

When a person died at home, family members and intimate friends gathered around the death bed. If circumstance permitted it, the closest relative sealed the passing of spirit from the body with a last kiss, in accordance with a belief that equated the soul with the breath, then closed the eyes. The relatives began lamentations, the women scratching their faces until they bled,^[50] and calling on the deceased by name throughout the funeral ceremony. The family was assisted by an undertaker and his staff, who were allowed to touch and handle the corpse, being permanently ritually unclean by virtue of their profession (see Infamia). The male relatives did not touch the body; it was placed on the ground, washed and anointed by female relatives, then placed on a funerary bier.^[51] The placing of the body on the ground is a doublet of birth ritual, when the infant was placed on the bare earth.^[52]

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."

Mourners were expected to wear the dress appropriate to the occasion, and to their station; an elite male citizen might wear a toga pulla (a "dark" toga, reserved for funerals).^[53][54] If the deceased was a male citizen, he was dressed in his toga; if he had attained a magistracy, he wore the toga appropriate to that rank; and if he had earned a wreath in life, he wore one in death.^[55] Wreaths also are found in burials of initiates into mystery religions.^[56]

The body was arranged on a funeral couch in a lifelike posture, as if on a dining couch. The libitinarii disguised its death-pallor with cosmetics. It lay in state in the atrium of the family home (domus) with the feet pointed toward the door, for seven or more days.^[57][58] Other circumstances pertained to those who lived, as most urban Romans did, in apartment buildings (insulae) or to the rural settings where the vast majority of Romans lived and died; but little is known of them. Elite practices are better documented, though likely often retrospective, idealised, speculative and antiquarian, or poetic.^[59] Cicero writes that for most commoners, the time between death and disposal was less than 24 hours. This would have allowed virtually no time for lying in or other long-drawn ceremony.^[60]

Embalming was regarded as uncommon, mainly an Egyptian practice, but some instances are mentioned in Latin literature, and others are archaeologically confirmed in the Empire, as far afield as Gaul. Toynbee speculates that a number of these could have been the work of Egyptian priests of Isis and Serapis, in service of clients and converts, or just people who liked the idea of this form of preservation.^[61] Since elite funerals required complex and time-consuming arrangements, the body had to be preserved in the meantime, whether it was destined for burial or cremation.^[62] The emperor Nero promoted his dead wife Poppaea as a goddess of the Roman state, with divine honours at state expense but broke with imperial tradition and convention by having her embalmed and entombed, rather than cremated.^[63]

Eulogy

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 eulogy (laudatio funebris) was a formal oration or panegyric in praise of the dead. It was one of two forms of discourse at a Roman funeral, the other being the chant (nenia), most of which was performed by women. Male mourners might express their grief by a dignified groaning (gemitus); anything more was thought improper.^[77][78] These practices are associated with noble families, and the conventions for words spoken at an ordinary person's funeral go unrecorded. While public oratory was practiced in Rome only by men, an elite woman might also be honored with a public eulogy, though this was a rare event.^[76] In the most illustrious families, eulogies would tell of the successes and deeds of both the deceased and of their ancestors, impersonated by the actors or relatives seated on the rostra, each on the curule chair appropriate to the highest office held, appropriately dressed and masked. Cicero and Livy say that these claims were sometimes false, perhaps (they are not explicit) by falsely claiming descent.^[79]

A well-delivered funeral oration could be a way for a young politician to publicize himself.^[80] Aunt Julia's Eulogy (Laudatio Juliae Amitae), a speech made by the young Julius Caesar in honor of his aunt, the widow of Gaius Marius, underlined his own claims to divine and kingly ancestry, and helped launch his political career as a populist. Marius, popular reformist and seven-times consul, had been Caesar's political sponsor.^[81][82]

The epitaph of the deceased in effect was a digest of the eulogy made visible and permanent,^[83] and might include the career (cursus honorum) of a man who had held public offices. In commemorating past deeds, the eulogy was a precursor to Roman historiography.

Sacrifices

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. Though not an underworld deity, Ceres was doorwarden between the realms of the living and the dead. The shade of the deceased could not pass into the underworld or afterlife without her consent. The sacrificial victim was consecrated by sprinkling with mola salsa, a sacred mixture of salt and grain or flour, then stunned or killed with an axe or hammer, turned on its back and gutted. The guts (exta), the "divine portion" of the sacrifice, were placed in an earthenware pot (olla) and examined.^[86]

Abnormality in the exta indicated divine rejection of the offering, in which case the sacrifice must be repeated with a fresh victim. If all seemed satisfactory, the victim was cut up, and distributed between the presiding goddess, the mourners and the shade of the deceased. The di Manes were given their portion separately; it was believed that the living who shared a meal with the di Manes effectively offered themselves to the dead, and could suffer consequences.^[87] On the other hand, families and the departed could share anniversary and festive meals. Almost all sacrificial meat was given to the mourners, roasted and eaten. At funeral meals, a small portion for the deceased was cremated on a spit with the body or, if a burial, placed alongside it. The exta were burned on the portable altar, consumed by the flames as Ceres' portion. As far as Cicero was concerned, unless a sow had been sacrificed a burial was not religious and a grave was not a grave.^[88]

Sacrifice had to be offered and accepted to secure an afterlife and resting place for the deceased. The highest status funerals might sacrifice a more costly domestic animal, such as an ox, or several victims of different kinds; and while animal sacrifice was preferred, those who could not afford it could offer a libation of wine, and grain or other foodstuffs; a less potent offering than animal sacrifice but Ovid says that Ceres is content with little, as long as the offering is pure.^[89]

Cremation, inhumation and os resectum

At a cremation funeral, the heir lit the pyre with a torch, his face averted. Once the corpse had been consumed in the fire, the spirit of the deceased was thought to have begun their separation from the world of the living.^[90] After a cremation, the heir sprinkled the ashes with wine, gathered them along with any traces of bone, placed them in a cremation urn and interred them. This was sometimes done by the wife of the deceased; Livia did so with the ashes of her husband, the emperor Augustus.^[91]

The ashes were interred either in or next to the cremation site (in which case the funeral place was a bustum) or interred elsewhere, in which case the cremation place was known as ustrinum (plural, ustrina); the deceased could be commemorated both at the ustrinum and the place of ash-burial. A single ustrinum, usually stone-built, could accommodate many successive cremations, and usually belonged to a single family. Some were several storeys high, and functioned as a chimney, whose fires could be fed from beneath. Mass cremations, in which several bodies were burned simultaneously in the same pyre were efficient but were used only for the poor, or during epidemics, or on battlefields. Otherwise the ustrinum was supposed to be cleared after use, to avoid the mixing of ashes from different bodies, though a few cases are known in which this was deliberately done. Caracalla deliberately mixed the ashes of his brother Geta with those of his executed supporters, as a final insult. On the other hand, a few examples are known of couples whose ashes were contained in the same vessel, as an expression of love.^[92][93]

Inhumation was practiced regularly in archaic Rome, but in the Mid- to Late Republic and the Empire into the 1st and 2nd centuries, cremation became the most common burial practice. Toynbee describes the change from burial to cremation as generally starting, excepting a few noble families, by 400 BC. Patrician members of the gens Cornelia continued inhumating their dead until 79 BC, when the dictator Sulla became the first patrician Cornelius to be cremated, perhaps because he feared that otherwise his body would be defaced by supporters of his arch-enemy, Gaius Marius.^[94] The ancient Sepulcretum, in the Roman Forum, shows evidence of both inhumation and cremation, and laws relating to both practices go back to the 5th century BC.^[95]

Cremation was far more costly and time-consuming than inhumation; at its simplest and least costly, inhumation required little more than a scraped hollow in the ground, with some form of covering.^[96] The planning and execution of cremations required expertise. The unplanned cremations of Pompey and Caligula left their bodies part-burnt for want of sufficient fuel or skill. Wood for pyres was expensive; on average, an effective, well built pyre employed about half a cord of timber - and once lit, it must be tended for 8 or 9 hours to ensure that the body was completely consumed. For cremations of the elite, coin and sculptural evidence for pyres usually shows eight layers of timber, each laid at right angles to those above and below, with the whole resembling an altar and the body at least partly concealed within. The smoke of the pyre could be sweetened with aromatic herbs, leaves and libations. For the elite, incense could be burnt; it not only masked unpleasant smells, but being resinous was highly flammable. At Ostia, and probably elsewhere, municipally funded funerals for ex-officials were sometimes granted up to 50 pounds of incense. For the highest status cremations, pyres of several storeys were built, with a lavishly decorated exterior and an equally well-appointed "room" within, to house the corpse on its funeral couch. Offerings to be consumed in the flames of the pyre were placed around the body. In some cases, a wax replica of the deceased was placed atop the pyre.^[97] In the deification of deceased emperors, a caged eagle was concealed in the pyre, and released on cue to seemingly carry the Imperial soul to heaven.^[92]

Crematory images on the theme of the dead and mourning appear in Latin poetry. 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.^[98] When Propertius describes his dead lover Cynthia visiting him in a dream, the revenant's dress is scorched down the side and the fire of the pyre has corroded the familiar ring she wears.^[99]

In the late 1st century AD, cremation was such a commonplace that Tacitus could refer to it as Romanus mos ("the Roman Way").^[100] Plutarch recounts a tradition that king Numa Pompilius, who was credited with the introduction of Rome's most important religious practices, forbade cremation. 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. This may have been done to complete the household's purification, and to fully return the deceased to mother Earth and legitimise the grave. 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.^{[5][102][103][104]}

Over time, inhumation once again became the norm. Bodel (2008) places the main transition from cremation to burial as starting among slaves and freedmen around the mid-first century AD.^[105] Eventually, cremation remained a feature of imperial deification funerals, and very few others. The reasons for this shift are not well understood. 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.^[106]

Novendialis

A second funeral feast and rites called the novendialis or novemdialis were held nine days or more after death.^[107] Another sacrifice was often made, to the Manes of the deceased (or possibly, the family Penates – Cicero has a ram sacrificed as an offering to the family Lares). As a recipient of sacrifice, the deceased was now a deity, albeit one of the numberless underworld dii manes. The entire body of the sacrificial victim was burned on the ground, and a libation to the Manes of the deceased was poured onto the grave.^[108] The sacrificial meat was not shared between the living and the dead. Purification rites were held, using "fire and water", to finally separate the deceased from the world of the living. This concluded the period of full mourning and released the family from their funeral obligations.^[109] Mourning dress was put aside, open house was declared and a feast was given.^[110] Among the elite, ancient laws of Numa released the men of the family from further mourning; women of the family could be nominated to continue mourning on behalf of the entire household, for up to 10 months, releasing their menfolk from the strictures of formal mourning, and back into public life and its obligations.^[111]

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.

Adults

Grave goods for adults could include fine quality clothing, personal ornaments, perfumes, food and drink, and blood, which the deceased presumably needed, or enjoyed. Lamps were ubiquitous.^[112] From the earliest times, food and drink, and sacrifices to deities, were generally offered in ollae; these were often used to contain the inhumed ashes of the deceased; the ashes of several individuals might thus be accommodated on a single tomb-shelf.^[113]

In some burials, grave goods appear to have been ritualistically "killed", being deliberately damaged before burial. In others, damaged goods may have been used as a matter of economy. Some graves contain one or more large nails, possibly to help "fix" the shade of the dead in the grave, and prevent their wandering from their proper place.^[114]

Infants and children

Roman literary and legal sources declared that concern for dead, un-teethed newborns was irrational, and mourning them was self-indulgent and hysterical. Nevertheless, grave goods in infant burials could include toys, pets, food and images of protective childhood or birth deities, to guard the child's soul on its journey.^[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.^[116] Cemeteries with disproportionately scant material evidence of infant or still-born deaths have been interpreted as confirmatory evidence for a general lack of care, or a culture of emotional indifference to the very young; this apparent lack may have more to do with soil conditions unfavourable to the preservation of infant remains, carelessness in past excavations, and over-reliance on the opinionated and unreliable pronouncements of elite literary sources as a guide to contemporary practice, and thus to the planning of later excavations.^[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.^[118] In the Graeco-Roman world, the bear was an animal of Artemis (or for Romans, Diana), the divine virgin huntress and patron goddess of wild animals, protectress of childbirth, nursing and infants, especially infant girls.^[119] In Brescia, Italy, bear figurines appear to have functioned as guides and companions for children in the afterlife. The lunula, and the phallus with a horn invoked protection from evil and misfortune. Beads found in burial sites were often made from materials used for medicinal purposes in the realm of the living, such as jet, which Pliny claims in his Historia Naturalis can cure toothaches and other ailments.^[120] Bells, epecially tintinnabuli helped to drive away evil and avert the evil eye.^[121] Bells were also set into the mortar of the Roman Catacombs as a protective device over children's tombs. This was especially common in the fourth century.^[122]

Funeral games (ludi funebres)

Roman and Greek literature offers dramatic accounts of games to honour or propitiate the spirits of the dead. In Homer's Iliad, Book 23, funeral games are held by Achilles to honour Patroclus, and in Virgil's Aeneid, Book 5, Aeneas holds games on the anniversary of his father's death. Very similar episodes are depicted on the walls of elite tombs in Etruria, and Campania; some appear to show combats to the death. The first such ludi funebres in Rome were given in 264 BC, during the war against Carthage; three pairs of gladiators fought to the death at the pyre of Brutus Pera, in what was described as a munus (pl. munera), a duty or provision owed to an ancestor by his descendants – in this case, his son. A feast was provided for friends and family; this may have been on the last day of the novendialis.^[126] Similar gladiatora munera became a core event at elite Roman funeral games. 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.^[127]

Gladiator munera became very popular, but they were also thought luxurious, self-indulgent and potentially corrupting. The host (editor) of a munus stood to gain votes in his political career for even the promise of funeral games. Sulla broke his own sumptuary laws during his stint as praetor to honour his dead wife, Metella, with an exceptionally lavish gladiator munus.^[128] The gladiators themselves could be admired for their courage, and despised for the bloodiness of their profession, whose function could approximate that of an executioner. The insulting term bustuarius ("tomb-man") was sometimes used for the lower class of gladiator, who might be perceived as no more than provider of living blood to the spirits of the dead.^[129][130] Julius Caesar broke any strict link between funerals and munera when he dedicated his ludi of 65 BC, with its 320 pairs of gladiators, to his father, who had been dead for 20 years.^[131]

In the Imperial era, the state took over the organisation and subsidy of the most extravagant gladiatora munera, incorporating them into the existing, long-standing roster of public, state-sponsored events (ludi), and identifying them with the generosity of Imperial officialdom.^[132] Any originally religious elements in these munera tended to be subsumed by their entertainment value. In the mid-to-late Empire, Christian spectators who commented on the gladiator games thought them a particularly savage and perverse form of human sacrifice to "pagan demons".^[133]

Festivals and cults of the dead

Starting on 13 February, dead parents and their ancestors were honoured at a nine-day annual festival, the Parentalia, a legal obligation of every paterfamilias. Its opening rites were performed by the Vestal Virgins. Families made their various ways to the extramural cemeteries where their ancestors had been laid to rest, and held extravagant feasts at their family tombs. Behaviour at Parentalia varied between ostentatious public display and (according to Christian witnesses) drunken joie de vivre. 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". Feralia was also an exorcism: Ovid thought it a more rustic, primitive and ancient affair than the Parentalia itself. It appears to have functioned as a cleansing ritual for Caristia on the following day, when the family held an informal banquet to celebrate the mutual affection between themselves and their benevolent ancestral dead (whom Ovid identifies as Lares).^[134] The midnight rites of the Lemuria festival (9, 11, and 13 May), were yet more ancient and obscure; families were redeemed at midnight from the potentially threatening lemures, undertood to be vagrant or resentful di manes or di parentes, the spirits of those family members who had died "before their time" (through disease, accident or violence) and could not enter a full afterlife until they reached a "natural term". Until then, their yearly care, or exorcism as malignant spirits, was a duty of the family's paterfamilias, who must spit black beans onto the floor of the family home at midnight, as food for the dead. Any malign spirit not satisfied by this offering could be exorcised from the domus by the family's loud clashing of bronze pots.^[135][136]

In the city of Rome, on 24 August, 5 October and 8 November, a hemispherical pit or vault, known as the mundus cerialis (literally "the world" of Ceres or Caereris mundus) was opened with the official announcement "mundus patet" ("the mundus is open").^[137] Offerings were made there to underworld deities, and to Ceres as guardian goddess of the fruitful earth and its underworld portals. Its opening offered the spirits of the dead temporary leave from the underworld, to roam lawfully among the living, in what Warde Fowler describes as 'holidays, so to speak, for the ghosts'.^[138][139] The significance of this ritual remains uncertain; tradition dated it to the foundation of Rome by Romulus, who established a state grain-store as a common resource, on the Etruscan model. The shape of the mundus was described as a reflection or inversion of the dome of the upper heavens.^[140] The opening of the mundus was among the very few occasions that Romans made official contact with their collective di Manes – the others being Parentalia and Lemuralia.^[141] Other events such as the Rosalia (festival of Roses), the Violaria (a festival of Attis) but especially the dies natalis (birthday) and death-day of the deceased were observed by the pious, with an abundance of flowers, sacrifice and family feasts.^[142]

Epitaphs

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.

Epitaphs are one of the major classes of inscriptions. Additional information varies, but collectively, Roman epitaphs offer information on family relationships, political offices,^[143] and Roman values, in choosing what aspects of the deceased's life to praise. In a funeral culture that sought to perpetuate remembrance of the dead beyond the power of individual memory, epitaphs and markers counted for a lot. The inscription sit tibi terra levis (commonly abbreviated as S·T·T·L) is a commonplace marking on funerary items, approximately translating as "May the earth rest lightly on you". A standard Roman funerary dedication is Dis Manibus ("to the Manes-gods"). Regional variations include its Greek equivalent, theoîs katachthoníois^[144] and Lugdunum's locally commonplace but mysterious "dedicated under the trowel" (sub ascia dedicare).^[145][146] There is a profound shift in content during the rise in dominance of Christianity. While traditional epitaphs usually note the person's day of birth, earthly achievements and lifespan,^[84] Christian inscriptions tend to emphasise the day of death, a transition to a hoped-for heavenly "new life".^[147]

Philosophical beliefs may also be in evidence. The epitaphs of Epicureans often expressed some form of the sentiment non fui, fui, non sum, non desidero, "I did not exist, I have existed, I do not exist, I feel no desire",^[148] or non fui, non sum, non curo, "I did not exist, I do not exist, I'm not concerned about it".^[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.^[150]

For those families who could not afford a durable inscription, the passage of time would have brought considerable anxiety, as such grave markers as they could provide gradually eroded, shifted or were displaced, with the grave's exact location, and the identity of the deceased, lost as the cemetery gradually filled.^[151] Many would have received no marker or epitaph at all; most of Rome's slaves were servi rustici, used for agricultural labour, and very few of them had the opportunities afforded to many urban household slaves, to buy their freedom with money earned and a promise of future favours. Almost all would have been enslaved for the whole of their lives, "and it is thought that they practically never appear in the epigraphic (or any other) record".^[152]

Funerary art

Imagines ("images")

Molded mask of a girl with funerary inscription from Roman Gaul

Mummy portrait of a girl wearing a gold wreath, from Roman Egypt

The "images" (sing. imago, pl. imagines) displayed by some noble Roman families at funerals were usually kept in cabinets made for the purpose, in the atrium of their family home.^[156] There is some uncertainty about whether these imagines maiorum ("images of the great ones") were funeral masks, lifemasks, busts, or all of these. The "images" could be arranged in a family tree, with a title (titulus) summarizing the individual's offices held (honores) and accomplishments (res gestae),^[157] a practice that might be facilitated by hanging masks.^[158] In any case, portrait busts of family members in stone or bronze were displayed in the home as well.^[159]

These imagines were most likely made of wax, coloured and detailed to create as accurate a depiction as possible. They were not only used at funerals but were also displayed at important family gatherings such as weddings. They were therefore not housed in the tomb, but in the family domus. Their making was acknowledged as requiring a high level of skill; they were intended as a faithful rendition of their subject, but were apparently not considered works of art.^[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. Three-dimensional, highly realistic images of deceased nobles are known to have been consumed by fire in the highest status cremation funerals; for example, at Sulla's and Julius Caesar's funerals, and at the "funus imaginarium" (funeral of the image) of emperor Septimius Severus. Caesar's wax image, placed on the pyre above his mortal remains, showed the wounds of his murder. Septimius' body had aleady been cremated, where he had died, in Britain; in Herodian's version, the emperor's ashes were brought to Rome and reverentially laid to rest in his mausoleum. 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".^[163] The veristic tradition of funerary likenesses, however, contributed to the development of realistic Roman portraiture. In Roman Egypt, the Fayum mummy portraits reflect traditions of Egyptian and Roman funerary portraiture and the techniques of Hellenistic painting.^[164][165]

Urban and suburban

In Rome, burial places were "always limited and frequently contested".^[166] The legislation that forbade almost all burial within the ritual boundaries of Roman cities and towns led to the development of necropolises alongside extramural roads, veritable "cities of the dead", with their own main and access roads, water supplies and prime development sites for grand monuments or mausolea. Amenities for visitors included rooms for family dining, kitchens and kitchen gardens. There was no zoning as such; the burial consecrated the ground, not vice versa, and the land beyond each tomb's perimeter was profane, open to public access.^[167] Plots could be rented or bought, with or without user-ready or customised tombs. The great cemetery of Isola Sacra and the tombs that line both sides of the Via Appia Antica offer notable examples of roadside cemeteries.^[168] In the city of Rome, tombs also lined both embankments of the Tiber, a major waterway whose towpaths and wharves were in near-constant use. Tombs were still being built there in the Imperial era, despite the hindrances they must have posed to businesses at docks and wharves, and the planning, building and maintenance of riverine roadways, bridges and aqueducts. Rome was virtually encircled by its dead.^[169]

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

Cemeteries, tombs and their dead were protected by religious and civil laws and interdicts.^[170] A place used for burial was a locus religiosus; it belonged to the Manes gods because a body was buried there, or found there. Its disturbance was thought to cause pain and discomfort to the deceased, whether senator or slave.^[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. Death by lightning strike was thought a clear statement by Jupiter that the place and the victim belonged to him; the place was marked out accordingly, and the victim buried, though not with "ordinary rites".^[172]

Cicero records a major pontifical decision that any grave in publicly owned land was unlawful, and therefore could not be treated as a locus religiosus. The decision paved the way for a mass exhumation of cemetery land just outside Rome's Colline Gate, and its eventual re-use as public land. At more or less the same time, cremation hearths (ustrina) and rubbish dumping were banned from the Esquiline and for 2 miles beyond the city wall. Cicero thought that all this had to do with minimising the risk of fires;^[173] that was a factor, but the Esquiline's odour was a more immediate and notorious public nuisance. Augustus' ally Maecenas covered the site with 25 feet depth of soil, built himself a luxury urban villa there and opened its extensive gardens to the public, all at his own expense; this earned him much credit as a public benefactor. Various funerary structures built on Rome's outskirts by wealthy patrons around this time have been suggested as attempts to serve the funeral needs of the very poor. They included extensive columbaria with built-in, efficient mass-crematoria.^[35][174] In the Imperial era, cremation and tomb provision were displays of patronage; for example, the entirely underground columbaria with spaces for freedmen of the Julio-Claudian house, at the Vigna Colina site.^[175]

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.

Disturbance or damage to tombs, memorials and lawfully interred human remains carried substantial penalties – malicious damage was a capital offence, though detection and punishment or compensation rather depended on whose remains, tombs, or memorials were involved, and who was applying or ignoring the law. The Via Basiliano's necropolis of 545 graves, jammed together and even overlapping, provides the evidence that violation of burial law was a "sore fact of life".^[176] Memorial stones have been found incorporated into houses, reused to create monuments to completely unrelated persons, and recycled in official buildings. In Puteoli, the municipality fined anyone who damaged the tomb of a decurion (a local, junior magistrate) 20,000 sestercii.^[177] Offenders could be prosecuted in civil courts. Some tomb inscriptions offer a cash reward to anyone who reported offenders to the civil authorities. Some memorials list those entitled to be placed there; some name persons or "alien clans" not entitled to use of the tomb. Some developers seem to have simply removed or ignored burial markers. Burial plots could be divided, subdivided and sold on, in parts or as a whole, or rented out to help cover the cost of maintenance; profits could be raised from the land by any appropriate means, such as sale of flowers from tomb gardens, but must only be used to repair, improve or maintain the site or its monuments, and not to "profit from death".^[172] "Guest burials" were sometimes explicitly forbidden, for fear that they set a precedent of habitual usage prior to claiming perpetual family rights to use of the tomb.^[178] There is evidence of severe near-contemporary encroachments, theft of stones and unrepaired damage to tombs, grave markers and epitaphs. Tombs could be lawfully moved – a common result of frequent flooding of cemeteries – after exemption by the pontifices, but they could also gradually decay through neglect, and be lost. Families could move away, or die out. In Pompeii, a legible memorial stone was discovered face-down, reshaped to make seating for a public latrine.^[179]

Until the creation of Christian cemeteries at intramural sites of Christian churches and martyrdoms, almost all cemeteries were extramural. John Bodel found that three cemeteries of the Imperial era each had a "peak life" of between 150 and 200 years intensive use, involving perhaps 4 or 5 generations, before they were filled, and their land was repurposed.^[180] As cities and towns expanded beyond their original legal and ritual boundaries, formerly intramural cemeteries had to be redefined as "outside the city" with deeds and markers, or their burials moved, releasing much-needed land for public or private use. 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. The emperor Aurelian's expansion of Rome's walled areas skirted these issues by incorporating sacred and religious places into the fabric of his new walls; some strictly unlawful destruction, however, would have been inevitable, and this was officially recognised and compensated. Where private and public interests collided, the law provided for restitution of loss to private parties, but not prevention.^[169]

Rural villas and estates

Mausoleum of Augustus, restored

A likely majority of Romans (Hopkins, 1981, calculates 80–90%) spent their entire lives in rural poverty, working on farms and villa estates as tenants, free labourers or slaves. Wealthy landowners used the income from their farms to support town houses, military and political careers, and a lifestyle of cultured leisure (otium). While some affected to despise money, farming was represented as an entirely appropriate, intrinsically noble occupation.^[181] By the 2nd century BC, the monumental tombs of aristocrats were a part of the rural and suburban villa landscape, surrounded by tombs of lesser family members, outnumbered by the humbler tombs of the bailiffs, commoner-tenants, and slaves who ran the place. Far from the main roads between towns and cities, the graves of field-workers occupied poor ground not worth the planting or grazing; landowners could offer burial space on their own property for whoever they wished, and wherever they pleased; graves were sacred no matter where. In his capacity as a land surveyor, Siculus Flaccus found that grave markers at the edge of estates were easily mistaken for boundary markers (cippi). Many of the elite chose burial among their ancestors at the family farm and villa, until the emperor Marcus Aurelius banned the practice in an effort to limit the spread of the Antonine Plague (165 to 180 AD). The ban remained in place until at least the 4th century. Heirs might be obliged by the terms of their inheritance to keep their inheritance whole, not sell it piecemeal, and to keep the family name alive; this could be done by leaving the property to freedmen, who adopted the name of the master who freed them. Whoever inherited or bought a property automatically acquired its graves, monuments and resident deities, including its dii Manes and Lares, who were closely associated – at least in popular opinion – with ancestor cult. If the family villa had to be sold, it was not unusual for the contract of sale to maintain the vendor's traditional rights of access to their family tombs, so that they could continue to observe their ancestral and commemorative rites and duties.^[182]

Common graves

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. The social status of the poorest citizens might have been marginally better than a slave, but their prospect of decent burial could be much worse. Some were doubtless unlawfully dumped by their relatives, or by the aediles or rather, by their assistants. Several historical burial crises are known, mostly relating to famines and plagues and the overwhelming of facilities for disposal.^[183]

The bodies of the poorest, whether slave or free, could have been consigned to the same dishonourable places as executed criminals deemed obnoxious to the state (noxii). Most are presumed to have been disposed of in pits (puticuli, s.puticulus) like those at the Esquiline, outside the town or city boundary, or at worst dumped into sewers or rivers, and their remains dispersed. For the truly impoverished, and during times of exceptionally high mortality such as famine or epidemic, mass-burials or mass-cremations with minimal or no rites might have been the only realistic option, and as much as the authorities and undertakers could cope with. Some modern scholars perceive this as a sign of apathetic indifference among Rome's poorest in a ferociously competitive society.^[183]

Basic pit graves

Example of imbrex and tegula flanged roof tiles that were used in "Cappuccina" roofed pit graves. The curved tile is the imbrex.

The least costly form of individual inhumation was the simple pit-grave.^[184] It was used, in various forms, throughout the Republic and Empire, especially where there was little or no pressure for burial space. Orientation of the grave was generally east – west, with the head to the east.^[185] Flanged tiles (or tegulae) were sometimes used to enclose and protect the remains in a box-like or gabled ceramic tomb, known in modern archaeology as Alla cappuccina ("like a Capuchin monk's hood"). Libations during ceremonies honouring the dead were sometimes given through a tube or funnel that pierced the tomb, and could be stoppered when not in use. Grave goods were often deposited along with the body; a pillow of tufa or wood might be provided for the comfort of the deceased.^[184][186]

Flat-roofed tomb made from roof-tiles (tegulae), 4th–5th century AD, Enns (Upper Austria). Museum Lauriacum, from the Roman cemetery of Ziegelfeld.

House tombs, Columbaria and mausoleums

"House tombs" for well-off, prominent but in most cases, probably sub-elite families were often contained within a low-walled exterior precinct, which might include a garden. The exterior of such tombs could be highly decorative, designed to provoke the notice and curiosity of passers-by, rather like the semi-public atria of private town-houses in function, if not appearance. Most had a decorated room for banqueting, complete with shelving, cooking facilities and stone-built banqueting couches or space for couches to be brought in, and either sarcophagi containing the immured dead or cinerary altars or urns containing their ashes. Entry to the inner rooms was likely privileged to family members, most of whom could anticipate their own burial here, rewarding their commitment to care of their departed relatives.^[187] Slaves freed by their master's will took on their former owner's family name and many of their family responsibilities. In due course, their own names and epitaphs might be added to those already listed on the tomb frontage, a dynastic history to be read by any passer-by. Most tomb owners made provision in their wills to cover the cost of family banquets and festivals, whose observance would gradually transform the deceased from "polluted body to sanctified ancestor".^[188]

The smallest "house tombs" were box-like, masonry structures with perpendicular walls, low-roofed but submerged some feet below ground level and on the inside, high enough to stand in. The walls afforded opportunities for decoration, including small wall-paintings, reliefs and mosaic walls and floors; extra floors could be added at need, above or below ground-level, to contain additional cremation urns, or inhumation burials. In some cases, mosaic floors within house tombs were carefully removed, an additional corpse interred, then the mosaic repaired and the whole resealed, with a "feeding tube" set into the mosaic to provide for the new interrment.^[189] Some tombs had an entrance lobby and several rooms to store paraphernalia for memorial ceremonies and feasts.^[190]

Sarcophagus of Junius Bassus, 4th century AD, an early example of very high status Christian art, with scenes from the Old and New Testaments

Wealthy, prominent families built large, sometimes enormous, mausoleums. The Castel Sant'Angelo by the Vatican, originally the mausoleum of Hadrian, is the best preserved, as it was converted to a fortress.^[191] The family Tomb of the Scipios was in an aristocratic cemetery, and in use from the 3rd century BC to the 1st century AD. A grand mausoleum might include surrounding flower gardens, groves, vineyards and orchards as a source of extra income, reception rooms and kitchens for family visits and feasts.^[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.^[62] The bodies of the wealthy deceased were usually inhumed within sarcophagi, but some mausolea include cremation urns. Some late examples combine Christian and traditional "pagan" styles of burial. 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. They were presumably reserved for lower-status family members, or for slaves, freedmen and other dependents. Larger rectangular niches were used for inhumation burials.^[193]

The roads from cities were lined with smaller mausolea, such as the Tombs of Via Latina, along the Appian Way. The Tomb of Eurysaces the Baker is a famous and originally very ostentatious tomb in a prime spot just outside Rome's Porta Maggiore, erected for a rich freedman baker around 50–20 BC.^[194] The tombs at Petra, in the far east of the Empire are cut into cliffs, some with elaborate facades in the Hellenised "baroque" style of the Imperial period.^[195]

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.

The Catacombs of Rome were entirely underground. They were famously used by Christians, but also by all religions, with some specialization, such as special Jewish sections. They are large systems of narrow tunnels in the soft rock below Rome, where niches were sold to the families of the deceased in a very profitable trade. Decoration included paintings, many of which have survived.^[196]

In the Christian period, burial near the grave of a famous martyr became desirable, and large funeral halls were opened over such graves, which were often in a catacomb underneath. These contained rows of tombs, but also space for meals for the family, now probably to be seen as agape feasts. Many of the large Roman churches began as funeral halls, which were originally private enterprises; the family of Constantine owned the one over the grave of Saint Agnes of Rome, whose ruins are next to Santa Costanza, originally a Constantinian family mausoleum forming an apse to the hall.^[197][198]

Sarcophagi

Main article: Ancient Roman sarcophagi

The funerary urns in which the ashes of the cremated were placed were gradually overtaken in popularity by the sarcophagus as inhumation became more common. Particularly in the 2nd–4th centuries, these were often decorated with reliefs that became an important vehicle for Late Roman sculpture. The scenes depicted were drawn from mythology, religious beliefs pertaining to the mysteries, allegories, history, or scenes of hunting or feasting. Many sarcophagi depict Nereids, fantastical sea creatures, and other marine imagery that may allude to the location of the Isles of the Blessed across the sea, with a portrait of the deceased on a seashell.^[199] The sarcophagus of a child may show tender representations of family life, Cupids, or children playing. Some tomb inscriptions name infants, and depict episodes from their brief lives on sarcophagi. They are depicted as well-grown children, regardless of their age or context, and never as newborns. They would have thus been included in the family's memorial festivals.^[200]

Relief panel from a 3rd-century marble sarcophagus depicting the Four Seasons (Horae) and smaller attendants around a door to the afterlife^[201]

Some sarcophagi may have been ordered during the person's life and custom-made to express their beliefs or aesthetics. Most were mass-produced, and if they contained a portrait of the deceased, as many did, with the face of the figure left unfinished until purchase.^[202] The carved sarcophagus survived the transition to Christianity, and became the first common location for Christian sculpture, in works like the mid-4th-century Sarcophagus of Junius Bassus.^[203]

Religion

Like their Etruscan neighbours, the Romans held a deepseated notion that the individual soul survived death. They went to great lengths to help their dead feel comfortable, and "at home" in the tomb. Several quite different but concurrent beliefs and customs seem to have been held regarding an afterlife. Some epitaphs and sculptural representations suggest that the deceased rested "in the bosom of a kindly Mother Earth". While individual souls were thought to merge into an undifferentiated collective of underworld deities (dii inferii) known as Manes gods, the naming of the deceased as an individual and the provision of grave goods implies that at least some personal qualities, needs and preferences were believed to survive along with the soul, which resided in or with the body or ashes in the dark of the grave, or within the memories of those who mourned their loss. Standard accounts of Roman mythology describe the soul as immortal^[211] and judged at death before a tribunal in the underworld, with those who had done good being sent to the Elysian Fields and those who had done ill sent to Tartarus.^[212] It is unclear how ancient, persistent and widely held such beliefs could have been; they seem influenced by Greek mythology and mystery cults. Strict Stoics and Epicurians declared the soul a material quality, drawn at death from its bodily home to rejoin an indistinct universal life-force. Belief in the persistence of an individual soul after death is evident in domestic and ancestor-cult practices that seek to feed, satisfy and sustain the soul as a familiar spirit, still imbued with an identity, personality and preferences, and a tendency to care for those who care for it; a divinised ancestor, rather than just one of a vast and impersonal community of shadowy Manes gods.^[213]

The mysteries seem to have promised immortality only for the initiated. Known forms of esoteric religion combined Roman, Egyptian, and Middle Eastern mythology and astrology, describing the progress of its initiates through the regions of the moon, sun, and stars. The uninitiated or virtueless were then left behind, the underworld becoming solely a place of torment. Common depictions of the afterlife of the blessed include rest, a celestial banquet, and the vision of God (Deus or Jupiter).^[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.^[214]

Philosophy

The mainstream of Roman philosophy, such as the Stoics, advocated contemplation and acceptance of the inevitability of death of all mortals. "It is necessary for some to stay and for others to go, all the while rejoicing with those who are with us, yet not grieving for those departing".^[215] To grieve bitterly is to fail to perceive and accept the nature of things. Epictetus encouraged contemplation of one's loved ones as a "jar" or "crystal cup" which might break and be remembered without troubling the spirit, since "you love a mortal, something not your own. It has been given to you for the present, not inseparably nor forever, but like a fig... at a fixed season of the year. If you yearn for it in the winter, you are a fool."^[216] There was no real consensus, at least among surviving Roman texts and epitaphs, of what happened to a person after death, nor on the existence of an afterlife. Pliny the Elder in his Naturalis Historia claims that most people are of the opinion that after death one returns to the non-sensing state that occurred before birth but admits, however scornfully, that there are people who believe in the immortality of the soul. Seneca the Younger seems to be less consistent, arguing both sides, indicating that death brings about utter annihilation while also talking about some survival of the spirit after it escapes from the prison of the body.^[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.