Roman death ritual and the cult of the dead

What is attested

The Roman funeral is one of the best-documented ancient rites in aggregate and one of the worst-documented in detail. In aggregate, because funerary inscriptions are the single largest category of surviving Latin text — epitaphs survive in numbers no other Latin documentary class approaches, overwhelmingly from the imperial period, recording the dead person's name, age, status and the relationship of whoever paid for the stone. Formulae recur with enormous consistency: the dedication to the Manes, abbreviated D M; the dimensions of the burial plot in feet along the road and back from it; the clause specifying that the monument does not pass to the heir; penalties for violating the tomb. What this mass documents directly is ownership, legal protection and commemoration — who was remembered, by whom, and on what terms. It is much weaker evidence for what anyone believed about the dead.

For the elite funeral of the middle Republic there is one substantial contemporary description, and it comes from a Greek. Polybius, writing in the second century BC from inside the household of a leading Roman family, describes the body brought to the Forum and set upright at the Rostra, a son or relative delivering a speech on the dead man's achievements and then on those of each ancestor in turn, and — the detail he found most striking — men wearing the wax portrait masks of the family's dead, dressed in the insignia of the offices those ancestors had held, riding in the procession and seated on ivory chairs. Polybius states his own interpretation openly: the spectacle was designed to make young men want to be worth commemorating. He is describing the funerals of a narrow governing class at Rome, not the funeral of a Roman.

Legal and contractual evidence tells us who did the work and what it cost. The Twelve Tables, as quoted and glossed by Cicero, forbade burial or cremation inside the city and restricted the extravagance of funerals and the conduct of mourners — though the text we have is a reconstruction from later quotations, and Cicero is a first-century BC writer interpreting a text he dates to the fifth. Far more direct is a large inscribed regulation from Puteoli, of Augustan date, that sets out the terms on which a contractor held the town's funeral monopoly: the staff he must maintain, where they must live, the schedule of charges, the obligation to remove corpses on notice, and the provision of men to carry out floggings and executions on the magistrate's order. It is a public services contract, and it shows that in an Italian city the disposal of the dead and the infliction of judicial violence were bought from the same supplier.

For people below the elite, the collegia are the key documents. The regulations of the association of Diana and Antinous at Lanuvium, inscribed in AD 136 and now in Rome, set an entrance fee, a monthly subscription and an annual contribution of wine, and specify the funeral payment due on a member's death, with deductions for the officer who arranged it. They provide for a symbolic funeral where a body could not be recovered, and for the case of a slave member whose owner refused to release the corpse. They also regulate the dinners: who supplies what, and penalties for disorder. Membership of such bodies was largely slaves and freedmen. The document proves that ordinary people organised and pre-funded their own burial and commemoration, and that eating together was part of what they were buying.

The archaeology matches the documents in an unusual way. Cemeteries lined the roads out of every town because the law kept the dead outside; the necropolis at Isola Sacra, between Ostia and Portus, preserves tombs equipped for return visits — benches for reclining, wells, cooking arrangements, and pipes running from the surface down into the burial so that liquid could be poured to the dead. Collective tombs with tiers of niches for cremation urns, the so-called columbaria, served households and associations at Rome in the early empire. From the second century AD onward, cremation gives way to inhumation across much of the western empire, on a chronology that varies markedly by region and that begins later in the north-western provinces; parts of the east were practising inhumation throughout, and had no comparable transition to undergo. Even so, it is one of the few large-scale shifts in Roman practice that excavation can date independently of any text. Inscriptions endowing annual rose-festivals at tombs show individuals paying, in advance and by legal instrument, for the dead to be visited on a fixed day — documentary proof of tomb cult that does not depend on any poet's description of it.

How the rite worked

The sequence as usually set out runs: the calling of the dead person's name aloud, an act named as conclamatio chiefly in later Roman lexicographical tradition rather than in contemporary description; washing and anointing of the body; laying it out at home for viewing; the procession to the place of disposal, with musicians, hired mourners and, for the elite, the ancestral masks; for the prominent, a speech from the Rostra; cremation on a pyre or interment; collection of the bones and their placing in the tomb; a period during which the household was ritually polluted, ending with a sacrifice on the ninth day and a meal. This sequence is a composite. Individual elements are attested by different authors at different dates, and no single ancient source runs through the whole of it as a procedure.

The practical work was contracted out. The Puteoli regulation shows a licensed undertaker with a fixed workforce, required to be available and priced by service, and at Rome the trade was associated with the goddess Libitina. The same Puteoli regulation places residence provisions on the contractor's workforce, whose precise terms are disputed; they are usually read as reflecting the polluting character of corpse-handling, and that reading, together with later antiquarian statement, is the basis for the general claim that undertakers were held at a distance. No excavated undertaker's establishment has been identified. At the other end of the scale the state or the family funded a public funeral for the eminent. For the poorest, Roman antiquarian writing names puticuli on the Esquiline and Horace describes that ground's conversion into gardens; nineteenth-century excavation there reported pits of human remains, whose identification as mass graves of the poor is contested — see the disputes below.

Commemoration was calendrical. From 13 to 21 February came the days of the parents, ending on the 21st in the Feralia, followed on the 22nd by a family meal, and in May came three separate days for the restless dead. The dates belong to the fixed festival calendar and are transmitted by the calendrical tradition, inscribed and later; which surviving stone preserves which entry has not been checked here. Observance meant going to the tomb with modest offerings — Ovid names wreaths, grain, salt, bread soaked in wine, violets — and, where the tomb was equipped for it, eating there. The Rosalia endowments show the same pattern converted into a funded institution with a named beneficiary and an enforceable obligation.

Cost is documented at both ends and nowhere in the middle. The Lanuvium rules give an actual funeral payment and the subscription that financed it. The Puteoli contract implies a published price list. Sumptuary restriction going back to the Twelve Tables, and repeated later, indicates that elite funerals were expensive enough to be worth legislating against. But no household accounts survive, and we cannot say what a typical funeral cost anyone.