Modern-day funerals in the Western world tend to be sober, muted gatherings.
Mourners dress in black and pay their final respects at a funeral, burial, or memorial service. This muted funerary tradition was certainly not the case in ancient Rome. Funerals were, particularly for elite families, public spectacles involving hired actors, singers, and even funeral games!
But what exactly happened at a funeral, and who performed which rituals, largely depended on who the deceased was: man, woman, commoner, or member of the elite. Throughout the funerary process in the late Roman republic, gender and class played an important role in how a funeral was carried out, from the mourning time to the funeral procession to the burial or cremation.
The Body
For elite families, the death of a family member meant an extended mourning period. During this time, the body would lie in the home for days in preparation for the funeral. For those from common families or lower social backgrounds, a burial could happen less than a day after death, and for slaves, burials included very few ceremonies.
For many parts of Roman funerals, women played a critical role—but that was because female citizens were viewed as inferior to their male counterparts. In ancient Rome, when a person died, their body was considered “ritually unclean.” This meant that most male Roman citizens did not touch a corpse. Instead, female relatives and undertakers handled the care of a body before the funeral, which included washing the body and preparing it for the funeral bier, which was placed on the ground.
The Burial
Ancient Roman funerals, for the elite, would entail the funeral procession, including family and friends, and actors would be hired to impersonate the deceased and the family’s ancestors. This was followed by a eulogy, a funerary sacrifice, the cremation or interment and burial of the ashes or body, and a funerary feast days later. Men would wear dark-colored togas to signify mourning, while women would wear unbelted tunics. For those from less elite families, many of these steps were shortened or removed, since the ritual could take as little as a few hours for the lower classes.
Women led much of the mourning process: female relatives would begin lamenting the death of a relative by wailing and, at times, self-mutilating by beating their breasts and scratching their faces until they bled, throughout the mourning period and during the funeral. It was considered undignified for men to show such displays of grief.
Roman women played a professional as well as a personal role in the grieving rituals around funerals. Women known as the praeficae were hired to perform the wailing, lamentation, and also to sing the nenia, a type of funeral chant praising the deceased. While the praeficae remain a somewhat mysterious group of women to us today, we know that many lived near the temple of Libitina, the funerary goddess.
The praeficae were not regarded as respectable, upper-class women because they sang the praise of others, which Romans thought meant you lacked personal virtue, and because they were paid to display over-the-top mourning by self-mutilating.
“Praeficae helped professionalize public mourning, but they had low status,” explained Shelby Brown, educational specialist and classcist based at the Getty Villa. “They were hired performers who helped rich families show off with excessive mourning, so they were criticised.”
Despite the lack of prestige, the praeficae played a leading, critical role in Roman funerals, often at the head of the funerary procession.
The Eulogy (and Games)
While it was frowned upon for men to take part in the intense, performed parts of grieving and mourning, only male family members could give the funeral eulogy, or the laudatio funebris, which was reserved for members of the upper class and could be a politically significant speech.
While the eulogy was usually reserved for men, occasionally women received the funerary oration. The first noted eulogy for a Roman woman was likely for Popilia, a distant relative of Julius Caesar, in 100 BCE. A few decades later, in 68 BCE, Caesar delivered a funeral eulogy for his aunt Julia in which he used his family ties to highlight his own lineage and claim to political power, which arguably aided in launching his political career.
At the funerals of elite citizens, funeral games (ludi funebres) were celebrated, a tradition that went back to the ancient Greeks and often involved gladiator fights to honor the dead. These games were sometimes criticized in the Republican era for their lavish costs, but were more commonplace in the Imperial era.
Mourning the Young
The treatment of child and infant death in ancient Rome might seem quite different from our contemporary rituals, particularly as it was a much more common phenomenon. Days-old infants were not considered ritually unclean and, unlike older children and adults, and could be buried anywhere in the city. Their deaths were also less likely to be grieved in the same intense, ritualistic manner as those of adults. However, as the kline monument of a young girl above indicates, young children were loved dearly by their families and were also paid homage and given the appropriate funerary rituals—especially when the family could afford to do so.
Then, as now, funerary traditions were meant to give loved ones the time and space to mourn the death of a family member or friend. Today’s funerary practices in the Western world are fairly removed from the ancient Romans’ public, pronounced rituals of grief. The heart of these really different traditions and rituals, however—to celebrate and honor the loss and life of a loved one—is not so far from our modern-day sentiments.
