Funerary practices from the Roman world have left rich material evidence in the form of cemeteries, monuments (including portraits), grave offerings, and actual skeletons (Pearce, Millett, and Struck 2001; Morris 1992). As disposal of human remains was forbidden inside cities, tombs clustered along the roads into a city, proclaiming the social hierarchy in death as in life, and seeking further commemoration through viewing and reading (usually aloud) by passers-by (Purcell 1987). In the countryside, tomb monuments variously set boundaries, controlled lines of view, and confirmed the authority of the owners of country estates. While it is clear that funerary monuments and finds have the potential to reveal much about Roman society, their interpretation is not straightforward. Different groups or social classes often have distinctive customs; conversely, conventions of austerity may blur social differences. Moreover, graves and funerary display depict how a person or his survivors wanted to be seen.
A great deal of funerary art survives from the monuments, tombstones, and sarcophagi of the Roman world. Commemorative portraits appeared as busts, statues, relief panels, or paintings (Kleiner 1992). As discussed above for imperial portraits, there are different elements involved in reading these images. Some were placed inside the tomb, to be seen by family members and mourners at subsequent funerals and religious occasions. An example is the soulful Fayum portraits painted in wax and placed over the faces of mummies. Likenesses placed on the outside of the tomb or stele proclaimed the accomplishments or stature of the deceased to a wider audience. The friezes showing the stages of industrial baking on the famous tomb of the baker Eurysaces outside the Porta Maggiore at Rome emphasized not only the success and scale of his enterprise, but also perhaps the work ethic that had made his business a success (Petersen 2003). A full-length togate portrait of the patron emphasizes his citizenship. This unique tomb is strategically placed at a convergence of two roads entering Rome, maximizing its visibility, and its sheer size rivals adjacent aristocratic ones.
Greco-Roman mythology provided another avenue of self-representation on tombs of the Roman period. This could be quite literal, as in the case of portraits depicting the deceased in the guise of divinities such as Venus or Hercules (Wrede 1981; Kleiner 1992). In the early empire, this format seems to have been most widely employed by slaves and freedmen and appears especially in reliefs on tombstones. In the second century, this practice seems to have spread more widely in society and appears in sculpture in the round and sarcophagi as well as reliefs. Such self-divinization likely imitates imperial identifications with different divinities. Another form of funerary art was the sarcophagus. Many sarcophagi were prepared with the heads on the major figure(s) left unfinished so that a portrait head could be added later for the patron. Some showed scenes of the deceased in significant activities such as reading scrolls, hunting, or fighting. Married couples represented the harmony of their union through clasping one another’s right hand. Mythological scenes, many evidently distributed through pattern-books, represented allegories for death or rescue from it through mythologization.
Let us move from the monument to the grave within or below it. Funerary ritual, including such factors as the method of disposal (cremation or inhumation), the positioning of the body, its compass orientation, and the offerings left with it, has the potential to reveal the varying treatment of different groups in society (by age, sex, or class) or the ethnic affiliation of different groups in cemeteries (Figure 4.5). Infants and children are sometimes treated differently from adults or even buried in separate graveyards or inside homes. This differential treatment evidently reflects their liminal status in society and the family (Norman 2003). Infants generally seem underrepresented in large cemeteries compared to the high infant mortality one might expect in a pre-industrial society. This too sharpens the suspicion that they could be buried in very different circumstances. Differential treatment of children leads to speculation about their standing in an era of high infant mortality and provides grist to debates about the extent of deliberate ‘‘exposure’’ of unwanted children.
Grave goods such as jewelry, ceramics, lamps, coins, or terracotta figurines can reveal aspects of religion or identity, although elements such as the images on lamps should not be over-interpreted. Shoes in graves may be gifts to aid the dead on their journey, but elaborate patterns on the soles seem to provide additional protective or cosmic symbolism (van Driel-Murray 1999). Food offerings for the dead were also more susceptible to influence from Roman or Mediterranean patterns in some regions than others (Stirling 2004). Graves in central France, for instance, show more continuity with Iron Age practices than do those of southern France (Bouby and Marinval 2004).
A final form of evidence in graves is, of course, the skeletons themselves. Aspects of how the corpses have been treated (such as orientation, or the choice of inhumation vs. cremation) reflect cultural choices at the time of death. Other data, both about living conditions and causes of death, remain in the bones themselves. A cluster of some 200 bodies excavated in the 1980s in the boathouses and beach of Herculaneum reveal important data about the population of the town and about the circumstances of individuals. Two separate studies of these bones have found somewhat different results (Bisel and Bisel 2002; Capasso 2001). These people ate a diet heavy
Figure 4.5 Infant buried in amphora at Leptiminus (Tunisia). Amphoras were divided in half to create coffins for the young. This burial comes from a cemetery containing children and adults. Photo: Leptiminus Archaeological Project, by permission
In vegetables and seafood and stressed their skeletons through physical labor beginning in childhood. Certain particular anomalies in the male skeletons of the group are associated with fishing activities, such as rowing a boat with one oar and holding nets in the teeth (Capasso 2001). Children as well showed stresses and anomalies indicative of physical labor. An oddity with the bodies from the Herculaneum boathouse, as with the skeletons recovered at Pompeii (admittedly collected and preserved somewhat haphazardly), is the small number of children within the group (Lazer 1997). Among victims of catastrophe we might expect to find children proportionally or even over-represented. As for causes of death, the different positioning and distribution of burned areas between the bodies on the beach as opposed to the boathouse shows that the bodies on the beach suffered much greater exposure to burning gases, while falling debris and inhalation of fine ash were more deadly for those in the boathouse (Capasso 2000).
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