Urban cemeteries

Cemeteries laid out along the roads leading into and out of settlements were filled with tombs that kept the memoria of the deceased alive. Not only the grave epitaphs, but also portraits and relief depictions were chosen by the deceased and their families and designed to commemorate the dead, their lives and their social status within society. The funerary practice of stone grave monuments, however, was unknown in the pre-Roman Germanic

24 EartyJirst-ceniurygravestone of P. Clodius of thefirst legion. Courtesy Rheinisches Landesmuseutn Bonn

And Celtic North-West. The first stone funerary monuments erected in the newly conquered German provinces were those of Roman military personnel, both a«ive and retired, as well as Roman merchants from various parts of the Empire (24). In the Roman West, the custom of erecting stone tombs of various types spread in the first century AD from northern Italy and the Romanised province of Gallia Narbonensis. The general adoption of this Roman funerary practice by the native population can be understood as the result of an emulative process of expressing status. On the middle and upper Rhine, the native Celtic population adopted the custom fairly early in the first century AD, as a number of tombs and funerary statues around Mainz indicates (2S), but, on the lower Rhine, it was not until the second century that the local population embraced the custom. Apparently they did not erect permanent grave markers before this time.

The most sumptuous of the monuments, so-called tower tombs, were designed to display status and social standing of leading families in a conspicuous manner. These include the tomb of the aristocratic lulii in Glanum, that of the merchant nouveau riche Secundinii at Igel near Trier, and the tomb of the wealthy legionary veteran Lucius Poblicius and his family (colour plate 6) in pre-colonial Cologne. Two of the earliest tomb monuments of the first decades of the first century AD north-east of Avenches at the ‘en Chaplix’ site were heavily decorated with sculptures of figures out of the pages of Graeco-Roman mythology, such as Bacchus, nereids and

Tritons, and with portrait statues of the deceased. The possession of Roman citizenship was an honour and distinction that is often highlighted in these monuments. Not only the socially prominent, but also craftsmen, traders, teachers and slaves preserved their

Memories in the form of built tombs or carved grave markers.

Benefaction and generosity were often publicised by the wealthy who purchased a burial plot and a carved grave stone for valued slaves who had died in their possession. The name of the dead slave, for example Severina, the wet-nurse, in Cologne (colour plate 7) or the ten-year-old Peregrinus in Speyer, and that of the benefactor appeared in the grave epitaph. Civic identity, professional achievement, public and private careers were expressed in a variety of ways. The tombs reveal to us the attitudes, aspirations and ideologies of a considerable body of citizens and non-citizens in Roman tovsms.

The cemeteries in this sense represent a visual cross-section through a collective of inhabitants who already possessed or came to internalise Roman urban, social and cultural values.

The cemeteries as part of the urban fabric also reveal changes in economic and social structures.

25 Crauestone of the skipper Blussus and his wife Menimanefrom Mainz-Weisenau, cAD 50. Courtesy Landesmuseum Mainz

Where the cemeteries are well researched, it is apparent that there was a shift in location from the early to late Roman periods. The earliest cemeteries south, west and north of

Cologne were laid out at a distance of between c.320 and 430 yards (300-400m) from the city wall. In the suburbs closest to the city were residential districts and industrial zones. By the late third century, however, these had been abandoned and the land was redeveloped as burial sites so that the cemeteries had a more immediate relationship to the city. At most cemeteries outside Roman tovms the burials offer a genuine cross-section through many levels of society, with the most ostentatious monuments directly fronting the streets. At some sites, however, there are indications that certain cemeteries were the preferred burial sites of the wealthy and influential. This appears to have been the case at Avenches where, in the cemetery outside the west gate, primarily the city’s magistrates, merchants and bankers found their last place of rest. Likewise, one of the four known cemeteries at Besangon, that at the Chamars site, was richer than the others and it included chamber tombs with opulent grave goods and a circular monument over 300ft (91m) in diameter which may have been funerary in function. By the same token, the south-east cemetery at Langres had a relatively high proportion of inscribed gravestones of slaves and freedmen as well as monuments to oriental gods frequently venerated by this sector of society. This particular cemetery may have been a communal burial ground, but probably not exclusively for this group of people.