War was the most dramatic feature of a Roman’s life, but it did not play so absorbing a role as in the pages of Rome’s historians. Perhaps even more than with us his existence centered about his family and his home. News reached him when it was old, so that his passions could not be stirred every day by the gathered turmoil of the world. The great events of his career were not politics and war, but anxious births, festal marriages, and somber deaths.
Old age was not then the abandoned desolation that so often darkens it in an individualistic age. The young never questioned their duty to care for the old; the old remained to the end the first consideration and the last authority; and after their death their graves were honored as long as a male descendant survived. Funerals were as elaborate as weddings. The procession was led by a hired band of wailing women, whose organized hysteria was cramped by a law of the Twelve Tables71 forbidding them to tear out their hair. Then came the flute players, limited by a like Solonic law to ten; then some dancers, one of whom impersonated the dead. Then followed in strange parade actors wearing the death masks, or waxen images, of those ancestors of the corpse who had held some magistracy. The deceased came next, in splendor rivaling a triumph, clothed in the full regalia of the highest office he had held, comfortable in a bier overspread with purple and gold-embroidered coverlets, and surrounded by the weapons and armor of the enemies he had slain. Behind him came the dead man’s sons, dressed and veiled in black, his daughters unveiled, his relatives, clansmen, friends, clients, and freedmen. In the Forum the procession stopped, and a son or kinsman pronounced a eulogy. Life was worth living, if only for such a funeral.
In the early centuries Rome’s dead had been cremated; now, usually, they were buried, though some obstinate conservatives preferred combustion. In either case, the remains were placed in a tomb that became an altar of worship upon which pious descendants periodically placed some flowers and a little food. Here, as in Greece and the Far East, the stability of morals and society was secured by the worship of ancestors and by the belief that somewhere their spirits survived and watched. If they were very great and good, the dead, in Hellenized Roman mythology, passed to the Elysian Fields, or the Islands of the Blessed; nearly all, however, descended into the earth, to the shadowy realm of Orcus and Pluto. Pluto, the Roman form of the Greek god Hades, was armed with a mallet to stun the dead; Orcus (our ogre) was the monster who then devoured the corpse. Because Pluto was the most exalted of the underground deities, and because the earth was the ultimate source of wealth and often the repository of accumulated food and goods, he was worshiped also as the god of riches and plutocrats; and his wife Proserpina—the strayed daughter of Ceres—became the goddess of the germinating corn. Sometimes the Roman Hell was conceived as a place of punishment;72 in most cases it was pictured as the abode of half-formless shades that had been men, not distinguished from one another by reward or punishment, but all equally suffering eternal darkness and final anonymity. There at last, said Lucian, one would find democracy.73
I Hence the words augurs—bird carriers (aves-gero)— and auspices—bird inspection (aves-spicio). Primitive man may actually have learned to forecast weather through the movements of birds.
II Fasti consulares, libri magistratuum, annales maximi, fasti calendares.
III Some Roman measures: a modius was approximately a peck; a foot was 11 5/8 English inches; 5 Roman feet made a pace (passus); 1000 paces made a mile (milia passuum) of 1619 English yards; a iugerum was about 2/3 of an acre. Twelve ounces (unciae) made a pound.
IV In northern Italy, about 250 B.C., a bushel of wheat cost half a denarius (thirty cents); bed and board at an inn cost half an as (three cents) a day; 58 in Delos, in the second century B.C.., a house of medium type rented for four denarii ($2.40) a month; in Rome, A.D. 50, a cup and saucer cost half an as (three cents).59