Public Funerals and Private Grave: the Death Paradox in Ancient Rome
Funérailles publiques et sépulture privée: le paradoxe de la mort dans l'ancienne Rome
Résumé
In Roman classical Antiquity, rites of passage about death implied an inevitable interaction with public places. At the moment of the funeral, the pompa funebris marched across the city to the forum, and the laudatio-famous discourse delivered in honor of the deceased in front of the citizens-used to be a longstanding element of mores maiorum. These rituals often remained part of a statement and legitimization of the nobilitas power, but they could also be an opportunity for the crowd (populus) to burst into a violent demonstration against the aristocratic order. Despite the public and collective dimension of the funeral ritual, dead bodies could not, with very few exceptions, be buried freely in public land. However, Law was not an exact science, based on rigid deductions, in these cases. Violators of this prohibition were not subject to severe repression for two reasons. On one hand, Roman jurists tried to consider the notion of dolus in their decisions. As a consequence, the absence of fraud could sometimes lead to the absolution of the guilty. On the other hand, these illegal burials still showed the pietas of those who had completed the last respects to a corpse, because Roman funerary ideology, including causa religiosis and humanitas, commanded not to produce insepulti.
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