Funeral Rites
Funeral rites took place at home and at the place of burial, which was located outside the city to avoid the pollution of the living. The funeral procession (pompa funebris) transited the distance between the two.
A professional guild (collegium) of musicians specialized in funeral music. Horace mentions the tuba and the cornu, two bronze trumpet-like instruments, at funerals.
Read more about this topic: Roman Funerals And Burial
Famous quotes containing the words funeral and/or rites:
“I make it a kind of pious rule to go to every funeral to which I am invited, both as I wish to pay a proper respect to the dead, unless their characters have been bad, and as I would wish to have the funeral of my own near relations or of myself well attended.”
—James Boswell (1740–1795)
“The instincts of merry England lingered on here with exceptional vitality, and the symbolic customs which tradition has attached to each season of the year were yet a reality on Egdon. Indeed, the impulses of all such outlandish hamlets are pagan still: in these spots homage to nature, self-adoration, frantic gaieties, fragments of Teutonic rites to divinities whose names are forgotten, seem in some way or other to have survived mediaeval doctrine.”
—Thomas Hardy (1840–1928)