Romans did not like doing the hands-on work of assigning human remains to a final resting place any more than the modern Americans or Europeans do. It was either too heart-breaking, if it was the body of a loved one, or considered too creepy for most people. Thus, Romans had an entire class of funeral workers, called libitinarii, to dispose of the dead appropriately.
Working with dead bodies was considered a disreputable profession in Rome, and those who did is were severely stigmatized. The libitinarii were tainted by their association with the dead and the bad luck it might bring. While they weren’t as despised as the infamia, such as prostitutes and actors, they were on par with tanners, night watchmen, and other low-status workers in the proletariat. You certainly wouldn’t want one of your children marrying one of the libitinarii if you could prevent it, unless you were already from one of the libitinarii families. Because the funeral workers were socially isolated, the job became almost a hereditary caste system, with children of libitinarii growing up to inherit their parents’ profession, and only able to find a spouse who had been born into the libitinarii as well.
The word libitinarii itself can be loosely translated to mean “undertakers”, but there were several specialist jobs in the ranks of the libitinarii, which designated status within the overall low-ranking group. The least despised of the libitinarii was a dissignator, the man who directed and organized the funeral procession of the deceased. If you asked (and gave him a suitable tip), he would deal with the libitinarii even further down the social hierarchy for you, allowing you to escape the unpleasantness of associating with your inferiors.
Who the dissignator negotiated with on your behalf depended on the way you wished to honor your loved one. Although touching and preparing the dead was ‘icky’ and unlucky, the deceased was usually (and counterintuitively) ‘laid out’ in his or her own home, among the bereaved family members. It was the job of the libitinarii to dress the corpse in his or her best clothes, and to place the deceased on a couch or bed with their feet facing the open front door (so the spirit would not be trapped or get lost in the house). Sometimes, depending on the family’s wishes (and, I suspect, on how hot the weather was), the couch or bed was decorated with flowers and sweet-smelling plants. Undertakers would also place a small coin (often called Charon’s obol) in the mouth of the departed, in order to pay the ferryman for a ride across the River Styx into Hades’ domain.
Most people were not embalmed, since it was thought to be disrespectful or barbaric to tamper with a dead body, but neither did family and friends want the extra trouble of grieving by a corpse that looked dead. It was therefore the job of the pollinctores to powder the corpse’s faces to disguise any discoloration or signs of decay.
Once the corpse was made to look presentable, the funeral was usually held soon afterwards. If the funeral was to be a public one, friends and well-wishers were notified of the date it would be held. If it were a private one, no such announcements were made. Either way, vespillones – the men who would carry the corpse on a litter (or later in coffin in later Imperial times) – were summoned to bear the body during the funeral procession. Ancient Romans always had their funeral processions at night, but by the time the Republic anyone who could afford even a small procession held the funeral during daylight hours.
The grieving family and friends of the deceased walked behind the litter bearing the body, while the funeral workers made up the bulk of professional mourners at the front of the procession. Actors wearing imagines, the wax or painted wooden masks representing the forefathers of the decedent, walked at the head of the line, followed by musicians and mimes playing dirges and indicating the great sorrow the family felt (but which was unseemly for them to express outside the home).
Just in front of the bier came the only kind of female libitinarii – the praeficae — the women whose job it was to wail and cry in ostentatious grief for the deceased. The women of the deceased’s household were forbidden by custom to display their lamentations, having to make do with eschewing veils and putting ashes in their hair to dull it, so the praeficae were paid to show all the pain the women were theoretically feeling. If paid enough, the professional mourners would tear their clothes and scratch at their own faces and breasts to indicate the level of bereavement that was felt by the family.
The entire procession would walk to the necropolis outside the ritual walls of the city, where the body would either be cremated or interred. Upper-class Romans, and those who aspired to be upper-class, preferred their bodies to be cremated on a pyre until well into the 2nd century. This required the services of the ustores, the men who collected wood for the pyre and burned the body. The pyre was constructed with four equal sides, and acted as an altar as well as a cremation site. While the body was burning, the bereaved would make a sacrifice to the underworld deities to make sure the departed would be welcomed into the lands of dead. Prior to the rise of Imperial Rome, the proper sacrifice was a sow, being sacred to the goddess Ceres, but after the reign of Emperor Augustus a bull or a lamb was also commonly used. A part of the sacrificial animal was burned on the pyre/altar, to go with the deceased, while the rest was returned home for use in the later funeral feast. Libations, offerings of food to the dead, were often put on the pyre to be burned as well.
When the funeral pyre had burned down, libations of wine were poured on the embers. The wine-soaked embers, bones, and ashes of the deceased were gathered carefully together by the closest family members and placed into a burial urn – preferably one suitable to departed’s former position in life. Once the urn was filled, “the persons present were thrice sprinkled by a priest with pure water from a branch of olive or laurel for the purpose of purification … after which they were dismissed … by the solemn word Ilicet, that is, ire licet [and] bid farewell to the deceased by pronouncing the word vale.” Afterwards, the grieving friends and family returned home. Those who were returning to the house where the body had been laid out “underwent a further purification called suffitio, which consisted in being sprinkled with water and stepping over a fire.” The chief benefactor of the decedent’s will would also act as the everriator, and sweep the threshold of the house clean with a ritual broom.
The urn containing the deceased’s ashes would be placed in a family tomb, or be inhumed at the necropolis, where its place of interment would be marked by an inscribed tombstone of some sort. Fossores, or grave diggers, were the men who were hired to excavate the hole necessary to bury the urn. By the 3rd century, the fossores were digging graves for unburned bodies enclosed in coffins or sepulcher more often than not.
Nine days after a person’s death (or nine days after the funeral; there is some debate as to timing), the family held the novendialis. This involved another animal sacrifice, and a funeral feast in honor of the deceased. The rites also included visiting the place off interment to offer more libations to diis manibus – the manes, or spirits of the dead – whom their loved one had joined. Although the family was doubtlessly still sad, the novendialis signaled the end of the full mourning period, and the bereaved to resume normal dress and grooming.
After the funeral, there was no more need for the libitinarii, and everyone would hope that many years would elapse before the family had to deal with the loathed funeral workers again. The fact that their jobs, however despised, could make the libitinarii relatively wealthy was also held against them, “since the undertaker gained profit from the grief, misfortune, and loss of others.” No one wanted to see or speak to an libitinarii until there was absolutely no other choice in the matter.