Memory and Mourning: Studies on Roman Death

This book explores the themes of memory and mourning from the Roman deathbed to the Roman cemetery, drawing subject matter from the literature, art, and archaeology of ancient Rome. It brings together scholarship on varied aspects of Roman death, investigating connections between ancient poetry, history and oratory and placing these alongside archaeological and textual evidence for Roman funerary and commemorative rituals. A series of case studies centred on individual authors and/or specific aspects of ritual behaviour, traces the story of Roman death: how the inhabitants of the Roman world confronted their mortality, disposed of the dead, remembered the dead and praised the dead, thereby enhancing our understanding of Roman society.

Table of Contents

Introduction (Valerie M. Hope)
1. ‘Goodbye Livia’: Dying in the Roman Home (David Noy)
2. Memory and Materiality: Re-embodying the Roman Funeral (Emma-Jayne Graham)
3. Gender and Roman Funeral Ritual (Darja Šterbenc Erker)
4. Death Ritual and Burial Practice in the Latin Love Elegists (Luke B. T. Houghton)
5. ‘The sole glory of death’: Dying and Commemoration in Dionysius of Halicarnassus (Clemence Schultze)
6. ‘Causa ante mortua est quam tu natus es’: Aspects of the Funeral in Cicero’s Pro Rabirio Perduellionis Reo (Eleanor Brooke)
7. Bad Deaths, Better Memories (Janet Huskinson)
8. ‘The mourning was very good’. Liberation and Liberality in Roman Funerary Commemoration (Maureen Carroll)
9. Poetic Monuments: Grief and Consolation in Statius Silvae 3.3 (Jean-Michel Hulls)
10. Remembering to Mourn: Personal Mementos of the Dead in Ancient Rome (Valerie M. Hope)

Rather than organize the volume by the material or methodology, the editors have innovatively arranged the chapters to follow the progression of dying from the deathbed to the funeral to the commemoration of the dead... this volumes main value as a whole is in the way it presents serially the social responses to death in Roman society as well as a multiplicity of ways to understand the rituals around death as active components in shaping memory.' (Edward M. Schoolman Bryn Mawr Classical Review)

"...this is a valuable contribution to the field of Roman death." (A.C.L. Emmerson Journal of Roman Archaeology, 25 (2012))