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Funeral Processions in Ancient Rome

By: seo expert

Funerals provided an especially important occasion for such families to display the imagines of officeholders in their past, and to proclaim their versions of the family history. The more public stages of the funeral began at the house of the deceased, where the body had lain in state. From the house decked with signs of mourning a funeral procession with relatives, friends, musicians, dancers, and professional mourners, made its way to the Forum. There, a prominent male member of the family, a son if one was available, delivered a funeral speech or laudatio to the assembled citizens, describing the offices that the dead noble had held and the memorable feats he had accomplished. According to Polybius , who witnessed these funerals in the middle of the second century, actors riding in chariots actually wore the family’s imagines in the procession, with each carrying the symbols of the offices held by the man whose imago he wore. In the Forum, the actors sat on the ivory chairs of officeholders placed around the speaker’s platform. Then, after the speaker had finished praising the deceased, he would proceed to list the offices and praise the accomplishments of each of the men whose imagines were displayed around him.

Like other public ceremonies, these funerals became more elaborate over time. From the middle of the third century, combats between pairs of gladiators also formed part of the proceedings. The first known gladiatorial games were staged during the funeral of Decimus Junius Brutus in 264; by the end of the third century, the sons of Marcus Aemilius Lepidus would put on combats with twenty two pairs of gladiators. In addition, leading families sought to expand the number of public funerals they could stage. At first, such funerals were restricted to officeholders, but families eventually began to stage them for male members who had held no office and for women of the family; both would provide occasions for the display of ancestral virtues. It also became the practice for wives to bring the imagines of their ancestors to their husbands’ houses, adding to the display.

Wars with Carthage called Punic from the Latin adjective punicus or Phoenician dominate Roman history in the middle and late third century. Carthage was the most powerful of the cities that had emerged from the Phoenician colonization of the ninth through sixth centuries.Carthage came to control, directly or indirectly, a considerable territory. In North Africa, the Carthaginians and other Punic cities nearby held the richest parts of modern Tunisia. By one means or another, the city of Carthage and members of its elite also exploited subordinate communities of their territory’s original population. By the end of the fourth century, the Carthaginians controlled an area almost equivalent to Latium and Campania combined, although they restricted their citizenship much more than did the Romans. Still farther away, Carthage exercised some leadership, if only intermittently, over rulers of various tribes and confederacies; the Numidians, in modern Algeria, were the most important.
Carthage also expanded its power and influence by sea. From the end of the seventh century, the Phoenician settlements of western Sicily, Sardinia, and the Balearic Islands were subordinate to Carthage in some way. By the end of the sixth century, the Carthaginians controlled the coasts of Sardinia, where they established colonies of their own and controlled mines in the interior. In the sixth, fifth, and fourth centuries, Carthaginian armies fought, with varying degrees of success, against the Greek cities of Sicily. Carthage also had contacts, if sometimes distant and indirect, with cities in Italy. As part of their struggles with the Sicilian Greeks and to protect their trade, the Carthaginians concluded treaties with some central Italian communities, including Rome. The first of these Roman Carthaginian agreements was probably made as early as c. 500, and others followed, although the precise number made thereafter is uncertain.

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