Building a Roman Funeral Pyre

Abstract

Until the second century A.D., the bodies of most people who died at Rome and in the western provinces of the Empire ended up on a funeral pyre, to be reduced to ashes which would be placed in a grave. The practical arrangements for this process have attracted some attention from archaeologists but virtually none from ancient historians. In this paper I shall try to combine literary and archaeological evidence to reconstruct how the pyre was prepared. I hope that this will provide a fuller background than currently exists for understanding the numerous brief references which can be found in Roman literature and the two surviving representations of a pyre (other than an emperor's) in Roman art. Cremation had different traditions in different areas, e.g. as an elite practice in parts of Gaul, even if ultimately it ‘may have been thought of as a sign of allegiance to Rome.’ There clearly were local differences, not just between provinces but between places quite close together, as well as changes over time, but many of the rites of cremation appear to have been similar throughout the Western Roman Empire, illustrating what Morris calls ‘a massive cultural homogenisation of the Roman world at a time when political and economic regionalism was increasing’.