Urban and suburban In Rome, burial places were "always limited and frequently contested". The legislation that forbade almost all burial within the ritual boundaries of Roman cities and towns led to the development of necropolises alongside extramural roads, veritable "cities of the dead", with their own main and access roads, water supplies and prime development sites for grand monuments or mausolea. Amenities for visitors included rooms for family dining, kitchens and kitchen gardens. There was no zoning as such; the burial consecrated the ground, not vice versa, and the land beyond each tomb's perimeter was profane, open to public access. Plots could be rented or bought, with or without user-ready or customised tombs. The great cemetery of
Isola Sacra and the tombs that line both sides of the
Via Appia Antica offer notable examples of roadside cemeteries. In the city of Rome, tombs also lined both embankments of the Tiber, a major waterway whose towpaths and wharves were in near-constant use. Tombs were still being built there in the Imperial era, despite the hindrances they must have posed to businesses at docks and wharves, and the planning, building and maintenance of riverine roadways, bridges and aqueducts. Rome was virtually encircled by its dead. of Aurelius Hermia and his wife Aurelia Philematum,
former slaves who married after their manumission, 80 BC, from a tomb along the
Via Nomentana in Rome Cemeteries, tombs and their dead were protected by religious and civil laws and interdicts. A place used for burial was a
locus religiosus; it belonged to the Manes gods because a body was buried there, or found there. Its disturbance was thought to cause pain and discomfort to the deceased, whether senator or slave. The discovery of any previously unknown interment on profane (public or private) land created an immediate encumbrance to its further use; it had revealed itself as a
locus religiosus, and remained so unless the pontifs agreed to revoke its status and remove the body or bones. Death by lightning strike was thought a clear statement by
Jupiter that the place and the victim belonged to him; the place was marked out accordingly, and the victim buried, though not with "ordinary rites". Cicero records a major pontifical decision that any grave in publicly owned land was unlawful, and therefore could not be treated as a
locus religiosus. The decision paved the way for a mass exhumation of cemetery land just outside Rome's
Colline Gate, and its eventual re-use as public land. At more or less the same time, cremation hearths (ustrina) and rubbish dumping were banned from the Esquiline and for 2 miles beyond the city wall. Cicero thought that all this had to do with minimising the risk of fires; that was a factor, but the Esquiline's odour was a more immediate and notorious public nuisance. Augustus' ally
Maecenas covered the site with 25 feet depth of soil, built himself a luxury urban villa there and opened its extensive gardens to the public, all at his own expense; this earned him much credit as a public benefactor. Various funerary structures built on Rome's outskirts by wealthy patrons around this time have been suggested as attempts to serve the funeral needs of the very poor. They included extensive
columbaria with built-in, efficient mass-crematoria. In the Imperial era, cremation and tomb provision were displays of patronage; for example, the entirely underground
columbaria with spaces for freedmen of the
Julio-Claudian house, at the Vigna Colina site. , in use from the 3rd century BC to the 1st century AD, then abandoned. Its fabric was incorporated into the
Aurelian walls. Disturbance or damage to tombs, memorials and lawfully interred human remains carried substantial penalties – malicious damage was a capital offence, though detection and punishment or compensation rather depended on whose remains, tombs, or memorials were involved, and who was applying or ignoring the law. The
Via Basiliano's necropolis of 545 graves, jammed together and even overlapping, provides the evidence that violation of burial law was a "sore fact of life". Memorial stones have been found incorporated into houses, reused to create monuments to completely unrelated persons, and recycled in official buildings. In Puteoli, the municipality fined anyone who damaged the tomb of a
decurion (a local, junior magistrate) 20,000 sestercii. Offenders could be prosecuted in civil courts. Some tomb inscriptions offer a cash reward to anyone who reported offenders to the civil authorities. Some memorials list those entitled to be placed there; some name persons or "alien clans" not entitled to use of the tomb. Some developers seem to have simply removed or ignored burial markers. Burial plots could be divided, subdivided and sold on, in parts or as a whole, or rented out to help cover the cost of maintenance; profits could be raised from the land by any appropriate means, such as sale of flowers from tomb gardens, but must only be used to repair, improve or maintain the site or its monuments, and not to "profit from death". There is evidence of severe near-contemporary encroachments, theft of stones and unrepaired damage to tombs, grave markers and epitaphs. Tombs could be lawfully moved – a common result of frequent flooding of cemeteries – after exemption by the
pontifices, but they could also gradually decay through neglect, and be lost. Families could move away, or die out. In Pompeii, a legible memorial stone was discovered face-down, reshaped to make seating for a public latrine. Until the creation of Christian cemeteries at intramural sites of Christian churches and martyrdoms, almost all cemeteries were extramural. John Bodel found that three cemeteries of the Imperial era each had a "peak life" of between 150 and 200 years intensive use, involving perhaps 4 or 5 generations, before they were filled, and their land was repurposed. As cities and towns expanded beyond their original legal and ritual boundaries, formerly intramural cemeteries had to be redefined as "outside the city" with deeds and markers, or their burials moved, releasing much-needed land for public or private use. Among Rome's most disruptive and obtrusive building projects were its aqueducts, whose planning and construction involved extreme care in legal negotiation with landowners and landusers, and avoidance of damage, if possible, to tombs, graves, monuments, chapels and shrines. The emperor
Aurelian's expansion of Rome's walled areas skirted these issues by incorporating sacred and religious places into the fabric of his new walls; some strictly unlawful destruction, however, would have been inevitable, and this was officially recognised and compensated. Where private and public interests collided, the law provided for restitution of loss to private parties, but not prevention. By the 2nd century BC, the monumental tombs of aristocrats were a part of the rural and suburban villa landscape, surrounded by tombs of lesser family members, outnumbered by the humbler tombs of the bailiffs, commoner-tenants, and slaves who ran the place. Far from the main roads between towns and cities, the graves of field-workers occupied poor ground not worth the planting or grazing; landowners could offer burial space on their own property for whoever they wished, and wherever they pleased; graves were sacred no matter where. In his capacity as a land surveyor,
Siculus Flaccus found that grave markers at the edge of estates were easily mistaken for boundary markers (
cippi). Many of the elite chose burial among their ancestors at the family farm and villa, until the emperor
Marcus Aurelius banned the practice in an effort to limit the spread of the
Antonine Plague (165 to 180 AD). The ban remained in place until at least the 4th century. Heirs might be obliged by the terms of their inheritance to keep their inheritance whole, not sell it piecemeal, and to keep the family name alive; this could be done by leaving the property to freedmen, who adopted the name of the master who freed them. Whoever inherited or bought a property automatically acquired its graves, monuments and resident deities, including its
dii Manes and
Lares, who were closely associatedat least in popular opinionwith ancestor cult. If the family villa had to be sold, it was not unusual for the contract of sale to maintain the vendor's traditional rights of access to their family tombs, so that they could continue to observe their ancestral and commemorative rites and duties.
Common graves A funeral ceremony acceptable to the Roman elite might represent several times the annual income of the average citizen, and an impossibility to the very poor, dependent on charity or an unpredictable day-wage, unable to afford or maintain a burial-club subscription. The social status of the poorest citizens might have been marginally better than a slave, but their prospect of decent burial could be much worse. Some were doubtless unlawfully dumped by their relatives, or by the aediles or rather, by their assistants. Several historical burial crises are known, mostly relating to famines and plagues and the overwhelming of facilities for disposal. The bodies of the poorest, whether slave or free, could have been consigned to the same dishonourable places as executed criminals deemed obnoxious to the state (
noxii). Most are presumed to have been disposed of in pits (
puticuli, s.
puticulus) like those at the Esquiline, outside the town or city boundary, or at worst dumped into sewers or rivers, and their remains dispersed. For the truly impoverished, and during times of exceptionally high mortality such as famine or epidemic, mass-burials or mass-cremations with minimal or no rites might have been the only realistic option, and as much as the authorities and undertakers could cope with. Some modern scholars perceive this as a sign of apathetic indifference among Rome's poorest in a ferociously competitive society. Flanged tiles (or
tegulae) were sometimes used to enclose and protect the remains in a box-like or gabled ceramic tomb, known in modern archaeology as
Alla cappuccina ("like a
Capuchin monk's hood"). Libations during ceremonies honouring the dead were sometimes given through a tube or funnel that pierced the tomb, and could be stoppered when not in use. Grave goods were often deposited along with the body; a pillow of tufa or wood might be provided for the comfort of the deceased.
House tombs, Columbaria and mausoleums "House tombs" for well-off, prominent but in most cases, probably sub-elite families were often contained within a low-walled exterior precinct, which might include a garden. The exterior of such tombs could be highly decorative, designed to provoke the notice and curiosity of passers-by, rather like the semi-public
atria of private town-houses in function, if not appearance. Most had a decorated room for banqueting, complete with shelving, cooking facilities and stone-built banqueting couches or space for couches to be brought in, and either sarcophagi containing the immured dead or
cinerary altars or urns containing their ashes. Entry to the inner rooms was likely privileged to family members, most of whom could anticipate their own burial here, rewarding their commitment to care of their departed relatives. Slaves freed by their master's will took on their former owner's family name and many of their family responsibilities. In due course, their own names and epitaphs might be added to those already listed on the tomb frontage, a dynastic history to be read by any passer-by. Most tomb owners made provision in their wills to cover the cost of family banquets and festivals, whose observance would gradually transform the deceased from "polluted body to sanctified ancestor". The smallest "house tombs" were box-like, masonry structures with perpendicular walls, low-roofed but submerged some feet below ground level and on the inside, high enough to stand in. The walls afforded opportunities for decoration, including small wall-paintings, reliefs and mosaic walls and floors; extra floors could be added at need, above or below ground-level, to contain additional cremation urns, or inhumation burials. In some cases, mosaic floors within house tombs were carefully removed, an additional corpse interred, then the mosaic repaired and the whole resealed, with a "feeding tube" set into the mosaic to provide for the new interment. Some tombs had an entrance lobby and several rooms to store paraphernalia for memorial ceremonies and feasts. , 4th century AD, an early example of very high status Christian art, with scenes from the Old and New Testaments Wealthy, prominent families built large, sometimes enormous,
mausoleums. The
Castel Sant'Angelo by the
Vatican, originally the mausoleum of
Hadrian, is the best preserved, as it was converted to a fortress. The family
Tomb of the Scipios was in an aristocratic cemetery, and in use from the 3rd century BC to the 1st century AD. A grand mausoleum might include surrounding flower gardens, groves, vineyards and orchards as a source of extra income, reception rooms and kitchens for family visits and feasts. Some had small cottages built to house permanent gardeners and caretakers, employed to maintain the tomb complex, prevent thefts (especially of food and drink left there for the deceased), evict any indigent homeless, and protect the dead from disturbance and harm. The roads from cities were lined with smaller mausolea, such as the
Tombs of Via Latina, along the
Appian Way. The
Tomb of Eurysaces the Baker is a famous and originally very ostentatious tomb in a prime spot just outside Rome's
Porta Maggiore, erected for a rich
freedman baker around 50–20 BC. The tombs at
Petra, in the far east of the Empire are cut into cliffs, some with elaborate facades in the Hellenised "baroque" style of the Imperial period. , which were originally commissioned by a Christian family and their allies in the
grain trade and bread production. The complex is several miles in length, four levels deep, and contains over 26,000 niches. The
Catacombs of Rome were entirely underground. They were famously used by Christians, but also by all religions, with some specialization, such as special Jewish sections. They are large systems of narrow tunnels in the soft rock below Rome, where niches were sold to the families of the deceased in a very profitable trade. Decoration included paintings, many of which have survived. In the Christian period, burial near the grave of a famous
martyr became desirable, and large funeral halls were opened over such graves, which were often in a catacomb underneath. These contained rows of tombs, but also space for meals for the family, now probably to be seen as
agape feasts. Many of the large Roman churches began as funeral halls, which were originally private enterprises; the family of
Constantine owned the one over the grave of Saint
Agnes of Rome, whose ruins are next to
Santa Costanza, originally a Constantinian family mausoleum forming an
apse to the hall.
Sarcophagi The funerary urns in which the ashes of the cremated were placed were gradually overtaken in popularity by the
sarcophagus as inhumation became more common. Particularly in the 2nd–4th centuries, these were often decorated with
reliefs that became an important vehicle for Late
Roman sculpture. The scenes depicted were drawn from
mythology, religious beliefs pertaining to the mysteries,
allegories, history, or scenes of hunting or feasting. Many sarcophagi depict
Nereids, fantastical sea creatures, and other marine imagery that may allude to the location of the
Isles of the Blessed across the sea, with a portrait of the deceased on a seashell. The sarcophagus of a child may show tender representations of family life,
Cupids, or children playing. Some tomb inscriptions name infants, and depict episodes from their brief lives on sarcophagi. They are depicted as well-grown children, regardless of their age or context, and never as newborns. They would have thus been included in the family's memorial festivals. panel from a 3rd-century marble sarcophagus depicting the
Four Seasons ('''') and smaller attendants around a door to the afterlife Some sarcophagi may have been ordered during the person's life and custom-made to express their beliefs or aesthetics. Most were mass-produced, and if they contained a portrait of the deceased, as many did, with the face of the figure left unfinished until purchase. The carved sarcophagus survived the transition to Christianity, and became the first common location for Christian sculpture, in works like the mid-4th-century
Sarcophagus of Junius Bassus. ==Military funerals and burial==