Chapter 5 From Corpse to Ancestor: The Role of ... - mikroarkeologi.se

Chapter 5From Corpse to Ancestor:The Role of Tombside Dining in the Transformationof the Body in Ancient RomeRegina GeeABSTRACT This article uses the house tombs of the necropolis of Isola Sacra as case studies of a typeof funerary monument in the Roman world whose form was intended to encourage the visitation of thosecharged with the duties of funerary ritual, in particular dining tombside. The location, layout anddecoration of the house tomb, in particular the provision of an attractive, high-status and comfortable sitefor dining, speaks to the owner’s concern for the attentive and continuing presence of relatives anddependents to tend to the ancestral cult. Furthermore, the placement of these tombs on crowded andhighly visible sites suggests that the post-burial banquets, dictated by custom and calendar, were viewedas publicly interactive performance intended to be viewed by the larger community.IntroductionOn specific festival days of the Roman calendar, cities ofthe dead swelled with the living as Romans traveled outto necropoleis and held funerary banquets in or nearmonuments to their beloved dead. These semi-annualbanquets were the key ritual action for the transformationof the dead from polluted body to sanctified ancestor, andsuggest this change in status was not fixed after burialrites and interment, but had to be perpetually renewedand renegotiated post-mortem.Dining with the dead in the Roman world was a ritualactivity insistent in its denial of the corpse andaffirmation of the ancestral spirit in need of actual andsymbolic sustenance, and this act of propriation andprovision formed the second element in thetransformation, the creation of memory. The strongestphysical evidence for the importance of this ritual comesfrom those tombs that encouraged visitation and diningby providing an appealing, high status and comfortablesite for the banquet.The layout and decoration of one particular type offunerary monument built in and around Rome in thesecond and third-centuries was a direct response to thisdesire by the owner for a living audience to rememberand dine with the deceased. While the tomb facadeengaged and presented information to an externalaudience that can be generally characterized as the boththe “casual passerby” and those arriving tombside forritual, the interior was for the latter only, visitors withsome tie to the deceased. The decoration of the interiorspace with frescoes, stucco and mosaic enhanced theexperience of being inside the tomb and rewarded thosewho visited by providing an attractive space in which tomake offerings.The form of the monument as a collective tomb with locifor a number of individual burials was also a meaningfulpart of its communication to this “internal” audience, andfor those who entered the tomb the message was pointed.Most of the visitors to the monument were also likelyfuture occupants, and viewing the niches not yet filledwould be for them a reminder of a promise extended bythe tomb owner in exchange for their attendance to theneeds of those already interred within.The Roman House TombThe second and third-century tombs of Isola Sacra andthe Vatican Necropolis are the best-preserved examplesof this type of collective tomb, given the modern name“house tomb”. Its form is derived from an earliercommunal tomb type called a columbarium, in particularsmall-scale, above-ground columbaria built for either afamily or a collegium, a professional, social or burialclub. The popularity of the house tomb as a monumenttype is supported by examples found within many of thenecropoleis skirting Rome, including those near the ViaTaranto, Via Salaria, Via Ostiense, Via Appia, PortaPortuense and the Circonvallazione Gianicolense. Thelargest number of extant tombs survives at Isola Sacra, acemetery along the west side of the Via Severianabetween Portus Augusti and Ostia, while the bestpreservedexamples (with the exception of the roofs) existin the Vatican Necropolis underneath St. Peter’s in Rome.59

Figure 1. Isola Sacra, Tombs 75, 77. Photo Regina Gee.The general appearance of this type of mausoleum is asfollows. They are aboveground chambers, barrel or crossvaulted,square or rectangular in plan, with niches forboth inhumation and cremation burials lining the interiorwalls. By the middle of the second century, house tombshad fairly standardized dimensions, typically ten by ten,twenty by twenty, or ten by twelve Roman feet. Theearliest examples date to the Trajanic-Hadrianic period(98-138) and feature concrete exteriors faced with acombination of opus reticulatum and brick, with anincreasing number of brick-faced facades appearing bythe Antonine period (139-180). The principle façade,usually faced with a fine–grained red brick, is typicallyarranged with a central door framed by a travertine jamband sills, a marble titulus inset above the door, andsplayed windows either flanking or cut into the titulus(Fig.1).Decorative architectural elements embellishing the tombfacades include projecting architraves above the door,marble insets for the windows, terracotta frames ofvarying degrees of elaboration around the titulus andwindows, and an entablature, in some cases “supported”by pilasters of projecting brick. Several tombs from IsolaSacra and a single example from the Vatican Necropolisfeature decorative terracotta plaques inserted into thefacade near the top of the doorframe and the entablature(Fig. 2). Where extant examples of the upper sectionexist, a triangular pediment topped the façade.The most common facing materials for the interior ofhouse tombs were reticulate and block work in theearliest examples from the Trajanic/Hadrianic period,changing to brick or brick and block work by theAntonine period, always covered with stucco and painted.Many feature the generous use of molded stucco to createarchitectural frames around individual loculi, figurativefriezes, and coffered ceilings. Frescoes enliven the spacesbetween niches as well as their interiors, and draw fromthe established decorative repertoire for both house andtomb of simple floral/vegetal motifs, animals, birds,portraits of the deceased and mythological scenes. Themajority of extant pavements are black and white mosaicsof geometric and vegetal designs. Examples of black andwhite and, less frequently, polychrome mosaic pavementswith more ambitious figural designs survive from bothIsola Sacra and the Vatican Necropolis, and the subjectsinclude hunt scenes, Nilotic landscapes with pygmies,mythological scenes, and representations of the seasons.The Tomb OwnersInscriptional evidence tells us the owners of these tombswere almost without exception male and the head ofhousehold, and the names suggest that for the most partthe occupants were non-elite but prosperous Romans,often freedmen or descendants of freedmen. In the textof the titulus, the public record of who was and could beburied within, the builder identifies himself as thededicant and names his blood kin and his freedmen andtheir descendents as the group for whom he is providing atomb. Occasionally, the tomb owner gave a space withina tomb as a gift to a friend of the family, and there are60

Figure 2. Isola Sacra, Tomb 100. Photo Regina Gee.also recorded instances of the sale of unused space withinthe family tomb as when at Isola Sacra, Valeria Trophimesold part of the enclosure in front of her tomb to C.Galgestius Helius. 1The function of these monuments as a sort ofarchitectural invitation to visit, dine and remember mayhave held increased importance for this group in Romansociety, members of the libertini or freedman class.Legally, former slaves did not have a familia with itsattendant history and thus lacked the personal andsocietal connection to ancestors Romans used as thefoundation supporting the duties of creating and tendingmemory. Their response was to fashion a history forthemselves to the best of their ability, using theimmediate network of kin and dependents as the lynchpinholding together their post-mortem transformation intoancestral spirits needing tending and sustenance. Inaddition to relatives, the freedmen and freedwomen of thedeceased, connected to the dead through ties of obligation1 For the inscription see H. Thylander, Inscriptions du Portd’Ostie (Lund, 1951-2), 124.and loyalty, were often responsible for carrying out thesevisits to the tomb. There are also descriptions, like that ofArtemidorus, of instances in which friends of thedeceased, sometimes members of the same collegium,gathered at the “dwelling of the deceased” for a memorialdinner (Oneirocritica 5.82).The House Tomb as MonumentumThe examination that follows considers these housetombs within the context of visitation, funerary ritual andactivity relating to the cult of the dead in and around thetomb in the hope of elucidating the relationship betweenthe appearance of these tombs and their function. Thiskind of analysis brings to the forefront the fundamentalnature of the tomb as a monumentum, something built toevoke memory. As a monumentum, the house tombfunctioned in several ways. It created a record ofexistence for a group of individuals. While the tomb itselfdid not architecturally resemble a Roman house, it didpreserve the social hierarchy of familial relationships andin this sense, as Nicholas Purcell notes, the house tombwas more domus than insula in spirit (Purcell 1987:39).61

Figure 3. Isola Sacra, Tombs 72, 73. Photo Regina Gee.By looking at where the name was written, on theexterior titulus, for example, versus below a row ofidentical niches on the back wall, visitors couldunderstand the relative importance of each individualwithin the larger family. In addition – and this aspect hasbeen under examined in discussions of this type ofmonument – the house tomb offered a location or stagingarea near witnesses to the actions which build memory.The concern for the perpetuation of the memory of thedeceased in Roman funerary art has drawn the attentionof several scholars in recent years. Penelope Daviesdiscusses the particularly Roman concern with creating a“living memory” by means of funerary monuments,which were blatantly manipulative in their pleas forattention (Davies 96: 49-52 pp.). Michael Koortbojian'streatment of late republican and early imperial funeraryreliefs erected by freedmen and their descendants focuseson the complex relationship among text, image andviewer in the evocation of memory (Koortbojian1996:210-234 pp.). For a number of reasons the chambertomb was an architectural form well suited to participatein the exercise of drawing the gaze in the pursuit ofmemoria. Romans who purchased them could employ avariety of enticements including size, decoration andunique design features to encourage an external viewer topause long enough to look at the monument and read thedeceased's name. The attention of a person in the vicinitycould be captured by the scale of the mausoleum,impressive in its sheer size whether standing alone or in arow of similar tombs. Builders focused attention on theprinciple facade through fine brickwork and thearchitectural decoration described earlier of entablatures,pilasters topped with terra-cotta capitals, and terra-cottaframes around the windows, and titulus. In someexamples, attention to the decorative potential of thefacade included using different colors for the brickwork,warm yellow for the pilasters, for example, against a redbackground (Fig.3).An important part of the visual presentation was thetitulus, the title deed, prominently and centrally displayedabove the door in most cases. The titulus contained theall-important nomen, the tie that legally bound the tombto a particular individual and spoke publicly of patronageand provision. The common placement of the titulusdirectly above the door, use of white marble to create acontrast to the surrounding red brick/terracotta frame andformulaic funerary inscription worked together to ensurethe information was easy to find and to read (Fig. 1).62

Figure 4. Isola Sacra, Tomb 87. Photo Regina Gee.The importance of addressing viewers through the titulusis made clear on tomb 97 at Isola Sacra. Although thedoor is on the side of the monument, the titulus remainscentrally placed on the wall facing the road, orientedtoward the greatest number of potential viewers (Fig. 4).The House Tomb as Site for Ritual ActivityFeast days listed on the official calendar as well asunofficial annual occasions regularly brought Romans outto the necropoleis encircling the city. Within the contextof these semi-annual visits, the house tomb can becharacterized as a locus for the staging of ritual.While funerary cult practice was private in the sense thatthe family and friends performed the necessary activities,elements of the Roman constructions surrounding publicperformance, audience, and spectacle were also present.Moving in and out of the house tombs with lights,incense, flowers and offerings of food and drink, anddining outside in the tomb precinct were highly visibleactivities. The location of the tombs on publiclyaccessible land allowed individuals to be seen performingtheir roles properly in front of an audience consisting ofpassersby on the nearby road and visitors to adjacenttombs. For these reasons, the enactment of ritualtombside does not fit easily into the category of eitherprivate or public activity, but rather belongs to the moremutable area of Roman social performance that combinedaspects of both.Like the rituals surrounding the funeral itself, gravesidedining was a dynamic performance enacted to articulateand fix proper relationships between the living and thedead, and one of a series of rituals surrounding the cult ofthe dead concerned with separation, transition, andtransformation. 2 The initial graveside banquet in honor ofthe deceased, the Silicernium, took place very soon after2 The series of ritual actions relating to proper burial includedthe ritual cleaning of the house (exverrae) after the removal ofthe body, the period of mourning (feriae denicales), thesacrifice of a pig to Ceres which cleansed the family ofpollution and made the grave legal (porta praesentanea), andthe ritual of cleaning and purification with fire and water afterthe funeral for those who had participated in the interment(suffito).63

the burial. 3 The Cena Novendialis, held the ninth dayafter interment, marked the end of the immediate postburialperiod and the family’s imminent return to society.Other traditional days for a sojourn to the cemeteries arelisted in the epitaph of a Roman who made financialprovisions for sacrifices in his memory on four annualoccasions: his dies natales, the Rosaria, the Violaria, andthe Parentalia. 4 Of these, the Parentalia, also referred toas the dies Parentales or dies Ferales, was the onlycommemoration listed on the Fasti, the official calendardrawn up by the Rome’s pontiffs. The Parentaliaemphasized the role of near relations in honoring thememory of dead kinfolk. The final day of the Parentaliawas called the Caristia or Cara Cognati and featuredanother meal at the tomb held in honor of the “dear kin”.Eating and drinking at the burial site, a tradition whosebeginnings in the Roman world dates to between thetwelfth and ninth centuries B.C.E., was integral tofunerary cult practice (Torelli 1987: 27). Words relatingto visits to the tomb included refreshment (refigeratio orrefrigerium) and in numerous examples of tombdecoration the theme of refrigerium is represented by oneof the most ubiquitous motifs in Roman funerary art, twobirds flanking a vessel. There are also representations ofbanqueting painted on the walls of tombs, and althoughsome of these scenes may refer to the hoped-for pleasuresof the afterlife, others seem to represent a meal enjoyedby the living. Funerary inscriptions encouraging thevisitors to eat and drink are not uncommon, and the act ofcommunal dining included consideration of the dead aswell as the living. Pouring wine, honey, milk or bloodinto the container holding the remains of the deceased,often by means of a lead or terracotta tube inserted intothe cinerary receptacle or sarcophagus, was a ritual actthat reconnected the dead to the living in the context ofthe shared act of feasting. There are examples of chairs inthe tomb for the deceased, inscriptions inviting the deadto share the refreshment, and in least one example thedeceased is referred to as the host of the banquet who hasinvited guests to dine at his tomb. 5 Visually, this idea ofthe ancestral spirit extending an invitation to visitors ischarmingly embodied at Tomb 43 at Isola Sacra, which3 Festus Paulus describes the Silicernium as a kind of sausage,quo fletu familia purgabatur. See H. Lindsay, “Eating with theDead: the Roman Funerary Banquet,” in Meals in a SocialContext: Aspects of the Communal Meal in the Hellenistic andthe Roman World, eds. I. Nielsen and H. Nielsen, (Aarhus,1998), 72.4 die natalis sui et rosationis et violai et parentalib (ILS 8366).5 For the deceased as the host of the banquet, R. MacMullen,Christianity and Paganism in the Fourth to the EighthCenturies (New Haven, 1997) 195; A.D. Nock, “Sarcophagi andSymbolism,” AJA 50 (1946), 156. On stone chairs for thedeceased in the tomb, see T. Klauser, Die Cathedra imTotenkult der heidnischen und christlichen Antike (Münster inWestfalen, 1927)13ff. An inscription found within a necropolisnow within the grounds of the Villa Doria Pamphili in Romeexpresses frank skepticism that the dead truly participated in thedrinking (ILS 8156).features an inlaid terracotta image of the deceasedstanding at the open door of his tomb, his hand extendedin a gesture of welcome (Fig 5.).A consideration of the tomb furnishings and the nature ofthe refreshment consumed helps give a sense of theexperience of banqueting as funerary cult practice.Within the cemeteries flanking Rome, examples of tombswith biclinia, masonry dining couches, survive at IsolaSacra (tombs 15, 86). Some evidence for dining facilitiescomes from inscriptions, such as two found near Romewhich describe tombs with kitchens, wells and diningbenches (CIL 6.8860, 6.29958). For those tombs that didnot have benches built as part of the structure, anotherpossibility is portable furniture brought to the tomb site,and in these instances the visitors may have forgone themore aristocratic and festive reclining dining position infavor of sitting at a table on chairs or benches(Hermansen 1989:44). A third-century funerary inscriptiondedicated to a woman named Secundula isuseful for its discussion of the arrangement of a suitablespace for dining and conversation. The dedicant, her son,describes creating a place for “passing the evening inpleasant talk” by covering the altar that marksSecundula’s tomb with a stone tabletop to hold food anddrink and piling cushions around it (ILCV 1570).Although several ancient sources propose simple food assuitable offerings to the deceased, the living participantsof the banquet did not limit themselves to the salted cornor lentils considered sufficient for the shades, and Lucianwrites with a certain bemusement of the costly picnicscarried to the grave, and questions whether the shadesever get their portion (Charon 22). Petronius listsexpensive delicacies prepared for a fictional CenaNovendialis, and like any good satirist, must have drawnhis observations from the foibles of contemporaries(Satyricon 65). Besides this literary evidence for finedining, we have the physical remains of afore-mentionedcooking and preparation areas in or near tombs. Theillumination of the site with torches and ceramic lamps isalso documented. Practical considerations accepted –banquets typically occurred at night – there is evidencefor the importance of lights within the cult of the dead,and candelabra as part of the typical furniture of thetomb. 6 To this environment created for comfortable,torch-lit dining alfresco one must add flowers. Althoughprimarily intended as offerings to the dead, the garlandsattached to altars and scatterings of the traditionalfunerary flowers of roses and violets no doubt gavesensory pleasure to the visitors as well.This consideration of amenities for the living did not alterthe essential concerns with ancestral worship andpropriation during the graveside visits. Rather, when6 Ovid’s Fasti, 2.562, describes the torches that light up thegrave (habent alias maesta sepulcra faces). There is also afunerary inscription mentioning the importance of light, utsemper viglet lucerna nardo (CIL 6.30102).64

Figure 5. Isola Sacra, Tomb 56. Photo Regina GeeRomans traveled to the tomb to banquet they broughtwith them the same social framework of convivialactivity that shaped dining within the Roman house.Inscriptional evidence together with early Christianwritings on the subject of “inappropriate” behavior shedslight on the more ephemeral qualities of mood oratmosphere during these graveside visits. 7 The spirit ofthese graveside gatherings seems to have been cheerful,even somewhat boisterous, fueled perhaps by wine andgood food. 8 The possibility of overindulgence isaddressed as early as the republican period. Cicero in hisdiscussion of Roman law notes with disapproval Romansmoving away from the funerary laws of the TwelveTables, with their prohibition of sumptuous display anddrinking to excess (De Legibus 2.24). The fifth-centurywritings of early Christian leaders such as Augustine and7 The examination of early Christian funerary cult practice isuseful given the continuity in the forms of ritual activity frompagan to early Christian. On the stability of these burialcustoms, see MacMullen, 110-120; P. Brown, The Cult of theSaints (Chicago, 1981), 24-25.8 On the atmosphere of hilaritas as opposed to silence andsadness, see P. Testini, Archeologia Christiana, NozioniGenerali dalle Origini alla Fine del Sec. VI (Rome, 1958), 141.Zeno, while not objective records of behavior, arenevertheless valuable sources of information.Their writings reveal a struggle between absorption andrejection of the pagan burial customs that flowed almostseamlessly into Christian funerary ritual in particularactivities surrounding martyr cults. Augustine writes ofthe practice of “banquets and carousing” on saints’ feastdays as a continuation of pagan graveside cult practice(Contra Faustis 20.21). Another commentary on thepagan tradition comes in the form of an admonition byZeno, who found the customary heavy eating anddrinking at graveside banquets inappropriate behavior forChristians (Sermones 1.16). After the banquet, some formof entertainment may have prolonged the convivialoccasion, indicated by evidence of playing musicalinstruments, dancing and singing at the tomb (Quasten1983: 153-60pp).The Tomb as a Site for SpectacleAlthough family, friends, and dependents wereresponsible for serving the memory of the deceased, it isa simplification to characterize the cult of the dead asprivate ritual. To do so does not consider Roman social65

constructions of performer and spectator, and morespecifically those events that blurred distinctions betweenthe roles. Recent scholarship examines the fluiditybetween the positions of viewer and viewed in the Romanworld in a number of contexts, including public banquets,gladiatorial games, and funeral processions that carriedthe remains from house to tomb. One can add the seriesof post-burial visits dictated by custom and calendar tothis list of publicly interactive performances. The publicaspect of the cult of the dead arose due to the placementof the tombs along major thoroughfares and usuallyamong other monuments, a location that increased thelikelihood of an audience for the presence of visitors tothe tomb.The form and location of the chamber tombs of theVatican Necropolis and Isola Sacra reveal their owners’desire for an audience. Tituli and external embellishmentson facades oriented to the road signaled a desire to belooked at and commented upon. Utilization of thestructure as a frame or backdrop against which visitors setup dining equipment and banqueted suggests this wish todraw the gaze was also present during the enactment ofritual. Under these circumstances, the tomb facadebecame a sort of scaenae frons, an architectural backdropthat enhanced the dignity and the theatricality of thebanquet much like wall paintings of architectural “stagesets” in the Roman house. Even when the actual riteswere not visible to non-participants, visitors arriving withflowers, food, libations and lamps, as well as the opendoor of the tomb itself, gave notice to anyone within thevicinity of the activity occurring at the site. Moreover,this observation was reciprocal in that during communalfestivals individuals gathered at one monument couldobserve other families visiting nearby tombs and havetheir own presence witnessed in return. In some casesvisual and verbal intercourse may have been heightenedby relationships between families who had tombs neareach other, as was probably the case for the Tombs F andL of the Vatican Necropolis, which both belonged todifferent members of the Caetennii family.A particularly clear example of the public aspect offunerary ritual can be found at Tomb 15 of Isola Sacra. Abiclinium is attached to the facade, one masonry benchfor reclining on each side of the door, approximatelyeight meters east of the original Roman road (Fig. 6).From their position on the benches, the diners, framed bythe monument behind them, would have been visible totravelers on the road as well as those Romans visiting thecontiguous tombs to the north and south. 9 In addition,assuming the conventional position with the left armsupporting the body would give the diners on the9 L. Bek proposes an imperial model for performative or selfconsciousdining in her discussion of the octagonal hall of theDomus Flavius as a triclinium whose arrangement facilitated“people watching from the wings”, see “Questiones Convivales,The Idea of the Triclinium and the Staging of ConvivialCeremony from Rome to Byzantium,” ARID 12 (1998): 90.northern bench a view of the contiguous tombs extendingsouthward and vice-versa. A slight turn towards the westenabled the diners on both sides to view the road directlyin front of them and complete the exchange of gazesbetween those at and those near the tomb.This enactment of funeral ritual within public viewdefines the performance of some actions surrounding thecult of the dead in these exterior spaces as a type ofspectaculum, in its original sense of something exposedto public view. Our contemporary perception of spectacleis both more scopophilic and pejorative than it was forRomans, for whom the experience of spectacle had amuch stronger interactive element (Bergmann 1999: 10).The most commonly cited text concerning Romanfunerary practice, the account by the Greek historianPolybius of the public funeral of a great man during therepublican period, underscores the performative natureand high drama of the rites of this period, as the writerrecounts with obvious admiration his witnessing of thepompa, the laudatio, and the animation of the ancestralimagines by actors (Historiae. 6.53). The Greek historianactually uses the word theama, spectacle, in his admiringdescription of the public funerary procession. Over time ashift occurred from this type of aristocratic funeral in thecentral civic space of the Forum to rites enacted withinthe private sphere of the house and the burial site. Writtenand visual evidence supports the contention that by thesecond century, the procession and oration as describedby Polybius seem to exist no longer and the emphasis wason the collocatio, the laying-out ceremony in the atriumof the Roman house (Bodel 1999: 266). While thelocation and the primary audience change, continuityfrom the earlier public procession to the later privatecollocatio existed in the ties between mortuary rites,performance, and audience. Within funerary ritual takingplace in the house, a sense of self-awareness concerningthe performative aspects of mourning seems to have beenpresent. Lucian criticized the extreme lamentations of thefamily at a collocatio because he believed their "over thetop" performance was a calculated attempt to impressothers present (De Lucto 10-15). The early secondcenturyreliefs found on the tomb of the Haterii, oftencited for the information they offer concerning funeraryritual, remind us of the presence of professional mournersand musicians, performers whose presence enhanced thecollocatio through music and a hired display of grief.This idea of spectacle is not limited to activitysurrounding the collocatio, but extends to those repeatedvisitations to the tomb site throughout the year. TheParentalia, Rosaria and Violaria, were festival days thatbrought the populace en masse to the necropoleissurrounding the city at the same time every year in arepeated expression of collective identity. The rhythmicrepetition of the festivals of the Fasti orchestratedindividuals over vast areas to follow an annuallyrecurring cycle of ceremonies as the establishment ofshared experiences among various audiences (Bergmann1999:22). One can imagine that on these days the cities of66

Figure 6. Isola Sacra, Tomb 15. Photo Regina Gee.the dead would be filled with the living, as Romansspread out from the city into the suburbs to perform therequired rituals at the site of the tomb. On festival days,the sheer numbers of Romans in the necropoleisheightened the synchronism between performer andaudience, as visitors simultaneously held the positions ofviewer and viewed.It is not necessary to leave out those more individualvisits to the tomb, those on the Silicernium, and CenaNovendialis. These occasions place the family and friendsagain at the charged locus of the tomb, but in theseinstances the most likely audience was the passer-by onthe road rather than other families engaged in the sameactivity. In the case of those tombs within the field ofvision of someone moving along the thoroughfare, thetraveler’s attention might be pulled or heightened by thecontrast presented between the tomb that was a lively andlit space, full of movement and the sound of voices, andthe quiet “unanimated” monuments surrounding it.As an architectural setting for the performance of ritualactivity, the chamber tomb is notable for the extent towhich it blurred the distinctions between passivemonument and active space, public performance andprivate duty, spectator and audience, and finallycommunal and individual. A question remains regardingthe reason for this desire to pull the public gaze onto whatwas essentially a private ritual. Why was there a desire towatch and to be watched in return?One possible answer lies within an expansion of the ideaof the transformative role of memory mentioned in theintroduction. On the individual level, the presence ofwitnesses created a memory of the event simply byviewing it and the larger the audience the greater thepotential for the creation of an event memory.Considering the idea of collective memory, the enactmentof funerary rites within public view, especially whensynchronized by festivals, had the power to display theoverall stability and wellbeing of the community. Atemporal system – in the example of funerary ritual fixedformally by the Fasti and informally by personalanniversaries – has the power to co-ordinate experienceand creates a communal identity (Kondoleon 1999: 321).Of all of the rituals enacted within Roman society, thoserevolving around the treatment of the dead were the mostdeeply engrained, as the Fathers of the Early ChristianChurch could attest, continually frustrated in theirattempts to move people away from pagan funerarypractice.To consider the chamber tomb in the context of ritualvisitation, the expense of the monument expressed hopein the continued appearance of those with the charge oftending the memory of the deceased. Even when inactive,silent with the doors closed, the form of the house tombwith its provision of space for multiple interments and anattractive staging area for ritual communicated the ideathat visitors had come and gone, and would come and goagain in the future. The performative aspects of thefunerary ritual enacted at the tomb site had resonancebeyond individual families, if one understands ritual asceremonial performances that aid in holding a large and67

ethnically diverse society together. An important functionof bringing private or domestic ritual into the publicsphere was to “calibrate the concerns of the communityas a whole onto those of the family and vice-versa”(Beard, North and Price 1998: 51). Witnessing and beingwitnessed in return was a way of participating incommunal identity while at the same time, through actsof pietas, contributing to the stability of the communityitself.ReferencesBEARD, M., NORTH, J. AND PRICE, S. 1998.Religions of Rome, Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press.BERGMANN, B. 1999. Introduction: The Art ofAncient Spectacle, The Art of Ancient Spectacle,Bettina Bergman & Christine Kondoleon(eds.), Washington D.C., National Gallery ofArt, pp. 9-35.BODEL, J. 1997. Monumental Villas and VillaMonuments, Journal of Roman Archaeology, 10,5-35.DAVIES, P. J.E.1997. The politics of perpetuation:Trajan’s column and the art of commemoration,American Journal of Archaeology, 3:101 pp. 41-65.HERMANSEN, G. 1981.Ostia: Aspects of City Life.Edmonton: University of Alberta Press.KONDOLEON, C. 1997. Timing Spectacles: RomanDomestic Art and Performance, The Art of AncientSpectacle, Bettina Bergman & ChristineKondoleon (eds.), Washington D.C., NationalGallery of Art, pp. 321-342.KOORTBOJIAN, M. 1996. In commemorationemmortuorum: text and image along the ‘street oftombs’, Art and Text in Roman Culture, JasElsner (ed.), Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, pp. 210-234.KLAUSER, T. 1927. Die Cathedra im Totenkult derheidnischen und christlichen Antike, Münster inWestfalen: Aschendorff.PURCELL, N. 1987. Tomb and Suburb, RömischeGräberstrasse: Selbstdarstellung, Status,Standard. Henner von Hesberg & Paul Zanker(eds.), Munich: Verlag der BayerischenAkademie der Wissenschaften, pp. 27-41.QUASTEN, J. 1983. Music and Worship in Paganand Christian Antiquity. Washington D.C.:National Association of Pastoral Musicians.RUSHFORTH, G. 1915. Funeral Lights in RomanSepulchral Monuments, Journal of Roman Studies5, 149-164.SCULLARD, H. 1981. Festivals and Ceremonies of theRoman Republic. New York: Cornell UniversityPress.TORELLI, M. 1989. Banchetto e simposio nel’Italiaarcaiaca, Milan: Diapress.Regina Gee (Ass. Prof.), College of Art and Architecture, Montana State University, USA.Email: rgee@montana.edu68