These two books, published in the same year and by the same publisher, tackle physical and emotional reactions to death and dying in the Roman world. Both are fresh additions to the scholarship on grief and mourning, and both aim to explore the importance of understanding Roman ideas on emotions, loss and coping mechanisms.
Smart’s book belongs to the Bloomsbury series History of Emotions, which aims to take a new approach to the study of the past. In addition to an introduction and epilogue, six chapters explore topics such as epitaphs and epigraphy, the writings of various Roman authors (Livy, Plutarch, Cicero, Caesar) and, finally, tears. In the introduction we encounter public grief and, in particular, the performance of grief at the death and funeral of the Emperor Augustus in 14 ce. For his successor, his family and the army this display played an important role in reinforcing and navigating social norms. But this politicisation of grief, particularly in the context of aristocratic funerals, as Smart points out, ignores how people felt not only on this occasion, but also how they dealt with grief and loss in their everyday lives, especially upon the death of loved ones.
To illustrate the latter theme, a trio of funerary epitaphs on monuments from Cologne, Merida and Lyon is marshalled; the practice of funerary commemoration, using words and images, is expanded upon in Chapter 1, ‘Epitaphs and Epigraphy’. The declared purpose of a funerary monument, according to Roman legal sources, was to preserve memory, but Roman written sources also reveal that it reflected the status of a person and that of their family. Memory is the key issue here, the life of the dead not just briefly sketched in an epitaph, but also ‘set in the memory of the living’ (Cicero, Philippics 9.10). The brevity of many epitaphs, for cultural or financial reasons, does not allow the conveyance of grief or loss; but when epitaphs are longer and speak to the viewer, they can preserve the deep sense of loss and sorrow felt by the survivors for a child who died too young or for a mother who died in childbirth or for a promising adolescent who died in an accident. Smart rightly notes that epitaphs can tell us about the nature of lived grief felt by a wide range of Roman society beyond the elite and beyond Roman Italy. In some cases they can provide sensory memories, describing characteristics of the dead in colourful and moving ways, so that they can rival descriptions of individuals in life that we find in Roman correspondence, letters of condolence and histories. The epitaphs enable us to move away from elite male-dominated sentiments, often very Stoic, to hear the voices of ordinary people, whose emotions were raw at the loss of a loved one.
In the following chapters the focus is on precisely those elite men and how they behaved and what they wrote. This, of necessity, limits the scope to this sector of society and to the public performative nature of their grief. More could have been done with epitaphs, and there is certainly no shortage of them. The literary texts presented by Smart range from episodes in Livy’s early history of Rome, when political grief gave birth to the Republic and shaped Roman political futures, to Plutarch’s writings on the necessity of controlling grief in normative social ways (for the elite) to retain composure and a sense of dignity. Smart discusses Cicero as well, although he was anything but Stoic during his exile from Rome and after the death of his beloved daughter Tullia. References to his sorrow, his weeping and his copiously shed tears crop up often in his letters, and he sought a separation from public life, all of which does not conform to the expectation of aristocratic Roman men. The elite were not to surrender their soul to grief, as Seneca (Moral Letters 99) states; one is reminded also of the cruel comments about Emperor Nero that he was ‘incontinent in sorrow’ at the death of his baby daughter (Tacitus, Annals 15.23). Caesar, on the other hand, the last of the Roman writers to be included in the book, did control his grief, privately on the death of his daughter and publicly at the death of his great rival Pompey, as one would expect within the prescripts of aristocratic behaviour. The barbarians in Gaul whom Caesar conquered and who broke down in tears and wept as emotional displays in this situation, however, received bad press in his Commentaries for their lack of restraint, which distinguished them from Romans.
In the chapter on tears Smart explores the motif of weeping and crying in politically sensitive situations. In 2 bce, for example, when the Roman people wanted to bestow the title of Pater Patriae upon Augustus, he reacted with tears. But his apparent reluctance to accept the honour and the emotional impact the offer had on him were performative, having nothing to do with sorrow or grief; the tears are interpreted by Smart as a language of politics and part of an emotionalised display. Just as performative were the tears shed by Caligula at the death of his uncle Tiberius, or the emotional display of Trajan when Pliny delivered his panegyric to the emperor in the presence of a joyful throng of Senators. Equally, tears could be effective in Roman courts of law when lawyers and orators theatrically performed in front of judges to influence the court in its rulings. The chapter ends with an acknowledgement of the role of rhetoric in the writings and speeches of elite Roman speakers and writers in shaping political discourse and exemplifying the way in which emotions were understood. Thus, tears can be seen as an element of the emotional fabric of the Romans, with an influence well beyond death, mourning and acts of sorrow.
Grief and sorrow mattered, as Smart asserts in the epilogue. The epitaphs, letters, histories and treatises discussed in the book all confirm this conclusion. But there were many actions and interactions in Roman society not recorded in the textual record that are not considered here. As an archaeologist, it is normal that I should regret this omission, but when we are trying to understand grief and the sense of loss felt by large numbers of ordinary Romans around the empire in the face of high mortality, especially when it concerns family and loved ones, we would do well to examine the burial record and the material culture associated with burials to gain insight into the effort made to bury the dead with care and attention and to see how people found ways to comfort themselves in pain and sorrow. As I have argued in the case of child burials, archaeological remains allow us to differentiate between public and private manifestations of grief (M. Carroll, A Fragment of Time. Infancy and Earliest Childhood in the Roman World [2018]). Displays of public, performative and competitive mourning were frowned upon by the male elites of Rome, as evidenced by written sources, and these displays could be regulated. What could not be regulated and what the archaeological record reveals is the personal and private expression of grief and sorrow of all social classes, for example, when children died, were buried with their toys and belongings, and given a costly epitaph in stone that may have pushed the family to its financial limits.
Mourning, as performed by the surviving family, friends and comrades of the deceased, is the theme of Hope’s book. She rightly recognises that ‘mourning was not the same as grieving’ (p. 2). In the excellent introduction she sets the scene for the evidence she explores (literature, epitaphs, art) and argues that ‘mourning was a gateway … to life’ (p. 2), with mourning serving to communicate loss and to negotiate the transition of the bereaved in personal networks and in Roman society in general. The introduction concludes with a striking statement: ‘To grieve may be human, but to mourn in the right fashion was an element of what made someone Roman’ (p. 24). Hope is no newcomer to the topic of Roman death, having produced numerous publications on aspects of the subject, and it is obvious throughout that she has a deep knowledge of the evidence and a familiarity with theoretical approaches to the material presented.
In Chapter 2 Hope focuses on those tending corpses and facilitating the funeral and how their actions, dress and ritual performances were controlled by law and social expectations. She discusses the limitations on mourning periods, but she acknowledges that pressure to set aside mourning after a certain time may not have coincided with a resolution to grief, again differentiating between (public) mourning and (private) grief. Archaeology, which is not considered by Hope, may shed light on rituals of mourning which were publicly performed long after the official period of mourning. So, for example, at Pompeii repeated rituals and offerings at the grave side are attested by the remains of food, poured libations and the deposition of ceramic or glass vessels over a longer, but undetermined, period of time, as fieldwork in the Porta Nocera cemetery demonstrates (W. van Andringa, H. Duday and S. Lepetz, Mourir à Pompéi. Fouille d’un Quartier funéraire de la Nécropole romaine de Porta Nocera [2013]). The excavations have also demonstrated that inscribed stelae sometimes were kept clean or adjusted in height so that they would remain visible for two generations or more, despite the rising level of sediments, allowing engagement with (and mourning for?) the dead. Furthermore, some cremation urns contain two individuals deposited with a long interval, suggesting that someone may have kept the ashes of a relative until they died and their ashes were combined in one grave (H. Duday and W. van Andringa, ‘Archaeology of Memory: About the Forms and the Time of Memory in a Necropolis of Pompeii’, in: C. Moser and J. Knust [edd.], Ritual Matters. Material Remains and Ancient Religion [2017]). Continuing grief for more than one generation may have prompted these repeated rituals, grave visits and the joint deposition of bodies of individuals who died at different times in one container, but their enactment in public can be interpreted as rituals of mourning, for which no parallels survive in Roman written sources. Such minutiae are not the subject of letters and histories penned by the male Roman elite, but archaeological investigations reveal them.
In this chapter Hope also has a note on the extremely brief period of mourning prescribed by Roman legal sources for infants up to the age of three, though without citing the source (p. 38). This is simply accepted without discussion, although the reviewer has demonstrated that legal prescripts on the lack of or limited period for mourning of very young children refer only to public mourning, and not to private grief and funerary rites for these vulnerable individuals (M. Carroll, A Fragment of Time. Infancy and Earliest Childhood in the Roman World [2018]).
How mourning was intimately connected with social expectations is exemplified by those instances of public figures who gained notoriety or had fallen from grace and who became the target of a mourning-ban. A prohibition against mourning penalised the dead, but it also significantly added to the loss of the family and punished them by denying them the rites normally performed for the dead.
The following chapters explore various themes relating to bodies, mainly those of the mourners. The plurality of experiences that mourning encompassed, and different types of mourners are discussed in Chapter 3. Body posture, gait and the position of mourners are investigated in Chapter 4, utilising written sources as well as relief depictions from funerary art. Chapters 5–7 delve into mourning practices that neglected as well as bruised or bloodied the bodies of the bereaved, the potency of hair and the impact of wearing it loose, long and dishevelled, and the conventions of mourning dress and the arrangement of clothing.
Chapter 8 has the face and tears of the mourner as its focus, a theme also present in Smart’s book. Hope discusses symbolic, natural and performed tears, the differences not always being straightforward or apparent, and she cites many of the same literary sources as Smart. But she goes further in exploring tears and facial expressions from the theoretical perspective of bodily experience. Tears could be different things, a product of grief or a device of mourning, thus sometimes natural or expected. The bodily and sensory experience of mourners speaking, weeping, shrieking and singing, among other things, is treated in Chapter 9. Lamentations were performed in some cases, usually by a close relative of the deceased at the time of death and at the tomb, where an ‘audience’ was present. However, a study of funerary epitaphs that ‘speak’ to the passer-by by addressing them, revealed that lamenting for an untimely or cruel death can also be present in the inscriptions, which the viewer would read out loud as if the voice of the deceased who bemoaned their fate could be ‘heard’ (M. Carroll, ‘Vox tua nempe mea est. Dialogues with the dead in Roman funerary commemoration’, Accordia Research Papers 11 [2007/2008]). To the sensory perceptions of visiting a cemetery, therefore, we should add the voices of those who viewed and recited the words written in stone long after the death of an individual.
The final chapter is a useful round-up of the themes of the foregoing discussions. Hope concludes that ‘mourning was a whole-body experience’, reflecting the body-focused themes of earlier chapters. Visual depictions of the lying in state of the body or the funeral in particular convey the sensorial experience of mourning, evoking sights, sounds, smells and gestures.
In sum, Smart compiles a considerable body of evidence from literature and epigraphy; Hope also makes confident use of literature and epigraphy. The Roman Mourner additionally adduces Roman imagery, primarily from funerary monuments. Because much of the evidence for both publications comes from written sources, it is biased towards Rome, the capital of the Roman empire, perhaps the only place that mattered for the governing and influential elite, and where the Roman authors were based. Employing archaeological evidence would have enabled an understanding of the differences and nuances in expressions of grief, loss, mourning and ritual from parts of the empire other than Rome. Neither author, however, makes use of archaeological material, although this would have rooted the observations and conclusions of the authors in physical evidence not related to elite status or solely to manifestations of grief and mourning in Roman Italy.
That said, both books demonstrate how the study of emotions is about understanding emotional expression. The final sentence in Hope’s book is from Seneca the Younger (Phaedra 881), and it is appropriate for each of the publications on emotions triggered by death that it be cited: ‘To die wept by loved ones is the best of deaths’. These volumes are well written and well argued in the main, and they are welcome additions to the literature on Roman death and the impact of death on society, appropriate for specialists and students alike.
