This significant contribution to the literature on Roman funerary ritual, comprising an introduction and thirteen papers in German, French and Italian, is the product of a 2007 colloquium which came about, in part, as an excursion among death rituals by the group engaged under Rüpke's direction in a major programmatic study of Roman religion in its imperial context. Two authors consider the metropolis: Gutsfeld examines the political dimension of Domitian's ‘black’ dinner of a.d. 89 and Šterbenc Erker the Roman literary tradition on the origins of commemorative rituals. Of the papers devoted to the provinces, one (Haensch) studies monuments erected empire-wide to governors, procurators and their circles, the rest consider specific settings. Three focus on the West: Häussler and Bel discuss burial practice across Late Iron Age to Roman transitions in South-East Britain and Nîmes respectively, Rothenhofer Iberian monuments which represent ‘deification’ of private individuals. Unlike many edited collections on Roman burial, the southern and eastern Empire predominates: here papers comprise a detection of references to the mysteries of Demeter and Kore in Paul's first letter to the Corinthians (Auffarth), an analysis of dedications from Phrygia which jointly invoke deceased individuals and Zeus Bronton (Chiai), a synthesis of archaeological and textual evidence for commemorative rituals in Petra and environs (Sachet), a discussion of the cult rôle of Romano-Egyptian mummy portraits (Lehmann), an investigation of the cultural affinities of burial rituals for children in North Africa (Schörner), and a comparison of textual and archaeological evidence for rituals at the tophet (Crouzet). The chronological emphasis lies on the early to mid-imperial periods, though several contributors reach into the distant pasts of their study areas to interpret Roman-period phenomena. Rebillard's discussion of funerary feasting by fourth- and fifth-century a.d. Christians is the only paper to take Late Antiquity as its main field.

The introduction emphasizes the value of high-resolution archaeological data for new insights into the sequence of funerary rituals, but most papers make more use of monuments, inscriptions and literary descriptions of rites, demonstrating in particular that the latter can still be mined for new insights. Šterbenc Erker places the claims by Ovid and Dionysios of Halikarnassos for exotic origins for the Parentalia and other commemorative rituals in the setting of the wider Augustan construction of Greek and Trojan ancestries for Roman rituals, a reminder to archaeological readers of the need to fully contextualize texts that bear on mortuary rituals. Nonetheless many papers use these newly-available archaeologically-detected residues of feasting or votive deposition to characterize the extended funerary rituals in diverse contexts, from monumental tombs, for example in Petra and south-east Britain, to more ordinary earth-cut burials, such as those of early Roman Nîmes, where Bel demonstrates the increasing destruction of dining gear on the pyre at the same time as the quantities of grave-goods reduce. However readers seeking a fuller account of new archaeological methodologies and data are better referred to another recent volume edited by Scheid (Pour une archéologie du rite. Nouvelles perspectives de l'archéologie funéraire, reviewed by M. Carroll in JRS 100 (2010), 325–6).

The editors directed contributors to consider the interaction between Roman and local elements in the development of funerary cult. As Sachet notes of Petra, the increasingly widespread evidence for protracted rituals, typically involving large-scale feasting, lends a common tone to burials across the Empire and complicates the determining of specific cultural affinities for rituals in individual instances. Most papers, however, echoing earlier work on provincial Roman burial practice, emphasize the enduring importance of pre-Roman traditions in rituals which come across, with the accumulation of examples, as almost infinitely heterogeneous and protean. An associated factor, which emerges more strongly from this volume than others, is the permeability between cult practice and death rituals. The linking through text and/or image with qualities associated with divinities in an idealized presentation of the dead, is well documented at Rome, especially among freedmen, but its Iberian manifestation is more commonly associated with urban élites (Rothenhofer). Another instance of this is the assimilation of the dead to the gods, as heroes at sanctuaries at the tombs of petty kings, as argued for the Folly Lane complex, St Albans (Häussler) or more ordinary ancestors in rural Phrygia (Chiai). On the other hand Schörner's analysis, finding, against previous work, little connection between the cult of Saturn in North Africa and the dead, is a reminder of the need to carefully evaluate claims for such associations. The same paper, of wide relevance for scholars working on childhood in antiquity, shows how the ‘Punic’ character of burials of children in Roman North Africa has been overstated: rather they both vary substantially between cities and also show characteristics shared with other provinces.

The volume will perhaps be used most for its individual papers, and here inevitably readers will find points to take issue with. Arguably, for example, Häussler overstates the traditional and consensual character of the spectacular burial complexes of conquest period south-east Britain or Haensch the ‘Roman-ness’ of tombs erected in the provinces to commemorate high-ranking Romans and their families. Nonetheless the shared emphases make the volume substantially complement and extend the thematic and empirical reach of earlier collections. Its aggregate impact would have been assisted by fuller cross-referencing between papers which bear on similar themes or material: for example both Haensch and Crouzet discuss the Petra tomb of the governor of Arabia Titus Aninius Sextius Florentius. Abstracts in the contributors' languages and in others would also have enhanced its accessibility and the achievement of the attention it merits.