t honours, the
collective sense of dignity in the noble families of Rome swelled into
that mighty civic pride, the like of which the earth has never seen
again, and the traces of which, as strange as they are grand, seem to
us, wherever we meet them, to belong as it were to another world. It
was one of the characteristic peculiarities of this powerful sense of
citizenship, that it was, while not suppressed, yet compelled by the
rigid simplicity and equality that prevailed among the citizens to
remain locked up within the breast during life, and was only allowed
to find expression after death; but then it was displayed in the
funeral rites of the man of distinction so conspicuously and
intensely, that this ceremonial is better fitted than any other
phenomenon of Roman life to give to us who live in later times a
glimpse of that wonderful spirit of the Romans.

A Roman Funeral

It was a singular procession, at which the burgesses were invited to
be present by the summons of the public crier: "Yonder warrior is
dead; whoever can, let him come to escort Lucius Aemilius; he is borne
forth from his house." It was opened by bands of wailing women,
musicians, and dancers; one of the latter was dressed out and
furnished with a mask after the likeness of the deceased, and by
gesture doubtless and action recalled once more to the multitude the
appearance of the well-known man. Then followed the grandest and most
peculiar part of the solemnity--the procession of ancestors--before
which all the rest of the pageant so faded in comparison, that men of
rank of the true Roman type enjoined their heirs to restrict the
funeral ceremony to that procession alone. We have already mentioned
that the face-masks of those ancestors who had filled the curule
aedileship or any higher ordinary magistracy, wrought in wax and
painted--modelled as far as possible after life, but not wanting even
for the earlier ages up to and beyond the time of the kings--were wont
to be placed in wooden niches along the walls of the family hall, and
were regarded as the chief ornament of the house. When a death
occurred in the family, suitable persons, chiefly actors, were dressed
up with these face-masks and the corresponding official costume to
take part in the funeral ceremony, so that the ancestors--each in the
principal dress worn by him in his lifetime, the triumphator in his
gold-embroidered, the censor in his purple, and the consul in his
purple-borde