THE HISTORY OF OLD ROME

III. From the Union of Italy to the Subjugation of Carthage and the Greek States

From: The History of Rome, by Theodor Mommsen
Translated with the sanction of the author by William Purdie Dickson

Chapter XIII - Faith and Manners

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Page 3

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-bordered, robe, with their lictors and the other insignia of office--all in chariots gave the final escort to the dead.

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