Roman Funerals and Family Members

This project aims to create the first ever, evidence-based, visualization of all known aristocratic funerals that might have been staged for Roman magistrates during the Roman Republic (509-27 BCE).

The Roman funeral was a spectacular affair, highly visual and multi-sensory, replete with music, professional mourners, incense, perfume, and public performance. It was also uniquely defined by the customary practice of including one’s ancestors directly in the funerary rite. During the procession that began at the home and culminated in the funeral eulogy held atop an elevated speaker’s platform, the Rostra, in the center of the Roman Forum—the civic, religious, and political heart of the city of Rome—actors would don waxen masks to play the role of each male ancestor who had achieved the highest magistracies in the Roman political system.

This project, part one of a larger effort, visualizes this funeral eulogy, where one would expect to see the deceased on top of the Rostra, one of his children who would give the eulogy, and, for a politically successful family, as many as ten or twenty actors all wearing the appropriate regalia that would indicate the office that had been achieved by each ancestor dating back to the founding of the Republic. One goal is to reevaluate the funeral assemblage on the Rostra by creating a new set of algorithms that will include database-driven and probabilistic models to include men AND women on the stage during Roman Republican history. For this renewed project, we will work to produce published output based on our new models. Our preliminary work created born-digital beta interfaces. We will extend our work to develop final versions to submit for “publication” in digital and print formats.

This project is a branch of the RomeLab initiative and will rely on existing 3D critical editions of the Roman Forum and interactive software developed by the Humanities Virtual World Consortium and RomeLab.