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-bordered, robe, with their lictors and the other insignia of office—­all in chariots gave the final escort to the dead.  On the bier overspread with massive purple and gold-embroidered coverlets and fine linen cloths lay the deceased himself, likewise in the full costume of the highest office which he had filled, and surrounded by the armour of the enemies whom he had slain and by the chaplets which in jest or earnest he had won.  Behind the bier came the mourners, all dressed in black and without ornament, the sons of the deceased with their heads veiled, the daughters without veil, the relatives and clansmen, the friends, the clients and freedmen.  Thus the procession passed on to the Forum.  There the corpse was placed in an erect position; the ancestors descended from their chariots and seated themselves in the curule chairs; and the son or nearest gentile kinsman of the deceased ascended the rostra, in order to announce to the assembled multitude in simple recital the names and deeds of each of the men sitting in a circle around him and, last of all, those of him who had recently died.