Let us step aside now, for here comes a funeral procession.  Who is the deceased?  Probably a consular personage, a duumvir, since lictors lead the line.  Behind them come the flute-players, the mimes and mountebanks, the trumpeters, the tambourine-players, and the weepers (praefiicae), paid for uttering cries, tearing their hair, singing notes of lamentation, extolling the dead man, mimicking despair, “and teaching the chambermaids how to best express their grief, since the funeral must not pass without weeping and wailing.”  All this makes up a melancholy but burlesque din, which attracts the crowd and swells the procession, to the great honor of the defunct.  Afterward come the magistrates, the decurions in mourning robes, the bier ornamented with ivory.  The duumvir Lucius Labeo (he is the person whom they are burying) is “laid out at full length, and dressed in white shrouds and rich coverings of purple, his head raised slightly and surrounded with a handsome coronet, if he merit it.”  Among the slaves who carry the bier walks a man whose head is covered with white wool, “or with a cap, in sign of liberty.”  That is the freedman Menomachus, who has grown rich, and who is conducting the mourning for his master.  Then come unoccupied beds, “couches fitted up with the same draperies as that on which reposes the body of the defunct” (it is written that Sylla had six thousand of these at his funeral), then the long line of wax images of ancestors (thus the dead of old interred the newly dead), then the relatives, clad in mourning, the friends, citizens, and townsfolk generally in crowds.  The throng is all the greater when the deceased is the more honored.  Lastly, other trumpeters, and other pantomimists and tumblers, dancing, grimacing, gambolling, and mimicking the duumvir whom they are helping to bury, close the procession.  This interminable multitude passes out into the Street of Tombs by the Herculaneum gate.

The ustrinum, or room in which they are going to burn the body, is open.  You are acquainted with this Roman custom.  According to some, it was a means of hastening the extrication of the soul from the body and its liberation from the bonds of matter, or its fusion in the great totality of things; according to others, it was but a measure in behalf of public health.  However that may be, dead bodies might be either buried or burned, provided the deposit of the corpse or the ashes were made outside of the city.  A part of the procession enters the ustrinum.  Then they are going to burn the duumvir Lucius Labeo.

The funeral pyre is made of firs, vine branches, and other wood that burns easily.  The near relatives and the freedman take the bier and place it conveniently on the pile, and then the man who closes the eyes of the dead opens them again, making the defunct look up toward the sky, and gives him the last kiss.  Then they cover the pile with perfumes and essences, and collect about it all the articles of furniture,