mpet on all the squares and
chief places of the city by the crier of the dead, in the following
form: 'Such a citizen has departed from this life, and let all who wish
to be present at his obsequies know that it is time; he is now to be
carried from his dwelling.'"

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