“But, Lady, Lucius Lamia agrees with me——”
“Lucius Ælius Lamia—it will not exhaust your lungs to give him his name more fully—is not as yet one of the family.”
“Madam, consider how Agrippina did with Germanicus—she had his pyre at Antioch, and conveyed his ashes to Rome.”
“Agrippina was able to have the funeral conducted with solemn pomp at Antioch. There were the soldiers, the lictors, great officers and all that sort of thing. Here—nothing at all. By the Immortals—consider the expenses, and none to look on gaping but tarry sailors and Jew rag-and-bone men.”
“Madam!”
“Silence. Without ancestors!—as impossible as without wood.”
To understand the point made so much of by the widow, the Roman funeral custom must be understood.
On the death of a noble or high official, his face was immediately moulded in wax, into a mask, or rather, into two masks, that were colored and supplied with glass eyes. One was placed over the dead face, when the corpse lay in state, and when he was conveyed to his funeral pyre, and the first effect of the rising flames was to dissolve the mask and disclose the dead features.
The ancient Greeks before they burned their dead laid gold-leaf masks on their faces, and in a still earlier time the face of the corpse was rouged with oxide of iron, to give it a false appearance of life.
But the second mask was preserved for the family portrait gallery.