When a Roman gentleman or lady was carried forth to his funeral pyre, he was preceded by a procession of actors dressed up in the togas and military or municipal insignia of departed ancestors, each wearing the wax mask of him he personified. For these masks were preserved with great care in the atrium of the house.
Now as Longa Duilia saw, to have her husband burned at Cenchræa, without a procession of imitation ancestors, would be to deprive the funeral of its most impressive feature.
Plancus had advised the burning at the port, with shorn rites, and that the ashes should be placed in the family mausoleum at Gabii, and that the utmost dignity should be accorded to this latter ceremony sufficient to content the most punctilious widow.
But this did not please the lady. The notion of a funeral with maimed pomp was distasteful to her; moreover, as she argued, it was illegal to have two funerals for the same man.
“That,” said Plancus, “hardly applies to one who has died out of Italy.”
“It is against the law,” replied Duilia. “I will give no occasion to objection, offer no handle to informers. Besides, I won’t have it. The respect I owe to Corbulo forbids the entertainment of such an idea. Really, and on my word, Plancus, I am not a child to be amused with shadow pictures, and unless you are making a rabbit, a fish, or a pig eating out of a trough, I cannot conceive what you are about with your hands, fumbling one over the other.”
“Madam, I had no thought——”
“I know you have none. Be pleased another time when addressing me to keep your hands quiet, it is irritating. One never knows where they are or will be, sometimes folding and unfolding them, then—they disappear up your sleeves and project none can guess where—like snails’ horns. Be pleased,—and now pawing your face like a cat washing itself. Please in future hold them in front of you like a dog when sitting up, begging. But as to the funeral—I will not have it cheap and nasty. Without ancestors a funeral is not worth having.”
“Then,” said the harassed freedman, “there is nothing for it but to engage an embalmer.”
“Of course—one can be obtained at Corinth. Everything can be had for money.”