ABSTRACT
In the end all Romans died. It is fitting then to look, in this last section on religion and beliefs, at how they died, how their remains were disposed of, and how they were commemorated. In doing so, our most immediate contact is made with the individuals who lived in the Roman World. The remains of people and the residues of those ceremonies they used to take them through the universal experience of death are dealt with directly. Yet as in so many aspects of the study of the Roman World, care must be taken in the use of the different kinds of evidence that are available. In particular, the abundant literary and artistic evidence for funerary practices must be handled with caution. Literary works, fine bas-reliefs, or even tombstones were all made for the relatively prosperous upper classes of Roman society and were themselves expressions of Roman traditions. As such, they cannot be taken automatically as indicators of the meanings of what was done in the burials of the masses of the population. The only information to be gained about the humble people who made up most of the population of the Roman Empire is to be found in the archaeology of their burial-places. There the interpretation of what archaeologists have discovered has more in common with the approaches of prehistoric study than of classical literature or art history. Nevertheless, one of the greatest assets to the study of Roman burial is that there is a substantial amount of information about the rituals which surrounded the burial of the remains which survive for the excavator. Even though such evidence and what is known about ideas on the after-life may both relate to a classical Roman ideal of what was supposed to happen, it is interesting to see what can be found to tell how far these ideals were followed and how they related to the local native traditions in the provinces.
