ABSTRACT
Through an analysis of the striking episode of Julius Caesar speaking at his own funeral, this chapter argues that Roman funeral rites, like funeral rites of other cultures both historical and contemporary, provided a mechanism through which the ritual community could commune with the spirits of the dead. The chapter focuses specifically on the pompa funebris within the wider framework of Roman funerary ritual. The discussion draws upon the results of cognitive psychology and proposes that processes of sensory manipulation that engender states of ecstasy were just as important in this ritual endeavor as processes of what cognitive scientists call predictive coding—the brain’s ability to make sense of the confused mental state in such rituals.
