Tacitus tells us that Nero, a bad-tempered emperor at the best of times, killed his wife Poppaea in A.D. 65 by kicking her in the stomach when she was pregnant (or maybe by a less dastardly dose of poison). He goes on: ‘The body was not consigned to the flames, as is the Roman custom (mos Romanus), but following the practice of foreign kings it was embalmed with spices’ (Ann. 16.6 (written c. A.D. 115)). Three hundred years later, though, Macrobius could say that cremation was the sort of thing that people only read about in books (Sat. 7.7.5). Two interesting stories, to be sure. There are strict limits on what we can do with them, but they hint at the biggest single event in ancient burial, the change in ‘the Roman custom’ from cremation to inhumation. This involved tens of millions of people across the whole western part of the empire.

This is the first of two linked chapters dealing specifically with the body. The body is a uniquely powerful medium for ritual communication, furnishing a set of ‘natural symbols’, as some would call them. Intuitive awareness of this led early ethnologists to seek pan-human explanations for burial customs. After observing one funeral, Frazer claimed that ‘Heavy stones were piled on his grave to keep him down, on the principle of “sit tibi terra gravis”’ (a little Latin humour here, reversing the common Roman epitaph ‘sit tibi terra levis’, ‘may the earth be light upon you’).