Augustus_ The Life of Rome's First Emperor - Anthony Everitt [186]
However, Tiberius held traditional views and disapproved of women openly intervening in public affairs. When the Senate voted her the honorific title of parens patriae, or parent of the fatherland, Tiberius rejected the offer on her behalf. It soon became clear that power lay with him alone, although, despite his annoyance at her elevation, he continued to seek his mother’s advice in private.
The funeral of a leading Roman was an event that combined terror, splendor, and solemnity, and although we do not have the details of the order of service for Augustus, it will have broadly followed the regular procedure. As was always the case, the ceremony took place at night.
A procession formed to convey the body from the house on the Palatine to its last resting place. Almost the entire population of Rome turned out onto the streets, and troops lined the route to ensure public order. The procession was managed by a dominus funeris, or master of the funeral, attended by lictors dressed in black. It was headed by trumpeters playing mournful music, and girls and boys of the nobility sang a dirge in praise of the dead man.
Farce and laughter can be a means of purging grief, or at least alleviating it. A troupe of clowns and mimes was sometimes hired at funerals; the performers would follow the musicians and singers, led by an archimimus, who imitated the speech and gestures of the dead man.
Like most wealthy Romans, Augustus will have liberated some of his slaves in his will. They came next in the procession, wearing the special cap of liberty that was given to freedmen.
The bier then appeared. This was a couch made of ivory and gold and spread with a purple and gold pall. Beneath the covering, Augustus’ body was hidden in a coffin; above it, a wax effigy in triumphal costume was displayed. The bier was accompanied by a statue of the princeps in gold and another of him riding a triumphal chariot. Statues of his ancestors were also carried, as well as personified images of the nations he had added to the empire, and of leading Romans of the past. Interestingly, Pompey the Great was among the company, but Julius Caesar was excluded on the grounds of his divinity.
The family, dressed in mourning, walked behind, among them Julia Augusta. The entire Senate were in attendance, as were many equites, and the Praetorian Guard. Anybody who was anybody was present.
The cortège stopped in the Forum, where Tiberius and his son Drusus, both dressed in gray, delivered eulogies. It then wended its way through the Porta Triumphalis, the gate through which triumphal processions entered the city, and arrived at Augustus’ mausoleum in the Campus Martius. The awe-inspiring climax of the ceremony approached.
In the early Republic, Romans were usually buried, but by the end of the first century B.C. almost everyone was cremated. Augustus’ body was laid on a pyre in the ustrinum, or crematorium, next to the mausoleum. Once the bier was in place, all Rome’s priests marched around it, followed by the equites. Then the Praetorian Guard circled it at a run and threw on the pyre all the triumphal decorations (often valuable silver or gold plaques) any of them had received from the princeps in recognition of acts of valor.
Centurions lit the pyre, and as the flames rose an eagle was released and flew up into the sky, as if bearing Augustus’ spirit into the heavens. A former praetor, presumably a man with an eye for the main chance, solemnly swore that he saw the spirit of the princeps on its journey upward. Julia Augusta rewarded his sharpness of sight with the huge sum of one million sesterces.
Perfume was thrown onto the fire, as well as things that the dead man would have enjoyed—cups of oil, clothes, and dishes of food. The ghosts of the dead, the manes, liked to drink blood, which reinvigorated