Blurring the Boundaries: Interactions between the Living and the Dead in the Roman World

Corpse abuse in ancient Rome, or more properly, the corpse abuse of (in)famous individuals (Marius' ashes scattered by Sulla; Pompey's decapitation and corpse abuse; and Sejanus' corpse dragged by a hook then tossed into the Tiber) is frequently an epilogue to personal or political enmity. Corpses are vulnerable to abuse ranging from verbal and physical assault, mutilation, and non-disposal.

In Roman law, the crime of tomb violation prohibited damage to the monument or memory of an individual, as well as unwanted disturbances or unauthorized additions to existing burials (de Visscher 1963; Kaser 1978; Caldelli et al. 2004; Thomas 2004; Paturet 2014). From the time that human remains were deposited into a grave, a tomb became a religious space (locus religiosus) that was legally defined, although its protection mainly concerned the integrity of the tomb structure or monument (Duday and Van Andringa 2017).

That the dead were polluting—i.e., that corpses posed a danger of making the living somehow unclean, offensive to both the living community and the gods—is thought to be among the most essential Roman beliefs about death.

In the periphery of Rome, the “world of the dead” and the “world of the living” were famously both distinct and intermeshed at the same time (Erasmo 2001). On the one hand, burial was relegated to outside the pomerium on religious grounds; on the other, funerary monuments were regularly visited, their epitaphs commonly address passing travelers directly, and burial took place within the city at least occasionally (Volpe 2017). The boundaries between the living and the dead were thus permeable and they also changed over time as the pomerium was successively expanded (Patterson 2000).