Roman Tombs

[ 3 pages, 5 woodcuts, 1 photo ]

Smith's Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities (1875) includes a very good article on the Roman funeral, and a couple of much smaller related articles.

[ 4/17/01: 8 pages, 3 photos ]

Among the articles of Platner and Ashby's Topographical Dictionary of Ancient Rome you will currently find pages on a number of tombs within the city of Rome: the so‑called Sepulcretum (proto­historic tombs in the Roman Forum), the Pyramid of C. Cestius, the Tomb of the baker Eurysaces, the tomb of Caesar's daughter Julia, the Mausoleum of Augustus, and the ustrina where the bodies of the emperors were cremated; but also the puticuli (the graves of the poor). Other articles are also useful: Trajan's tomb is covered under the Forum Trajani, for example.

[ 4 long webpages, at least 27 images ]

Rodolfo Lanciani's book Pagan and Christian Rome contains an enormous amount of often fascinating information on Roman tombs, especially in Late Antiquity. Four full chapters of it, well over a hundred pages in the print edition, are devoted to the tombs of the emperors, the tombs of the popes, and the tombs of ordinary people both pagan and Christian.

[ 2/23/01: 14 pages, 15 photos ]

If you're chiefly interested in tombstones and the inscriptions on them, the Latin Inscriptions section of LacusCurtius includes good readable photos of a number of them, fully transcribed and translated, and usually with additional commentary: you also have the choice of looking at the raw photo as a test, then checking your skills against the "solution" page.

The site also includes a couple hundred transcribed inscriptions (of varying reliability, I fear); you can ask me to put the corresponding photo online: most of these inscriptions are of course funerary.

[ 17 pages of print, 4 photos ]

The Roman Era in Britain, a book by John Ward (1911), includes the interesting chapter Sepulchral Remains: a survey of burial practices, inhumation vs. cremation, grave goods, the then recent finds, museum holdings, and funerary inscriptions.