Comparing death, burial and the underworld

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He throws black beans behind him without looking, saying that with them he ransoms himself and his family, and he clashes bronze objects and calls nine times for the ghosts of his fathers to leave the house.

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Source A shows how important public mourning was by the fact that Rome's earliest laws tried to limit it. The Twelve Tables restricted funerals to three mourning veils, a purple tunic and ten flute-players, and banned women from tearing their cheeks or wailing. A law is needed only against something people actually do, so loud, expensive displays of grief must have been a normal part of Roman funerals, and the limits suggest families used mourning to compete in showing their status.

Source B shows mourning as the very centre of the funeral. The panel between the handles is filled with the dead person on a high bier surrounded by rows of mourners raising their arms to their heads as if tearing their hair, so the lament is the moment the family chose to record. The large number of mourners honoured the dead and displayed the family's importance, and because the vase itself was about 1.6 m tall and stood over the grave, the display became permanent and public.

Both sources therefore show that public mourning mattered greatly, but the Roman source restricts it, while the Greek vase celebrates it - although Athens too later limited mourning under Solon.

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Source A remembers Claudia for the virtues of an ideal Roman wife. She 'loved her husband with all her heart' and bore two sons, so she fulfilled the central roles of wife and mother. 'She kept the house; she worked the wool' are the traditional virtues of the Roman matrona, and her charm in speech and grace in bearing show attractive, modest femininity. By addressing the passing stranger, the epitaph made these virtues public, advertising the respectability of her family as well as her own.

Source B remembers Hegeso within the same domestic world. She sits indoors, richly dressed, her feet on a footstool, choosing a piece of jewellery from a box held by her maid, so she is remembered for her beauty, wealth and status as the mistress of a household. The inscription names her as the 'daughter of Proxenos', defining her through her father and family, and her calm, dignified pose shows her as she was in life rather than in death.

Both sources therefore remember women for their place in the household and family, but Claudia is praised in words for active virtues such as wool-working and motherhood, whereas Hegeso is honoured in an image for her beauty, wealth and status.

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Grave markers and tombs were made by the living, for the living to see, so it is not surprising that many of them concentrate on the life of the dead person. But a good number also reveal beliefs about death, and even monuments about life show what people hoped would survive them.

Many Greek monuments show how people lived. The Hegeso stele shows a wealthy woman seated indoors choosing jewellery from a box held by her maid, and names her as 'daughter of Proxenos', so it tells us about her status, her family and the domestic ideal of women. The Ampharete stele shows a grandmother holding her grandchild, and the epitaph of the Kroisos kouros asks passers-by to mourn a young man 'whom raging Ares destroyed as he fought in the front ranks', recording the values of courage and family. The Dipylon amphora shows the lament at an aristocrat's funeral, which tells us more about funeral customs than about the afterlife.

Roman tombs are even more concerned with life. The tomb of Eurysaces, outside the Porta Maggiore, is decorated with scenes of bread-making to record his success as a baker and contractor. The tomb of the freedwoman Naevoleia Tyche at Pompeii advertises the public honours of her husband, and Claudia's epitaph praises her love for her husband, her two sons and the fact that she kept the house and worked the wool. Reliefs of freed couples display their new citizen status. Such monuments, lining the roads outside towns, were advertisements of a life well lived.

Yet some grave markers do reveal beliefs about death. Many white-ground lekythoi show Charon waiting in his boat, Hermes leading the dead, or Sleep and Death carrying a body, which shows how Athenians imagined the journey to the underworld. Ampharete's epitaph imagines the dead no longer seeing the light of the sun, and Phrasikleia's says she will always be called a maiden, having died before marriage. Roman tombstones beginning D M show belief in the Manes, the spirits of the dead, and prayers that the earth may lie light on the dead imply that they can still feel it, while the Epicurean formula 'I was not; I was; I am not; I do not care' denies any afterlife. These show a wide range of belief.

Overall, I largely agree. Most grave markers and tombs tell us more about the status, families, work and virtues of the dead than about the afterlife, because they were made to impress the living. But some, especially the lekythoi and the Roman epitaph formulas, reveal beliefs directly, and the very act of commemoration shows a widespread belief that being remembered was a kind of survival after death.