9. Roman Funerals Were Highly Melodramatic
Ancient Romans liked to see themselves as the serious and stolid types, so they put on a stiff upper lip and avoided excessive displays of emotion. That, however, created a problem when it came to funerals. On the one hand, the more people attended a funeral, and the showier the funerary procession was, the more respected the deceased was. On the other hand, excessive displays of grief by the deceased’s relatives – especially for upper-class Romans – were seen as gauche and undignified. To solve the conundrum, they used professional mourners.
For a fee, special women wailed and put on the ostentatious displays of grief that custom barred well-born Roman women from demonstrating in public. The professional mourners wept to impress the crowds and to seriously sell their sadness, threw dust and dirt on themselves, tore out their hair, ripped their clothes, and scratched their faces until they drew blood. Eventually, those ostentatious displays became too much. So laws were passed to prohibit the hiring of professional mourners because their antics “invoked strong emotions and were incompatible with the idea of the quiet life of the citizen“.
