Harry Thurston Peck, Harpers Dictionary of Classical Antiquities (1898)

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Libitīna

An ancient Italian goddess of voluptuous delight and of gardens, vineyards, and vintages, originally connected with Venus, and therefore often called Venus Libitina. She was also regarded as the goddess of death and of the departed, and was therefore afterwards identified with Proserpina. By an ancient ordinance, asscribed originally to Servius Tullius, for every person who died in Rome a piece of money was deposited in her temple. Everything requisite for burials was kept there, and had to be bought or borrowed from it. Hence a person undertaking the burial of a person (an undertaker) was called libitinarius, and his business libitina; whence the expression libitina funeribus non sufficiebat—i. e. they could not all be buried. Owing to the connection of Libitina with the dead, the Roman poets frequently employ her name in the sense of death itself.