This text is part of:
Search the Perseus Catalog for:
[3]
The women also, by private agreement amongst themselves, mourned a whole year for him, with a mourning which was honourable and enviable.1 He was buried, too, by express vote of the citizens, within the city, near the so-called Velia,2 and all his family were to have privilege of burial there. Now, however, none of the family is actually buried there, but the body is carried thither and set down, and some one takes a burning torch and molds it under the bier for an instant, and then takes it away, attesting by this act that the deceased has the right of burial there, but relinquishes the honour. After this the body is borne away.
1 ‘In the following year, Agrippa Menemus and P. Postumius being consuls, P. Valerius, by universal consent the foremost Roman in the arts of war and peace, died, in the height of his glory, but so poor that means to defray his funeral expenses were lacking. He was therefore buried at the public charge, and the matrons mourned for him as they had done for Brutus’ (Livy, ii. 16, 7).
2 See chapter x. 2.
Plutarch. Plutarch's Lives. with an English Translation by. Bernadotte Perrin. Cambridge, MA. Harvard University Press. London. William Heinemann Ltd. 1914. 1.
This text was converted to electronic form by optical character recognition and has been proofread to a high level of accuracy.
Purchase a copy of this text (not necessarily the same edition) from Amazon.com
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.