Abstract
Despite strong prohibitions concerning contact between corpses and the living, the dead occupied an important position within the physical and literary life of Rome. This paper explores the metaphorical importance of certain rituals and literary allusions to death and the dead, in which Romans found themselves symbolically among the dead. I focus on literary and epigraphic evidence of the middle to late Republican and early Empire periods. By reading death in ancient Rome, we can reconstruct the extent to which the dead were reintegrated into society and how the deceased ancestors, in turn, welcomed the newly deceased back into the family in funeral ritual.
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