All-powerful custom restricted him to a narrow range of thought and action; and to have led a serious and strict or, to use the characteristic Latin expressions, a sad and severe life, was his glory. No one had more and no one had less to do than to keep his household in good order and manfully bear his part of counsel and action in public affairs. But, while the individual had neither the wish nor the power to be aught else than a member of the community, the glory and the might of that community were felt by every individual burgess as a personal possession to be transmitted along with his name and his homestead to his posterity; and thus, as one generation after another was laid in the tomb and each in succession added its fresh contribution to the stock of ancient honours, the collective sense of dignity in the noble families of Rome swelled into that mighty civic pride, the like of which the earth has never seen again, and the traces of which, as strange as they are grand, seem to us, wherever we meet them, to belong as it were to another world. It was one of the characteristic peculiarities of this powerful sense of citizenship, that it was, while not suppressed, yet compelled by the rigid simplicity and equality that prevailed among the citizens to remain locked up within the breast during life, and was only allowed to find expression after death; but then it was displayed in the funeral rites of the man of distinction so conspicuously and intensely, that this ceremonial is better fitted than any other phenomenon of Roman life to give to us who live in later times a glimpse of that wonderful spirit of the Romans.
A Roman Funeral
It was a singular procession, at which the burgesses were invited to be present by the summons of the public crier: "Yonder warrior is dead; whoever can, let him come to escort Lucius Aemilius; he is borne forth from his house." It was opened by bands of wailing women, musicians, and