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Re-examining Roman Death Pollution

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 August 2020

Allison L. C. Emmerson
Allison L. C. Emmerson*
Affiliation:
Tulane University, New Orleans
*
aemmerso@tulane.edu
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Abstract

The idea that the dead were polluting — that is, that corpses posed a danger of making the living unclean, offensive both to their own communities and to the gods — has long occupied a fundamental position in Roman funerary studies. Nevertheless, what that pollution comprised, as well as how it affected living society, remain subject to debate. This article aims to clarify the issue by re-examining the evidence for Roman attitudes towards the dead. Focusing on the city of Rome itself, I conclude that we have little reason to reconstruct a fear of death pollution prior to Late Antiquity; in fact, the term itself has been detrimental to current understandings. No surviving text from the late republican or early imperial periods indicates that corpses were objects of metaphysical fear, and rather than polluted, mourners are better conceived as obligated, bound by a variable combination of emotions and conventions to behave in certain, if certainly changeable, ways following a death.

Keywords

Romereligiondeathfunerary studiespollutionritual
Type
Articles
Information
The Journal of Roman Studies , Volume 110 , November 2020 , pp. 5 - 27
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by The Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies

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Footnotes

I am grateful for the many friends and colleagues who have provided feedback during the long gestation of this project, above all John Bodel, Dennis Kehoe, Ryan Boehm, Tom Carpenter, Joseph Farrell, Cynthia Bannon, Liana Brent and Mark Letteney. I also thank the Editor, Christopher Kelly, and the Journal's anonymous readers, as well as the organisers of, and participants in, the American Academy in Rome's panel at the 2020 joint annual meeting of the AIA and SCS, where I presented a preliminary version of this article.

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