31. Mourning at Roman Funerals Was… Tricky
The Romans, who liked to see themselves as the serious and stolid types, went in for the stiff upper lip and avoiding excessive displays of emotion. That, however, created a bit of a conundrum when it came to funerals. On the one hand, the more people attended a funeral, and the showier the funerary procession was, the more respected the deceased was. On the other hand, an excessive display of grief by the deceased’s relatives – especially for upper-class Romans – was seen as somewhat gauche and undignified. So they solved that by hiring professional mourners.
For a fee, special women could be hired to do all the extraordinary wailing and ostentatious displays of grief – the kinds of emotional displays that custom kept well-born Roman women from demonstrating in public. The professional mourners would weep to impress the crowds, and to seriously sell their sadness, they would throw dust and dirt on themselves, tear out their hair, rip their clothes, and scratch their faces until they drew blood. Eventually, those ostentatious displays of professional mourning became too much. So laws were passed to prohibit the hiring of professional mourners because their antics “invoked strong emotions and were incompatible with the idea of the quiet life of the citizen“.