Juris civilis initia et progressus. Ad leges XII. Tabularum brevis commentatio. Ex Ulpiani Fragmentorum Tituli XXIX. selectis notis illustrati. Gaii ex veteris jurisprudentiae Fragmentis Institutionu

it had been the custom that whoever was dead should be brought back to his own home. Whence it is in Virgil:

Bring him back before his own dwelling, and bury him in a tomb.

Nor burn. I believe, says Cicero, it is also on account of the danger of fire.

Cicero, On Laws, book 2.

DO NOT DO MORE THAN THIS.

These words are an appendix to some previous law that defined the measure of funerals and expenses: as if the law were written in such a sense that, when it had prescribed a limit to those things, it then added this as a sort of sanction.

DO NOT SMOOTH THE FUNERAL PYRE WITH AN ADZE.

The law commands that the pyre be constructed from rough and unpolished wood; it forbids the use of an adze, which is the carpenter’s axe used to polish rough timber. Therefore, the law removes superfluous and useless expenses from funerals.

Cicero, Book 2, On Laws.

WOMEN SHALL NOT TEAR THEIR CHEEKS, NOR SHALL THEY HAVE WAILING ON ACCOUNT OF A FUNERAL.

From Cicero, Book 2, On Laws.

He said that the interpreters of the old XII. Tables, Sextus Aelius and L. Acilius, did not sufficiently understand what Lessus was, but suspected it was some kind of funeral garment. However, L. Aelius thought that Lessus was a kind of mournful lamentation, as the word itself signifies. He says he judges this to be the more true, because Solon’s law forbids the very same thing.

Pliny, passage in Book 11, chapter 73.

Regarding the tearing of cheeks, Pliny writes thus: Below the eyes are the cheeks, which only men possess, and which the ancients called genas. The Twelve Tables forbid them to be torn by women.