Sulla's burial.

or stretchers: but the more powerful, on couches. Thus, Sulla is said to have had six thousand couches.

NOR SHALL GOLD BE ADDED:

but to whom the teeth shall have been fastened with gold, it shall be permitted, without penalty, to bury or burn him with it.

The law forbids gold to be thrown into sepulchers, since the custom among the ancients was that many precious things were thrown onto the pyre along with the dead person. That which is understood from very many passages of Virgil and the commentaries of Servius upon them.

And one may admire the leptologian pedantry/attention to detail: that in such a small number of very serious laws, they nevertheless thought it necessary to legislate on a matter so trivial, and which rarely occurs; when, however (as our Pomponius warns), laws ought to be constituted, as Theophrastus said, in those things which happen for the most part, not those which happen by paradox. Unless, perhaps, it is that which both Plutarch and others testify, that the Romans, in matters pertaining to sacred rites and religion, such as those of the Di Manes the ancestral spirits, were wondrously anxious and led to the height of superstition.

NEITHER A PYRE NOR A TOMB

From Cicero, Book 2, On Laws.

shall one build or add nearer than sixty feet to another’s house, against the will of the owner: nor shall one acquire by use the courtyard of a sepulcher or a tomb.

Pyre.
Rogus.
Bustum.

Pyre, says Servius, is a pile of wood: it is called a Rogus when it has begun to burn: but it is called a Bustum when it is already burned out, as if well-burned.

However, that Bustum is used by the law for a sepulcher in which someone has been buried, even this is evidence: first, because when it cautions about the interval of the place, it shows that one thing is