Sarcophagus with couple personifying semidivine water and earth deities Roman 2nd century CE at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Sarcophagus with couple personifying semidivine water and earth deities Roman 2nd century CE at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The Romans absorbed a great deal of Etruscan funerary art practices. Above ground mausolea were rare during the Pre-Republican Period. Underground tombs and tumuli were far more common methods of burial. The early Romans buried those who could not afford such accommodations in mass graves or cremated them. Few remain extant except in Praeneste, or present day Palestrina, where approximately forty early mausolea are still intact. Etruscan influence extended into the early Republic, with mausolea styles becoming more consistent as Roman influence increased throughout the Latin League. One of the most significant of these is the tomb of the Scipios that still exists adjacent to the Via di Porta San Sebastiano just outside of Rome.

During the Hellenistic mid-Republic both the interiors and exteriors of mausolea adopted staples of Classical architecture such as barrel vaulted roofs, klinai, which were full body benches upon which the dead lay, painted facades, ornate columns, and friezes along the roofs. During this era, most Romans acknowledged the idea that above ground burial allows the public to better remember the deceased. Clearly in accordance with their tradition of the mos maiorum, Romans began to set aside money to build vast new mausolea for the preservation of their legacies. By the Augustan period, mausolea reflected influences of Greece, Asia Minor and North Africa following their Roman conquest.

With the advent of the Empire mausolea were used more extensively as resting places for not just immediate family but extended family, slaves, freedmen, concubines, clients, animals, and other intimate acquaintances. Former masters provided financial assistance to their freedman and some of the freedmen's mausolea became as impressive as those of wealthy citizens. In fact, the most expensive and ostentatious grave altars and ash chests were commissioned more frequently by wealthy freedmen and other members of the emerging middle class than by the Roman elite.

Although Etruscans and Greeks used sarcophagi for centuries before the Romans, inhumation with the use of sarcophagi did not become widely adopted in the Empire until the second century CE. Surviving evidence indicates that a great majority of early sarcophagi were used for children. This suggests families may have viewed inhumation as a kinder, and less disturbing burial rite than cremation. At first, sarcophagi were decorated in a fashion similar to grave altars and ash chests with floral garlands but Etruscan styles with couples reclining on the sarcophagus lid also remerged like this 2nd century CE Roman sarcophagus at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Met describes the couple as personifications of semidivine water and earth deities. "Like Hellenistic and Roman images of river gods, the bare-chested man holds a long reed, and a lizard-like creature crouches beside him. The woman holds a garland and two sheaves of wheat, attributes of Tellus, goddess of the earth. At her feet is a furry-tailed mammal with a small Eros on its back. While the man’s head is carefully portrayed, his wife’s head has been left unfinished, suggesting that he predeceased her, and no one added her portrait after she died."

Image courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art.