Burial and Betrayal: Punishing Social Transgressions in the Ancient Roman Cemetery

Darcy Tuttle examines how private individuals used funerary spaces to settle scores against those perceived as "badly deserving." While Roman monuments standardly promised proper burial, ongoing offerings, and cult rituals connecting the living to the dead, select case studies of social betrayal from the first three centuries CE reveal a darker counter-practice. Through these documented incidents, the talk traces how citizens attempted to enforce postmortem punishments and strip transgressors of their place among both the living and the honored dead.