Otium (Dec 2017)
La mort, la souillure, la terre et le droit dans l’ancienne Rome
Abstract
In the ancient Roman world, as soon as the spark of life abandoned the corpse, it becomes the prey of a fetid corruption that disfigures it and makes an object of community defilement. The familia was considered funesta and has to be purified with an appropriate rite. Indeed, it was only after the sacrifice of the porca praesentanea to Ceres and after the meal at the end of the funeral that the family returns pure. However, the contamination attached to the body continues to exist and is channeled by burial in the ground which is contaminated by the presence of dead corpse. As a consequence, the Roman legal sources established a distinction between religiosus (touched by death) and purus or profanus land. This contamination is reversible and depends exclusively on the presence of the body into the ground. In case of extraction and transfer of the corpse to another location, the original spot becomes again profane or pure. In the Roman funerary ideology, defilement is attached to the corpse and is rooted in its transformation from alive to dead body. Beyond this anthropological point of view which implies an exceptional status, the defilement remains very pragmatically the source of lots of legal and administrative prescriptions in the daily management of death.
