=150. Great Funerals Very Fashionable. Desire to Be Remembered after Death.=--Before he died, Gordianus also gave particular orders about his funeral. Every Roman seems to look forward to his obsequies with a melancholy, but an enormous interest. If he is poor, he hoards his money and joins a coöperative burial society to provide for final rites that will be long remembered. If he is rich, he will leave nothing undone to succeed in impressing the entire city that it has lost an important citizen. Under the Republic the funerals of great personages were really public pageants, deliberately calculated to teach young nobles the glory of a long career spent in the service of the state. Under the Empire these customs are still maintained, although often they are nothing more than vulgar displays showing forth the wealth of the deceased. The age does not believe earnestly in immortality. Epicureans deny it outright, and Stoics more than doubt. Sometimes a very gross view of death is taken, that it is merely the careless end of a round of sensual pleasures. You can occasionally read on tombstones inscriptions like this: “_Bathing, wine, and love-affairs--these hurt our bodies, but they make life worth living. I’ve lived my days. I revelled, and I drank all that I desired. Once I was not; then I was; now I am not again--but I don’t care!_”[90] But most persons, especially grave Stoics like Gordianus, view death otherwise. Death means a going out into the dark; a process of being forgotten by those who once loved or admired you. If, by a splendid funeral, you can make your memory last a little longer, who would fail having one? Hence the excuse for very costly obsequies, often for unimportant individuals. =151. Preliminaries to a Funeral.=--The moment Gordianus seemed to be breathing his last his son bent over his face as if to catch his final sigh. Then immediately the young man called his father three times “Quintus! Quintus! Quintus!” partly to make sure he was dead; partly as a signal to start off all the expectant slaves and freedmen in loud and frenzied lamentation through all the wide domus. A messenger promptly summoned a fashionable _libitinarius_ (funeral director) who undertook to conduct everything in the best possible style. While the house rang with outcries, professional experts washed the body in warm water and took immediately a waxen impression of the features. The dead was thereupon dressed in an embroidered toga, such as he might have worn when a magistrate, and was placed on a gilded couch in the atrium with the feet towards the door, beside which was set a bunch of cypress or pine, in token of the sorrow in the house. Skillful embalmers were available and the actual funeral could have been delayed as much as a week. This was not necessary, however, and the ceremony took place in two days--time enough to arrange the great pyre and other necessary matters.