Numa

The Pontifices also explain and direct the ancestral rites of burial for those who desire it, and they were taught by Numa not to regard any such offices as a pollution, but to honour the gods below also with the customary rites, since they receive into their keeping the most sovereign part of us, and particularly the goddess called Libitina, who presides over the solemn services for the dead, whether she is Proserpina, or, as the most learned Romans maintain, Venus; thereby not inaptly connecting man’s birth and death with the power of one and the same goddess.

Numa himself also regulated the periods of mourning according to ages. For instance, over a child of less than three years there was to be no mourning at all; over one older than that, the mourning was not to last more months than it had lived years, up to ten; and no age was to be mourned longer than that, but ten months was the period set for the longest mourning.[*](Cf. chapter xix. 1. ) This is also the period during which women who have lost their husbands remain in widowhood, and she who took another husband before this term was out, was obliged by the laws of Numa to sacrifice a cow with calf.