It would be helpful to be told mortuary statistics of the period to understand what percentage of the populous could even consider funerary games, or a multi day rite. I'm going with "very few" I mean a senate of a few hundred, a thousand knights, one dies every month? More?
I tend to think one a month would be excessive, but perhaps a small cohort at a game had paid toward it for their memento mori or even a dozen of them, each saying it was "their" funeral games? Even small towns had a venue for games, but could you book it at short notice or was the bidding open to buy a days (or an hours?) Games as your turn? Was it rude not to go? Did you cater?
Renting out professional mourners means running a booking system, time management. Leave Stichus's funeral at lunchtime, get Gallus done before sundown, wash, then hang around for the night specials... could you do two a day let alone three?
This is more what kinds of things happened at an upper class to patrician funeral. Down on the suburba, I bet it was women keening in the home, a swift out, bury or burn and back.
If you had wax effigies, you were going there. If you weren't on the cursus honarium or a knight, or very very rich, I don't think you were. Ex slaves got rich, so this was money as well as birthright stuff.
This is what is so different now, data. Info. It bet it is fairly rare, for us to have docs surviving for a slave funeral. Or for an 'average joe' furneral. Who would bother to write that? Keep that?
Yet now, we have too much data. Still, just the movies/video/TV has at least some representation of what an average person might do during a funeral.
I tend to think one a month would be excessive, but perhaps a small cohort at a game had paid toward it for their memento mori or even a dozen of them, each saying it was "their" funeral games? Even small towns had a venue for games, but could you book it at short notice or was the bidding open to buy a days (or an hours?) Games as your turn? Was it rude not to go? Did you cater?
Renting out professional mourners means running a booking system, time management. Leave Stichus's funeral at lunchtime, get Gallus done before sundown, wash, then hang around for the night specials... could you do two a day let alone three?
This is more what kinds of things happened at an upper class to patrician funeral. Down on the suburba, I bet it was women keening in the home, a swift out, bury or burn and back.
If you had wax effigies, you were going there. If you weren't on the cursus honarium or a knight, or very very rich, I don't think you were. Ex slaves got rich, so this was money as well as birthright stuff.