The most striking part of an aristocratic Roman funeral was not the body. It was the imagines: wax portrait masks of the family's office-holding ancestors, kept in cupboards in the hall of the house, brought out for the procession and worn by men dressed in the insignia of the office each ancestor had held. The effect, as the Greek historian Polybius described it after watching one, was that a young Roman saw the whole line of his family assembled and listened to a speech recounting what each of them had done. He treated it as one of the most effective political institutions in Rome, and he was describing a funeral.
That display was the privilege of families that had held office, which sharpens the question of what everyone else did. The answer, across the Roman world, was to join a burial club. Collegia pooled monthly dues so that a member's funeral and a place for their ashes were paid for, and their surviving rules set out the sums, the entitlement and the penalties in businesslike detail. Slaves belonged to them alongside the freeborn poor. The columbaria, chambers walled with niches for hundreds of urns, are what those subscriptions bought.
The dead were not finished with after the novemdiale. At the Parentalia in February families went out to the tombs with offerings, and the Roman year had further days on which the dead were addressed. The obligation was to keep them fed and named, and a tomb left unattended was a recognised kind of failure.