Death and Burial in the Roman World

Jocelyn M. C. Toynbee's Death and Burial in the Roman World, published by Thames and Hudson in 1971, is an academic monograph surveying Roman funerary practice and belief, cremation and inhumation, tomb architecture, epitaphs and the material evidence for what Romans across the empire actually did with and believed about their dead. Toynbee was a leading Roman art and archaeology specialist working from the excavated and inscribed material record. Its strength is the comprehensiveness of that material survey, drawing together funerary evidence from across the Roman world into one reference. Its limit is that it was written over fifty years ago, and Roman archaeology has continued to excavate new burial sites and refine dating and interpretive method since, so a claim resting on a specific regional or period detail of Roman burial custom benefits from checking against more recent excavation reports alongside Toynbee's foundational synthesis.