Disreputable bakers and unclean undertakers
Bakers do not strike me as at all disreputable, but Cicero included them among the least respectable of trades since they catered to voluptas, sensual pleasure. There is no accounting for taboo.
A taboo is something you don’t do, or rather a thing not to be done, such as marrying your sister – or, in Cicero’s book, becoming a baker. Taboos are related to religion, dirt and holiness, as Mary Douglas, the great 20th-century anthropologist, showed.
We needn’t feel superior to South Sea islanders or Congolese forest-dwellers, for taboos rule Western lives quite as strongly. A recent string of letters in this paper on the best way of escaping a public lavatory without touching the door handle demonstrated that.
The point about Cicero and bakers comes in a learned new book by the classicist Sarah E Bond called Trade and Taboo, on disreputable professions in the Roman Mediterranean. Bakers suffered disapproval, but it was worse, she explains, for gravediggers.
The general Roman view was that corpses emitted a kind of death pollution. The social stigma of infamia attached to those who dealt with death. Puteoli (now Pozzuoli), for example, decreed that undertakers’ men must wear distinctive caps (probably red) and live outside the city. They would go into the city by night to collect corpses.
It was big business in Rome, where between 100BC and AD200 about 12million bodies had to be disposed of. Outside the Esquiline gate, hundreds of burial pits were excavated in the 19th century. Animal remains jostled with the corpses of the poor.
Undertakers offered other low services such as supplying executioners and hiring out instruments of torture to punish slaves. Executioners might be slaves themselves, as was Zosimus, who in 304 was required to execute Christians in Thessalonica who wouldn’t undertake sacrifices. The bosses, dissignatores, combined arranging funerals with putting on theatricals; they were undertakers and impresarios. Their degree of disreputability was not so chthonic as those who touched corpses. No one polluted by death could perform sacrifices or take part in certain public rituals.
We are aware, of course, from the Bible that corpses made anyone who touched them ritually unclean in Jewish religion. The difference was that, while for Romans burial was a family duty, Jews took on a communal commitment to bury all, including the unclaimed bodies of the poor.
This was inherited by the early Christians. Tertullian, who lived in the 2nd to 3rd century, wrote of Christians paying to ensure burial of the destitute. The new element was that corpses were no longer ritually polluting. The most popular image in the catacombs was of Christ raising Lazarus from the dead. In a later text from the 7th century, Christ is called a gravedigger.
While in classical Roman literature, mortuary workers were often seen as infamous robbers, in early Christian writings they were frequently portrayed as faithful and pious. In Cirta, in Roman North Africa, fossores or gravediggers were reckoned among the orders of clerics in AD303.
At Lyon in AD177, Christians were anxious to recover bodies of martyrs from the amphitheatre. When Polycarp was burned in martyrdom in the 2nd century, his bones were recovered as “more valuable than precious stones”. By a participation in the death and Resurrection of Christ, martyrs’ remains had now acquired the holy status of relics.