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the manes derived pleasure from flowers strewn about their graves; whether the tradition of providing them with a meal on these occasions was equally long-standing is unclear, but it was certainly well-established at the outset of the Empire.
Interpretation of the Cult Practices
Since the late nineteenth century, a series of exceptionally competent classicists, notably Attilio de-Marchi, Franz Bömer and Jocelyn Toynbee, have focussed their attention on the cult of the dead in the Roman world. Each has compiled the relevant evidence with painstaking thoroughness, but without attempting to explore similar institutions in other cultures. In the absence of such an analytic framework, however, historians of Greece and Rome have not been able to generate a set of meaningful questions against which to test these accumulated data. The major advantage of the comparative approach employed here is that it locates this mass of information in a broader anthropological setting, where pertinent questions are already to hand. These have been raised by anthropologists with a specific interest in mortuary practices, whose work in contemporary societies, including the Chinese, has grown increasingly sophisticated over the last thirty years.
At the outset, it must be emphasized that the concerns of the modern anthropologist cannot be blindly grafted onto the ancient material. Because classical scholars will always be restricted by the deficiencies of their evidence, there are several interesting questions that cannot even be attempted. One brief example will elucidate the point. Anthropologists at work in Taiwan and the New Territories have frequently examined the generational depth of the ancestral cult in the villages in which they have conducted their field studies. At what point, they ask, does an ascendant cease to receive offerings as an individual on his death-day anniversary and become instead an undifferentiated member of those distant ancestors who are honoured collectively on other occasions? In a land-poor village, for example, Steven Harrell determined that ancestors "more than one or two generations removed from the eldest living family members” received combined offerings at the Ch'ung Yang." Ahern found