Some modern holidays, including Halloween and Dia de los Muertos, are rooted in the idea that on certain special occasions the spirits of the dead can return and walk among the living. The living can join the celebrations by disguising themselves to mingle with the spirits.
The ancient Romans did not celebrate a holiday quite like our modern ones, but the idea that the dead could still be present in the living world, and that living people can use masks and costumes to blur the line between living and dead, is one that they would have recognized. Here is a detail of Roman funeral customs reported by the Greek historian Polybius:
After burying the body with the customary rites, they place an image of the deceased in the most prominent part of the house with a wooden shrine around it. This image is a mask of the deceased’s face, shaped and painted to be an extraordinary likeness of the dead person. They display these masks with great reverence on public occasions, and whenever some prominent member of the household dies, they are worn by participants in the funeral procession, whoever seems to best match the original’s appearance in shape and size. They also don appropriate clothing: if the ancestor was a consul or praetor, a toga with purple edges; if a censor, a wholly purple toga; if he had celebrated a triumph, a toga worked through with gold.
Polybius, History of Rome 6.53
(My own translation)
Our modern traditions are different (these Roman worthies weren’t going trick-or-treating), but there is something ancient about the feeling that, on certain special occasions, the line between living and dead may not be quite as clear as we think.
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