Funerary monument of Publius Vesonius Phileros, Porta Nocera Necropolis, Pompeii
Burial and Betrayal
Darcy Tuttle
ISAW Research Scholar
This event will take place in person at ISAW.
Registration is required at THIS LINK.
The ancient Roman cemetery is often framed as the domain of the “well deserving,” as funerary monuments frequently formulaically assert. These dead were deserving of proper burial, of commemoration, and of the ongoing provision of offerings and other cult activities that both integrated them into the community of the dead and maintained their relationships with the living. But what might happen to the “badly deserving?” By examining select case studies of social betrayal documented in Roman cemeteries from the first three centuries CE, this talk will explore efforts at enforcing postmortem punishments against those perceived to have violated Roman social norms. It will argue that these stories of betrayal, while unique in their specifics, together illuminate the ways in which private individuals could seek to impose a form of afterlife exile upon those they deemed guilty of social transgressions.
Darcy Tuttle is a Research Scholar at ISAW. Her research draws on historical, archaeological, epigraphic, and literary evidence to explore how people engaged with and related to the dead in the ancient Italy. She is an active field archaeologist with involvement in two projects based in Italy: the Gabii Project and the Southern Etruscan Tomb Survey. She recently completed her PhD at the University of California, Berkeley in the Graduate Group in Ancient History and Mediterranean Archaeology. Prior to joining ISAW, she was the recipient of the 2026 Donald and Maria Cox | Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Rome Prize at the American Academy in Rome. She is currently working on a book project provisionally entitled, “Ghost Justice: Crime, Community, and the Roman Cult of the Dead."
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