disguise the pallor of death, and organising the procession and cremation or burial; each of these tasks was a speciality within the profession. Specialist undertakers could be hired to torture, flog or crucify slaves, to perform executions, and to carry or drag corpses from their place of execution to a place of disposal. In the town of Puteoli, circa. 100 – 50 BC, the undertaker also functioned as the town executioner. He and his 32 permanent staff lived outside the municipal boundary, and could only enter the town to carry out their trades, charged at a given rate-per-mile, plus hire or purchase of necessary equipment and services. Funerals of decurions (local magistrates, members of the town's senate) were marked out as the most urgent, followed by funerals of the young who had died prematurely; their deaths, though not a public concern, were considered the most grievous. Certain services had to be provided without additional payment, in a timely manner, and in a specific order of priority. Any slave's corpse left on the street must be removed "within two hours of daylight" without mourning or funeral rites, and the slave's owner, if detected, must pay a 60 sestertii fine to the municipality. The corpses of suicides by hanging, deemed particularly offensive to the gods, must be removed within the hour of discovery, again without mourning or funeral rites. Not every city had professional undertakers on its public payroll; but many did, and Puteoli's arrangements and practices are assumed to broadly reflect those in Rome. There were differences in regulation from place to place; for example, Martial describes the night-time use of tattooed workmen as corpse carriers in Rome; in Puteoli, they were specifically excluded. Undertakers on the Esquiline The likely headquarters for the City of Rome's official undertakers was on the Esquiline Hill, where a temple in Libitina's sacred grove had been dedicated to Venus Libitina, as a patron goddess of funerals and undertakers, "hardly later than 300 BC". Venus's attested presence on the Esquiline seems to underline a very Roman association between sex, passion and death. Libitina herself appears to have had no independent cult, shrine or worshipers; her name is the likely source for the usual title of undertakers, "Libitinarii", but it also appears to have been metonymy for virtually all that pertained to undertakers and funerals, including biers ("couches of Libitina") and death itself. The Esquiline contained squared