invest less in spectacular funerals and extravagant housing for their dead, and more on monumental endowments to the community, such as the donation of a temple or public building whose donor was durably commemorated by their statue and inscribed name. Elite, private tomb inscriptions offer evidence for a very wide range of memorial practices, such as funeral games, drawn from neighbouring cultures and communities. Funeral games (ludi funebres) Roman and Greek literature offers dramatic accounts of games to honour or propitiate the spirits of the dead. In Homer's Iliad, Book 23, funeral games are held by Achilles to honour Patroclus, and in Virgil's Aeneid, Book 5, Aeneas holds games on the anniversary of his father's death. Very similar episodes are depicted on the walls of elite tombs in Etruria, and Campania; some appear to show combats to the death. The first such ludi funebres in Rome were given in 264 BC, during the war against Carthage; three pairs of gladiators fought to the death at the pyre of Brutus Pera, in what was described as a munus (pl. munera), a duty or provision owed to an ancestor by his descendants – in this case, his son. A feast was provided for friends and family; this may have been on the last day of the novendialis. Similar gladiatora munera became a core event at elite Roman funeral games. In the late Republic, a munus held for the funeral of the ex-consul and Pontifex Maximus Publius Licinius in 183 BC involved 120 gladiators fighting over 3 days, public distribution of meat (visceratio data) and the crowding of the forum with dining couches and tents as venue for the feast. Gladiator munera became very popular, but they were also thought luxurious, self-indulgent and potentially corrupting. The host (editor) of a munus stood to gain votes in his political career for even the promise of funeral games. Sulla broke his own sumptuary laws during his stint as praetor to honour his dead wife, Metella, with an exceptionally lavish gladiator munus. The gladiators themselves could be admired for their courage, and despised for the bloodiness of their profession, whose function could approximate that of an executioner. The insulting term bustuarius ("tomb-man") was sometimes used for the lower class of gladiator, who might be perceived as no more than provider of living blood to the spirits of the dead. Julius Caesar broke any strict link between