with a lavishly decorated exterior and an equally well-appointed "room" within, to house the corpse on its funeral couch. Offerings to be consumed in the flames of the pyre were placed around the body. In some cases, a wax replica of the deceased was placed atop the pyre. In the deification of deceased emperors, a caged eagle was concealed in the pyre, and released on cue to seemingly carry the Imperial soul to heaven. Crematory images on the theme of the dead and mourning appear in Latin poetry. In one of the best-known classical Latin poems of mourning, Catullus writes of his long journey to attend to the funeral rites of his brother, who died abroad, and expresses his grief at addressing only silent ash. When Propertius describes his dead lover Cynthia visiting him in a dream, the revenant's dress is scorched down the side and the fire of the pyre has corroded the familiar ring she wears. In the late 1st century AD, cremation was such a commonplace that Tacitus could refer to it as Romanus mos ("the Roman Way"). Plutarch recounts a tradition that king Numa Pompilius, who was credited with the introduction of Rome's most important religious practices, forbade cremation. Perhaps in at least partial continued obedience to this prohibition, and perhaps on the understanding that "a part implies the whole", a complete finger could be cut from the corpse before its cremation and either buried separately, unburnt, or burned in a smaller, cooler fire at the end of the mourning period. This may have been done to complete the household's purification, and to fully return the deceased to mother Earth and legitimise the grave. The practice, known as os resectum ("cut-off bone") is attested by literary sources and to some extent, by archaeology, in at least one cremation of a named individual of senatorial class, and in several columbaria deposits, likely of freedmen or very ordinary citizens. Over time, inhumation once again became the norm. Bodel (2008) places the main transition from cremation to burial as starting among slaves and freedmen around the mid-first century AD. Eventually, cremation remained a feature of imperial deification funerals, and very few others. The reasons for this shift are not well understood. Some evidence points to Christianity's preservation of the body, following the example of Jesus' entombment, anticipating resurrection: the veneration of martyrs' physical remains: the proscriptions and preferences of