of the State Cicero describes the provision of a funeral and rites as a "natural duty", consistent with universal notions of human care and decency. Those who had rendered special service to the people or the state, in their military or civil career or as an ally, might be voted a funeral at state expense (a funus publicum). Sometimes the honour would be noted and publicly acknowledged by the heir, but the payment of costs refused, as a mark of the family's continued generosity to the people and state. The state intervened in several public and private aspects of burial and funeral practice. For certain deceased with a very high public profile, the entire population was expected to go into official mourning over a fixed period (and no longer than that). Sumptuary laws, designed to restrain expenditure and conspicuous display of wealth, privilege and excessive emotion, were often ignored or circumvented by the elite. "Excessive" mourning displays - of too great an intensity, cost or duration - were officially frowned on, as was the use of timbers "finished with the axe" for funeral pyres. The sprinkling of wine on the ashes of the deceased had been banned as extravagant and practised as essential for time immemorial. At the other extreme, some individuals might attempt to lawfully escape the burden and expense of a funeral obligation, through the courts, or unlawfully avoid even the most basic disposal costs for a dead relative or slave, and risk a fine by simply dumping the body in the street. Bodel (2000) calculates that around 1500 abandoned and unwanted corpses, not counting victims of epidemics, had to be removed from the streets of Rome every year. Responsibility for their removal and disposal fell to government-contracted undertakers and their servants or slaves, working on behalf of the aediles, the magistrates who oversaw the maintenance of temples, shrines, public buildings, and the streets. Cassius Dio claims that 2,000 died in Rome every day in the plague outbreak of AD 189; and Suetonius, that in one autumn of Nero's reign, 30,000 in Rome died of plague. It is not known how undertakers or aediles dealt with such numbers of dead. Undertakers Undertakers (dissignatores, or libitinarii) supplied a broad range of funeral and disposal services, considered demeaning or ritually unclean to most citizens; these included digging graves, building pyres, moving and dressing corpses, applying cosmetics to the deceased to