separately; it was believed that the living who shared a meal with the di Manes effectively offered themselves to the dead, and could suffer consequences. On the other hand, families and the departed could share anniversary and festive meals. Almost all sacrificial meat was given to the mourners, roasted and eaten. At funeral meals, a small portion for the deceased was cremated on a spit with the body or, if a burial, placed alongside it. The exta were burned on the portable altar, consumed by the flames as Ceres' portion. As far as Cicero was concerned, unless a sow had been sacrificed a burial was not religious and a grave was not a grave. Sacrifice had to be offered and accepted to secure an afterlife and resting place for the deceased. The highest status funerals might sacrifice a more costly domestic animal, such as an ox, or several victims of different kinds; and while animal sacrifice was preferred, those who could not afford it could offer a libation of wine, and grain or other foodstuffs; a less potent offering than animal sacrifice but Ovid says that Ceres is content with little, as long as the offering is pure. Cremation, inhumation and os resectum At a cremation funeral, the heir lit the pyre with a torch, his face averted. Once the corpse had been consumed in the fire, the spirit of the deceased was thought to have begun their separation from the world of the living. After a cremation, the heir sprinkled the ashes with wine, gathered them along with any traces of bone, placed them in a cremation urn and interred them. This was sometimes done by the wife of the deceased; Livia did so with the ashes of her husband, the emperor Augustus. The ashes were interred either in or next to the cremation site (in which case the funeral place was a bustum) or interred elsewhere, in which case the cremation place was known as ustrinum (plural, ustrina); the deceased could be commemorated both at the ustrinum and the place of ash-burial. A single ustrinum, usually stone-built, could accommodate many successive cremations, and usually belonged to a single family. Some were several storeys high, and functioned as a chimney, whose fires could be fed from beneath. Mass cremations, in which several bodies were burned simultaneously in the same pyre were efficient but were used only for the poor,