funerals and munera when he dedicated his ludi of 65 BC, with its 320 pairs of gladiators, to his father, who had been dead for 20 years. In the Imperial era, the state took over the organisation and subsidy of the most extravagant gladiatora munera, incorporating them into the existing, long-standing roster of public, state-sponsored events (ludi), and identifying them with the generosity of Imperial officialdom. Any originally religious elements in these munera tended to be subsumed by their entertainment value. In the mid-to-late Empire, Christian spectators who commented on the gladiator games thought them a particularly savage and perverse form of human sacrifice to "pagan demons". Festivals and cults of the dead Starting on 13 February, dead parents and their ancestors were honoured at a nine-day annual festival, the Parentalia, a legal obligation of every paterfamilias. Its opening rites were performed by the Vestal Virgins. Families made their various ways to the extramural cemeteries where their ancestors had been laid to rest, and held extravagant feasts at their family tombs. Behaviour at Parentalia varied between ostentatious public display and (according to Christian witnesses) drunken joie de vivre. The last day of Parentalia was Feralia (21 February), a somewhat darker affair in which the ancestors (the di Manes) were placated with "an arrangement of wreaths, a sprinkling of grain and a bit of salt, bread soaked in wine and violets scattered about." Feralia was also an exorcism: Ovid thought it a more rustic, primitive and ancient affair than the Parentalia itself. It appears to have functioned as a cleansing ritual for Caristia on the following day, when the family held an informal banquet to celebrate the mutual affection between themselves and their benevolent ancestral dead (whom Ovid identifies as Lares). The midnight rites of the Lemuria festival (9, 11, and 13 May), were yet more ancient and obscure; families were redeemed at midnight from the potentially threatening lemures, undertood to be vagrant or resentful di manes or di parentes, the spirits of those family members who had died "before their time" (through disease, accident or violence) and could not enter a full afterlife until they reached a "natural term". Until then, their yearly care, or exorcism as malignant spirits, was a duty of the family's paterfamilias, who must spit black beans onto the floor of the family home at midnight, as food for the dead. Any malign spirit not satisfied