pulla (a "dark" toga, reserved for funerals). If the deceased was a male citizen, he was dressed in his toga; if he had attained a magistracy, he wore the toga appropriate to that rank; and if he had earned a wreath in life, he wore one in death. Wreaths also are found in burials of initiates into mystery religions. The body was arranged on a funeral couch in a lifelike posture, as if on a dining couch. The libitinarii disguised its death-pallor with cosmetics. It lay in state in the atrium of the family home () with the feet pointed toward the door, for seven or more days. Other circumstances pertained to those who lived, as most urban Romans did, in apartment buildings () or to the rural settings where the vast majority of Romans lived and died; but little is known of them. Elite practices are better documented, though likely often retrospective, idealised, speculative and antiquarian, or poetic. Cicero writes that for most commoners, the time between death and disposal was less than 24 hours. This would have allowed virtually no time for lying in or other long-drawn ceremony. Embalming was regarded as uncommon, mainly an Egyptian practice, but some instances are mentioned in Latin literature, and others are archaeologically confirmed in the Empire, as far afield as Gaul. Toynbee speculates that a number of these could have been the work of Egyptian priests of Isis and Serapis, in service of clients and converts, or just people who liked the idea of this form of preservation. Since elite funerals required complex and time-consuming arrangements, the body had to be preserved in the meantime, whether it was destined for burial or cremation. The emperor Nero promoted his dead wife Poppaea as a goddess of the Roman state, with divine honours at state expense but broke with imperial tradition and convention by having her embalmed and entombed, rather than cremated. Charon's obol "Charon's obol" was a coin placed in or on the mouth of the deceased. The custom is recorded in literary sources and attested by archaeology, and sometimes occurs in contexts that suggest it may have been imported to Rome as were the mystery religions that promised initiates salvation or special passage in the afterlife. The custom was explained by the myth of Charon, the ferryman who conveyed the souls of the newly dead across the water – a lake,