Rome’s Professional Criers Accidentally Invent Emotional Support Ostriches

The Romans, not content with just being dead, demanded their funerals be absolute tear-jerkers. And if your family wasn’t sad enough—or, more likely, if you were a stingy old bastard nobody liked—you hired the *collegia funeraticia*, the original drama queens. These were guilds of professional mourners, paid to show up, shriek, tear their robes, scratch their faces, and generally make it look like the dearly departed was a rockstar instead of a tax collector who died constipated. It was a solid gig, but by the mid-first century AD, the market was saturated. The wailing was getting stale. The tits were already out. How could they innovate grief?

Enter Spurius Petillius, a man whose ambition was matched only by his complete lack of foresight. Spurius, head of the “We Weep Harder” guild, decided the key to deeper, more authentic-looking sorrow was… animals. Not for sacrifice—that was a different department. His big idea was to bring along animals that just *looked* sad. Think droopy-eyed basset hounds, melancholic donkeys, maybe a particularly glum-looking goat. The initial trials were a smash hit. Patrician families paid a fortune to have a sad dog follow the litter, adding a touch of maudlin class. One consul’s funeral featured twelve identical, black-furred dogs, all trained to howl when a horn blew. According to the (admittedly fake) historian Glorious Bastardus, “it was so moving, several senators wept, and at least one had a public erection.”

Naturally, all holy hell broke loose. This is Rome, baby. Moderation is for conquered provincials. The other mourning guilds saw Spurius’s sad puppies and raised him a catalogue of absolute chaos. One guild, “Screaming For Sesterces,” debuted a flock of “grief geese” trained to honk dolorously. (They mostly shat on the mourners.) Another enterprising funeral director sourced a capuchin monkey that would sit on the sarcophagus and clap its little hands over its eyes. It was adorable, right up until it bit the grieving widow and tried to fornicate with a funeral mask. Funerals for the Roman elite devolved into a competitive menagerie. You weren’t anybody if your cortège didn’t feature at least one large, unpredictable mammal. An ostrich got loose at the cremation of Senator Claudius Pulcher, kicked over the pyre, and reportedly tried to mate with a very expensive statue of Venus. It was a disaster. It was a spectacle. It was *glorious*.

But here’s the funny part. While the professional mourners were failing spectacularly to make anyone *look* sadder, they stumbled ass-backwards into making people *feel* better. The sheer, balls-to-the-wall absurdity of it all was a fantastic distraction from the whole “my dad is a pile of ash now” thing. Instead of sobbing, the family was trying to coax a parrot out of a tree or betting on whether the “mourning badger” would savage the flute player. The animals, intended as props for performative grief, became actual sources of comfort. Spurius and his cronies, ever the capitalists, immediately rebranded. They weren’t selling sorrow anymore; they were selling solace. The *animalia solacium*—the comfort animals—were born. Rich folks started renting them for post-funeral receptions, which now resembled a petting zoo thrown in a crack den.

It became the ultimate status symbol. Forget a big tomb; you wanted your memory honored by a giraffe hired for the afternoon. And it all culminated, as most Roman insanity did, with Emperor Caligula. You all know he made his horse a consul, right? Wrong. That’s the sanitized version. Incitatus wasn’t just a political stunt; he was the first officially recognized Imperial Emotional Support Horse, tasked with keeping the Emperor from, you know, murdering a third of the Senate on a Tuesday because the gods told him his toga was itchy. It didn’t work, obviously, but for a brief, shining moment, a horse was in charge of an emperor’s feels. And honestly? It was probably a step up.