Notes

The Labyrinths, turrets, sundry fashions of burials

Book 3, Chapter 8: The Romans, because the dead corps, that died in battel, were after their burial digged out of the ground, instituted the manner of burning the carcases of men departed, which Rite was executed on Sylla, chief of all the house and kindred of the Cornelians, which feared lest he should be served as he had used Marius.

brusler les corps mors de leurs parens et seigneurs

D’après César, De bello gallico, VI, 19. Rabelais a déjà fait allusion à ce passage, ch. III., l. 14.

brusler les corps

Rabelais va traiter de la crémation. On admettait au XVIe siècle que cet usage remontait à Scylla (P. Vergile, De Inventous rerum, III, x). Pour les Druids, cf. plus bas, III, 17.

faisoient brusler

César, De bello gallico, VI, xix; voir III, p. 361.

cremation

negatur cremari posse in iis qui cardiaco morbo obierint, negatur et veneno interemptis; certe exstat oratio Vitelli qua Gnaeum Pisonem eius sceleris coarguit hoc usus argumento, palamque testatus non potuisse ob venenum cor Germanici Caesaris cremari. contra genere morbi defensus est Piso.

It is stated that at the cremation of persons who have died of heart disease the heart cannot be burnt, and the same is said of persons that have been killed by poison; undoubtedly there is extant a speech of Vitellius that employs this argument to prove Gnaeus Piso guilty of poisoning,b and explicitly uses the evidence that it had been impossible to cremate the heart of Germanicus Caesar on account of poison. In reply Piso’s defence was based on the nature of the disease.