Hominem mortuum in urbe ne sepelito neve urito.

This is a famous provision of the Twelve tables that rules about the funerary practices in ancient Rome. Before being written, this rule was part of the oral culture: it states that in the city nobody can be buried or cremated.The meaning of this ancient prohibition elicits several questions such as " what was the city at that time?; How it was delimited? People were cremated or buried in ancient Rome?" These questions are indeed very interesting and help understand the relationships Rome had with their gods. First of all, a general principle in the ancient cultures states that a dead body is a source of corruption and the world of the living people should be far from it. In addition, although Rome had the chance to build 3 city walls throughout its history, it cared more about its pomerium, which is the sacred limit of the Urbs rather than its physical boundaries. In fact, the pomerium was a string of land that ran parallel to the city walls and had the shape of a shallow ditch: that boundary protected the city dwellers from the unknown world and guaranteed that the citizens were respectful of the Pax Deorum which was an absloute requirement to keep in good standing the relationships between gods and humans. Furthermore, the burial practices in ancient Rome reflected the influences of the eastern cultures on Rome.At the time of the twelve tables the bodies of the Romans were cremated and the first Columbaria were built.However, because the provision includes also the " buried" people,we can deduct from history that people were buried in the Orientalizing period, that is to say almost three hundred years before that this law was written. Therefore, this is the clue of the old age of this norm that was observed even before that the alphabet was introduced in Rome.