Laudator Temporis Acti

Ramsay MacMullen (1928-2022), Enemies of the Roman Order (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1966), p. 7:

A child was born into a praenomen, nomen, and cognomen, all parts of which committed him to the character of earlier namesakes — to whom, as he grew up, he offered sacrifices in his home, and for whose deeds he was ridiculed or respected by his friends as son (or grandson, or great-grandson) of the man who did thus-and-so. Career and marriage were in the gift of the family, and at his death his merits were recalled and his very few faults sunk to the bottom of a sea of rhetoric by cousins and adherents whose powers qualified them to deliver a eulogy. The embrace of the clan thus received him from the womb, shaped him, delivered him to his grave, and hallowed his memory thereafter. By a custom most extraordinary, it even brought him to life again at his funeral; for at this moment an actor who looked and talked most like him, or perhaps some relative who resembled him, put on his death mask of wax, exactly painted, and walked ahead of his bier accompanied by dozens or (for a great man of a great family) by hundreds of his ancestors represented in turn by their masks, and by the robes and rites of the highest office they had attained, so that the whole procession brought together praetors and consuls, generals and party leaders reaching back through generations.

Id., p. 8:

Growing up in a house filled with one's own forebears, reading their stories and seeing them come to life and walk beside some relative's bier—all this must surely have had an effect on the stupidest boy. He would know what was expected of him with a vividness at times overwhelming. At the least he could continue the line with a carven correctness. He could be "a walking bust." But it was hard to stop there. The faces on the walls exercised a more powerful spell over the imagination. They made pride and obligation visible.