In antiquity, those known as funeral games were part of funerals and used to consist of gladiatorial combats.

This barbaric custom was very old, but it was not always observed in the same way. At first, slaves or captives were beheaded at the foot of a pyre or the tomb of the one who wanted to be honored and in favor of which games were developed as expiatory victims and to apply their manes.

We see in the Iliad that Achilles had funeral games in honor of Patroclus. Aeneas did the same with those of Pallas, son of Evander, and in honor of his father Anchises. Julius Caesar, in his Commentaries on the Gallic War, states that the Gauls observed this custom. As time went on, the custom was introduced to make the elect for the sacrifice fight among themselves for their life.

The funeral games passed from the Greeks to the Romans, who would call it munus, that is, present or gift. The first to introduce him to Rome was June Brutus in the gift of his father, or, according to others, Appius Claudius and Marcus Fulvius during his consulship.

Magistrates and individuals celebrated funeral games on certain occasions. At other times games of this kind were part of certain plays. The Emperor Claudius ordered that these games be held on fixed days at the expense of the state and that the councilors take care of them, but shortly thereafter abolished them. Theodoric the Great, king of the Goths, was the one who abolished them definitively in the fifth century.

In addition to these games, there were other matches or fights that did not end with death. The people attended them in mourning suits and the funeral was followed by a large banquet to which the guests dressed in white clothing. After the fall of the empire and in the Middle Ages, they replaced other games that also resented the character of that age in which knights and paladins were trained in various exercises of the war representing different drills. In them they displayed ostentation of strength, agility and ingenuity, and they gave proof of love and courtesy to their ladies, who often were judges of those lides.

Modern Encyclopedia: Universal dictionary of literature, science, arts, agriculture, industry and commerce. Volume III. Francisco de Paula Mellado (printer). 1851.

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