Candela
Candela a candle, made either of wax (cerea) or tallow (sebacea), was used universally by the Romans before the invention of oil lamps (lucernae). (Varr. L. L. 5.119; Serv. ad Verg. A. 1.727; Mart. 14.43; Athen. 15. 700.) They used for a wick the pith of a kind of rush called scirpus (Plin. Nat. 16.178). They were used in funeral processions (Pers. 3.103). In Livy (40.29) fasces candelis involuti appear to be packets wrapped up in a kind of wax cloth. In later times candelae were only used by the poorer classes; the houses of the more wealthy were always lighted by lucernae (Juv. Sat. 3.287; cf. Plin. Nat. 34.11. Becker-Göll, Gallus, ii. p. 390).
From William Smith (ed.), Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities. Text provided under a CC BY-SA license by Perseus Digital Library, http://www.perseus.tufts.edu, with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities and Tufts University. Data accessed from https://github.com/PerseusDL/canonical-pdlrefwk/ on 17 October 2026.