In the days of the Mishnah the rabbis regulated even the meals of mourning. At a funeral feast they ordered ten cups of wine to be drunk in the house of the bereaved — three before supper to whet the appetite, three during supper to aid digestion, and four after the meal for the four benedictions.
Later, four complimentary cups were added: one for the precentors, one for the municipal authorities, one in remembrance of the destroyed Temple, and one in memory of Rabban Gamliel. But fourteen cups proved too generous a hand. Drunkenness at funerals became common enough that the sages curtailed the count back to the original ten.
The cup for Rabban Gamliel honored a reform he had worked in his lifetime. Funeral expenses had grown so extravagant that poor relations began to abandon their dead rather than face the costs. Gamliel left instructions that his own body be buried in a simple linen shroud, and after his example, said Rav Pappa, the dead were wrapped in canvas worth about a zuz.
The Talmud (Ketubot 8b) preserves this quiet revolution. A great sage refused a great funeral so that his neighbors could afford to bury their own — and a ritual of plain linen became a kindness handed down.