THE CATACOMBS OF ROME

—–parti elette Di Roma, che son state cimitero Alla milizia che Pietro seguette.

PARADISO, c. ix.

"Roma Sotterranea,"—the underground Rome of the dead,—the buried city of graves. Sacred is the dust of its narrow streets. Blessed were those who, having died for their faith, were laid to rest in its chambers. In pace is the epitaph that marks the places where they lie. In pace is the inscription which the imagination reads over the entrance to the Christian Catacombs.

Full as the upper city is of great and precious memories, it possesses none greater and more precious than those which belong to the city under ground. Republican Rome had no braver heroes than Christian Rome. The ground and motives of action were changed, but the courage and devotion of earlier times did not surpass the courage and devotion of later days,—while a new spirit displayed itself in new and unexampled deeds, and a new and brighter glory shone from them over the world. But, unhappily, the stories of the early Christian centuries were taken possession of by a Church which has sought in them the means of enhancing her claims and increasing her power; mingling with them falsehoods and absurdities, cherishing the wildest and most unnatural traditions, inventing fictitious miracles, dogmatizing on false assertions, until reasonable and thoughtful religious men have turned away from the history of the first Christians in Rome with a sensation of disgust, and with despair at the apparently inextricable confusion of fact and fable concerning them.

But within a few years the period to which these stories belong has begun to be investigated with a new spirit, even at Rome itself, and in the bosom of the Roman Church. It was no unreasonable expectation, that, from a faithful and honest exploration of the catacombs, and examination of the inscriptions and works of art in them or derived from them, more light might be thrown upon the character, the faith, the feeling, and the life of the early Christians at Rome, than from any other source whatever. Results of unexpected interest have proved the justness of this expectation.

These results are chiefly due to the labors of two Romans, one a priest and the other a layman, the Padre Marchi, and the Cavaliere de Rossi, who have devoted themselves with the utmost zeal and with great ability to the task of exploration. The present Pope, stimulated by the efforts of these scholars, established some years since a Commission of Sacred Archeology for the express purpose of forwarding the investigations in the catacombs; and the French government, soon after its military occupation of Rome, likewise established a commission for the purpose of conducting independent investigations in the same field.¹

The Roman catacombs consist for the most part of a subterranean labyrinth of passages, cut through the soft volcanic rock of the Campagna, so narrow as rarely to admit of two persons walking abreast easily, but here and there on either side opening into chambers of varying size and form. The walls of the passages, through their whole extent, are lined with narrow excavations, one above another, large enough to admit of a body being placed in each; and where they remain in their original condition, these excavations are closed in front by tiles, or by a slab of marble cemented to the rock, and in most cases bearing an inscription. Nor is the labyrinth composed of passages upon a single level only; frequently there are several stories, connected with each other by sloping ways.

There is no single circumstance, in relation to the catacombs, of more striking and at first sight perplexing character than their vast extent. About twenty different catacombs are now known and are more or less open,—and a year is now hardly likely to pass without the discovery of a new one; for the original number of underground cemeteries, as ascertained from the early authorities, was nearly, if not quite, three times this number. It is but a very few years since the entrance to the famous catacomb of St. Callixtus, one of the most interesting of all, was found by the Cavaliere de Rossi; and it was only in the spring of 1855 that the buried church and catacomb of St. Alexander on the Nomentan Way were brought to light. Earthquakes, floods, and neglect have obliterated the openings of many of these ancient cemeteries,—and the hollow soil of the Campagna is full "of hidden graves, which men walk over without knowing where they are."

Each of the twelve great highways which ran from the gates of Rome was bordered on either side, at a short distance from the city wall, by the hidden Christian cemeteries. The only one of the catacombs of which even a partial survey has been made is that of St. Agnes, of a portion of which the Padre Marchi published a map in 1845. "It is calculated to contain about an eighth part of that cemetery. The greatest length of the portion thus measured is not more than seven hundred feet, and its greatest width about five hundred and fifty; nevertheless, if we measure all the streets that it contains, their united length scarcely falls short of two English miles. This would give fifteen or sixteen miles for all the streets in the cemetery of St. Agnes."² Taking this as a fair average of the size of the catacombs, for some are larger and some smaller, we must assign to the streets of graves already known a total length of about three hundred miles, with a probability that the unknown ones are at least of equal length. This conclusion appears startling, when one thinks of the close arrangement of the lines of graves along the walls of these passages. The height of the passages varies greatly, and with it the number of graves, one above another; but the Padre Marchi, who is competent authority, estimates the average number at ten, that is, five on each side, for every seven feet,—which would give a population of the dead, for the three hundred miles, of not less than two millions and a quarter. No one who has visited the catacombs can believe, surprising as this number may seem, that the Padre Marchi's calculation is an extravagant one as to the number of graves in a given space. We have ourselves counted eleven graves, one over another, on each side of the passage, and there is no space lost between the head of one grave and the foot of another. Everywhere there is economy of space,—the economy of men working on a hard material, difficult to be removed, and laboring in a confined space, with the need of haste.

This question of the number of the dead in the catacombs opens the way to many other curious questions. The length of time that the catacombs were used as burial-places; the probability of others, beside Christians, being buried in them; the number of Christians at Rome during the first two centuries, in comparison with the total number of the inhabitants of the city; and how far the public profession of Christianity was attended with peril in ordinary times at Rome, previously to the conversion of Constantine, so as to require secret and hasty burial of the dead;—these are points demanding solution, but of which we will take up only those relating immediately to the catacombs.

There can, of course, be no certainty with regard to the period when the first Christian catacomb was begun at Rome,—but it was probably within a few years after the first preaching of the Gospel there. The Christians would naturally desire to separate themselves in burial from the heathen, and to avoid everything having the semblance of pagan rites. And what mode of sepulture so natural for them to adopt, in the new and affecting circumstances of their lives, as that which was already familiar to them in the account of the burial of their Lord? They knew that he had been "wrapped in linen, and laid in a sepulchre which was hewn out of a rock, and a stone had been rolled unto the door of the sepulchre." They would be buried as he was. Moreover, there was a general and ardent expectation among them of the second coming of the Saviour; they believed it to be near at hand; and they believed also that then the dead would be called from their graves, clothed once more in their bodies, and that as Lazarus rose from the tomb at the voice of his Master, so in that awful day when judgment should be passed upon the earth their dead would rise at the call of the same beloved voice.

But there were, in all probability, other more direct, though not more powerful reasons, which led them to the choice of this mode of burial. We read that the Saviour was buried—at least, the phrase appears applicable to the whole account of his entombment … "as the manner of the Jews is to bury." The Jewish population at Rome in the early imperial times was very large. They clung, as Jews have clung wherever they have been scattered, to the memories and to the customs of their country,—and that they retained their ancient mode of sepulture was curiously ascertained by Bosio, the first explorer of the catacombs. In the year 1602, he discovered a catacomb on what is called Monte Verde,—the southern extremity of the Janiculum, outside the walls of Rome, near to the Porta Portese. This gate is in the Transtiberine district, and in this quarter of Rome the Jews dwelt. The catacomb resembled in its general form and arrangements those which were of Christian origin;—but here no Christian emblem was found. On the contrary, the only emblems and articles that Bosio describes as having been seen were plainly of Jewish origin. The seven-branched candlestick was painted on the wall; the word "Synagogue" was read on a portion of a broken inscription and the whole catacomb had an air of meanness and poverty which was appropriate to the condition of the mass of the Jews at Rome. It seemed to be beyond doubt that it was a Jewish cemetery. In the course of years, through the changes in the external condition and the cultivation of Monte Verde, the access to this catacomb has been lost. Padre Marchi made ineffectual efforts a few years since to find an entrance to it, and Bosio's account still remains the only one that exists concerning it. Supposing the Jews to have followed this mode of interment at Rome, it would have been a strong motive for its adoption by the early Christians. The first converts in Rome, as St. Paul's Epistle shows, were, in great part, from among the Jews. The Gentile and the Jewish Christians made one community, and the Gentiles adopted the manner of the Jews in placing their dead, "wrapped in linen cloths, in new tombs hewn out of the rock."

Believing, then, the catacombs to have been begun within a few years after the first preaching of Christianity in Rome, there is abundant evidence to prove that their construction was continued during the time when the Church was persecuted or simply tolerated, and that they were extended during a considerable time after Christianity became the established creed of the empire. Indeed, several catacombs now known were not begun until some time after Constantine's conversion.³ They continued to be used as burial-places certainly as late as the sixth century. This use seems to have been given up at the time of the frequent desolation of the land around the walls of Rome by the incursions of barbarians, and the custom gradually discontinued was never resumed. The catacombs then fell into neglect, were lost sight of, and their very existence was almost forgotten. But during the first five hundred years of our era they were the burial-places of a smaller or greater portion of the citizens of Rome,—and as not a single church of that time remains, they are, and contain in themselves, the most important monuments that exist of the Christian history of Rome for all that long period.

It has been much the fashion during the last two centuries, among a certain class of critics hostile to the Roman Church, and sometimes hostile to Christianity, to endeavor to throw doubts on the fact of this immense amount of underground work having been accomplished by the Christians. It has been said that the catacombs were in part the work of the heathen, and that the Christians made use of excavations which they found ready to their hand. Such and other similar assertions have been put forward with great confidence; but there is one overwhelming and complete answer to all such doubts,—a visit to the catacombs themselves. No skepticism can stand against such arguments as are presented there. Every pathway is distinctly the work of Christian hands; the whole subterranean city is filled with a host of the Christian dead. But there are other convincing proofs of the character of their makers. These are of a curiously simple description, and are due chiefly to the investigations of late years. Nine tenths of the catacombs now known are cut through one of the volcanic rocks which abound in the neighborhood of Rome. Of the three chief varieties of volcanic rock that exist there, this is the only one which is of little use for purposes of art or trade. It could not have been quarried for profit. It would not have been quarried, therefore, by the Romans, except for the purposes of burial,—and the only inscriptions and other indications of the character of the occupants of these burial-places prove that they were Christian.⁴ They are very different from the sepulchres of the great and rich families of Rome, who lined the Appian, the Nomentan, and Flaminian Ways with their tombs, even now magnificent in ruin; very different, too, from the columbaria, or pigeon-holes, in which the ashes of the less wealthy were packed away; and still more different from the sad undistinguished ditch that received the bodies of the poor:—

"Hoc miserae plebi stabat commune sepulcrum."

It not unfrequently happens in the soil of the Campagna, that the vein of harder rock in which the catacombs are quarried assumes the soft and sandy character which belongs to it in a state of decomposition. The ancient Romans dug this sand as the modern Romans do; and it seems probable, from the fact that some of the catacombs open out into arenaria, or sandpits, as in the case of the famous one of St. Agnes, that the Christians, in time of persecution, when obliged to bury with secresy, may have chosen a locality near some disused sandpit, or near a sandpit belonging to one of their own number, for the easier concealment of their work, and for the safer removal of the quarried tufa. In such cases the tufa may have been broken down into the condition of sand for removal. In later times, as the catacombs were extended, the tufa dug out from one passage was carried into the old passages no longer used; and thus, as the catacomb extended in one direction, it was closed up in another, and the ancient graves were concealed. This is now one of the great impediments in the way of modern exploration; and the same process is being repeated at present; for the Church allows none of the earth or stone to be removed that has been hallowed as the resting-place of the martyrs, and thus, as one passage is now opened, another has to be closed. The archaeologists may rebel, but the priests have their way. The ancient filling up was, however, productive of one good result; it preserved some of the graves from the rifling to which most were exposed during the period of the desertion of the catacombs. Most of the graves which are now found with their tiled or marble front complete, and with the inscription of name or date upon them unbroken, are those which were thus secluded.

But there is still another curious fact bearing upon the Christian origin of the catacombs. They are in general situated on somewhat elevated land, and always on land protected from the overflow of the river, and from the drainage of the hills. The early traditions of the Church preserve the names of many Christians who gave land for the purpose,—a portion of their vignas, or their villas. The names of the women Priscilla, Cyriaca, and Lucina are honored with such remembrance, and are attached to three of the catacombs. Sometimes a piece of land was thus occupied which was surrounded by property belonging to those who were not Christian. This seems to have been the case, for instance, in regard to the cemetery of St. Callixtus; for (and this is one of the recent discoveries of the Cavaliere de Rossi) the paths of this cemetery, crossing and recrossing in three, four, and five stages, are all limited to a definite and confined area,—and this area is not determined by the quality of the ground, but apparently by the limits of the field overhead. There can be no other probable explanation of this but that Christians would not extend their burial-place under land that was not in their possession. Many other facts, as we shall see in other connections, go to establish beyond the slightest doubt the Christian origin and occupation of the catacombs.