ROMA SOTTERRANEA.

ROMA SOTTERRANEA.Part First.CHAPTER I.THE ORIGIN OF THE CATACOMBS.

The great St. Jerome, writing about 1500 years ago, tells us that when he was a schoolboy in Rome, he used to go every Sunday, in company with other boys of his own age and tastes, to visit the tombs of the apostles and martyrs, and to go down into the crypts excavated there in the bowels of the earth. â€œAs you enter,â€ he says, â€œyou find the walls on either side full of the bodies of the dead, and the whole place is so dark, that one seems almost to realise the fulfilment of those words of the prophet, â€˜Let them go down alive into Hades.â€™ Here and there a little light admitted from above suffices to give a momentary relief to the horror of the darkness; but, as you go forward, you find yourself again plunged into theutter blackness of night, and the words of the poet come unbidden to your mind, â€˜The very silence fills the soul with dread.â€™â€ Anybody who has frequented the Roman Catacombs will recognise the justice of this description; and if he is as familiar with Virgil and with the Psalms of David as St. Jerome was, he may have used something like the same language to describe his own impressions. But we are writing for those who have never seen the Catacombs at all, and we must therefore enter into more minute particulars.

Let us first try to get a general idea of what the Catacombs are. And for this purpose let us transport ourselves in imagination to the city of Rome, and having been led out some two or three miles (more or less) almost on any of the fourteen great consular roads which went forth from the old centre of the world to its most distant provinces, let us go down, either by some modern staircase or through some accidental fissure in the soil, into the bowels of the earth. At the depth of fifteen or twenty feet we shall probably find ourselves landed in a dark narrow gallery, something like what is here representedâ€”a gallery about three feet wide, and perhaps seven or eight feet high, cut out of the living rock, and its walls on either side pierced with a number of horizontal shelves, one above the other, like the shelves of a bookcase. We need hardly be told that each of these shelves once contained a dead body, and had then been shut up by long tiles or slabs of marble, securely fastened by cement, and inscribed perhapswith the name of the deceased or with some Christian emblem. Probably some grave still uninjured may lie within our sight, or we may see bones and ashes in some of the graves that are open.

Gallery with Tombs.

If we step forward and enter one of the doorways to be found on either side, it will introduce us to a small chamber, twelve or fourteen feet square perhaps. If there is nothing but graves cut in the walls of this chamber, just as in the galleries, we may safely conjecture that it was only a family vault. But if wefind a bench hewn out of the rock all round the room, together with a chair (or perhaps two) similarly excavated, we can hardly be wrong in supposing that the room was once used as a place of assembly, whether for purposes of public psalmody or of religious instruction. Or, if the principal tomb in the chamber be shaped like an altar, if two or three chambers open out of one another, and if one of these have an absidal termination, with a chair at the end and a low seat running round the sides, such as may still be seen in some of the old basilicas above ground for the accommodation of the bishop and clergy, no one can justly accuse us of rashness if we suspect that we stand in a place that was provided for the celebration of the Christian mysteries in days of persecution.

Arcosolium, or altar-shaped tomb.

Part of Catacomb of St. Agnes.

If we were sufficiently bold to leave the gallery which we first entered, and to pursue our way further into the interior, we should soon lose ourselves in some such labyrinth as is here represented. This diagram is a true map of a small portion (perhapsnot more than an eighth) of a catacomb on the Via Nomentana, commonly known by the name of St. Agnes. It is about 230 yards long by 180 in width; yet if all the galleries in this small section of a catacomb were stretched out in one continuous line, they would make very nearly two English miles in length. And then we must remember that in almost all these subterranean cemeteries the same thing is repeated on two or three different levelsâ€”in some of them even on five levels. In the Catacomb of St. Callixtus, on theVia Appia, we can descend by a succession of staircases to five differentstories, so to speak; and perhaps the excavators might have made even a sixth and a seventh had they not by this time come to the level of water, where any galleries they might dig would soon have become mere subterranean canals.

Section of the Cemetery of St. Callixtus.

But we have not even yet finished our tale ofwonder. One such excavation as this would have been a remarkable work, and its history would have deserved examination. But in the hills round Rome there are forty or fifty such, of various sizes indeed, and each having its own name and history, but all evidently inspired by the same idea and forming part of the same general plan. What was this plan? For what purpose were these labyrinths of long narrow galleries and small chambers so laboriously excavated?

To this question their very form seems to supply the only possible answer. They were made to bury the dead. This is undeniably the first and principal use to which they were put. It is no less certain that this was also the object for which they were designed. Time was, indeed, when learned men shrank from this conclusion, and suggested, that though unquestionably they were used as burial-places, yet perhaps this was only an afterthought, and that they may have been originally designed for something else. The building of Rome, it was said, must have required vast quantities of stone and of sand to make cement; perhaps, therefore, in the Roman Catacombs we have only lit upon a certain number of exhausted, or rather deserted, sandpits and quarries, which later generations availed themselves of, for economyâ€™s sake, as places of burial.

Plan of Arenaria at St. Agnesâ€™.

This theory sounds very plausible at a distance from the places themselves; but on closer examination on the spot there are found fatal objections to it. One is, that they happen not to be excavatedeither in sand or in stone, but precisely in a rock of intermediate consistency, too solid to be used as sand, too soft and friable to be used as building-stone; and perhaps this might be allowed to stand as a peremptory refutation of the theory in question. But we will add another argument, not less simple or less conclusive, drawn from the different forms of the two kinds of excavation. Compare the subjoined plan with that which has been give before on page 5. These two excavations occur in the same place. They overlie one another on the Via Nomentana, and they are here drawn on precisely the same scale. Could they be mistaken one for the other? Do they look like parts of the same plan? One represents the long, narrow, straight streets or galleries and occasional chambers of a catacomb; the other, the broad, tortuous, and irregular excavations of a sandpit. The makers of both had each a definite object in their work, but these objects were distinct from, and even opposed to, one another; and hence the two systems have distinct, and even contrary, characteristics. The only point in common between them is, that both were carried on underground, and both wished to disturb as little as possiblethe superficial soil. But the quarryman aimed at taking out as much of the material as he could, and with the least trouble; whilst the Christianfossordesired to extract as little of the material as was consistent with his object of providing hundreds or thousands of graves. Hence we find in the sandpit broad roads, admitting the use of horses or carts, and these roads well rounded off at the corners for the facility of passing to and fro; whereas the paths of the cemetery cross one another at right angles, that so every part of their walls may be available for purposes of sepulture, whilst they are so narrow that two men can scarcely walk abreast in them. Moreover, in the sandpits the roof is arched, and the vault of the arch springs from the very ground; whereas in the catacombs the walls of the galleries are made strictly perpendicular, in order that horizontal shelves, capable of supporting the bodies of the dead, might be safely cut in them, and the tiles that shut them in might have adequate support. In a word, the two kinds of excavation could hardly be mistaken for one another. A catacomb could only be made to look like a sandpit or quarry by first destroying all the graves, widening the paths, and rounding their angles; in a word, by destroying every characteristic of a catacomb; and a sandpit could be turned into a cemetery resembling the Catacombs, only by setting up such a quantity of masonry as must needs remain to tell its own tale. There are actual examples of thismetamorphose to be found in three or four places of the Catacombs; and here is the representation of one of them, from the Catacomb of St. Hermes, on the Via Salara. What an amount of labour and expense was necessary to effect the change, and, after all, with a result how clumsy and unsatisfactory as compared with those places which were excavated directly and primarily for the purpose of burial!â€”so unsatisfactory, indeed, that presently the Christians left off prosecuting the work even here where they had begun it. Though immense spaces of the sandpit still remained unoccupied, they chose rather to excavate after their own fashion in the virgin rock below. We may conclude, then, without a shadow of doubt, that those excavations which we call the Roman Catacombs were made solely for the sake of burying the dead.

Sections of Gallery in St. Hermes.

But by whom? and to bury what dead? We answer, and again without hesitationâ€”By Christians, and only to bury Christians. And if it is asked onwhat authority this statement is made, we might point to the thousands of Christian inscriptions that have been found in them, and to the utter absence of evidence in favour of any other account of them. Our readers, however, would probably insist that it was impossible for the early Christians, a small and persecuted body, going about stealthily and in disguise, as it were, among the Pagan multitude, to have executed so vast a work.

First, let me sayâ€”though the remark hardly comes here in its proper place, yet, as it may help to dissipate a prejudice, let me anticipate a little and sayâ€”that the work in its full magnitude, such as we have been describing it, was the work (to speak roughly) of three centuries of labour. There is evidence that the Catacombs were used as Christian cemeteries even before the end of the first century, and they certainly continued to be so used, more or less, up to the first decade of the fifth. Among the inscriptions found in them is one of the year of our Lord 72; there are others of 107, 110, and so on, down to 410; so that the whole period of their use includes almost a century of the Churchâ€™s peace, as well as all the time of her persecution.

However, here as elsewhere the difficulty is not about the end of the work, but about its beginning. How was it possible that the Christians in the first and second centuries could have executed any part of the great work we have described? How could they have made a beginning? how carried it on?Was it a work done in violation of the law, and therefore in secret? or was it public and notorious, and such as their Pagan neighbours, enemies though they were, could not legitimately interfere with? The answers to these questions are to be sought in learned volumes of old Roman law, and in hundreds of Latin Pagan inscriptions, which, however, cannot be transferred to these pages. For our present purpose their contents may be thus briefly summarised.

It was the common practice of Roman gentlemen and ladies of wealth to make in their wills very minute provisions for their tombs, and for certain rites and ceremonies to be performed at their tombs after death. They ordinarily set apart some portion of a field or garden near the high road, accurately measured off with so many feet of frontage and so many feet into the field behind; and in the middle of this plot they ordered a monument to be erectedâ€”often a chamber of considerable dimensions, with an altar of stone or of fine marble in which their bones or ashes should be laid, and benches of the same material, with cushions and all else that was necessary for the convenience of guests, whom they invited to come and partake here of a feast in their memory, both on the anniversary of their death and on several other occasions. The cost of the tomb was often specified in the will, and recorded on the epitaph; and the expenses of the feasts were met partly by contributions from dependantsof the deceased who were intended to partake of it, partly by the rent of certain houses or gardens, or by the interest of moneys bequeathed by the deceased himself or by others for this purpose. The execution of this part of the will was commonly intrusted to some one or more faithful freedmen, who had a direct interest in its fulfilment; and heavy fines were inflicted on the heirs in case of neglect.

The motive of these testamentary dispositions is obvious; they were made in the vain hope that by these means the name and memory of the deceased might not utterly perish. And the Roman law did all that it could to secure the realisation of so natural a wish; it fenced every place of burial round about with divers safeguards, and punished its violation with the severest penalties. First of all, the burial of a single corpse (or the deposit of the little urn of ashes if the body had been burnt) sufficed to impart a sort of religious character to the spot where these remains had been laid for their last resting-place, provided the burial had been made with the consent of the owner of the soil. Henceforth that place no longer belonged to the category of ordinary landed property, but became subject to new and peculiar laws of its own. It did not pass by will as part of the inheritance; no prescriptive right had any power to alienate it; if at any time some undutiful descendant should secretly obliterate all visible tokens ofits use as a place of burial, and fraudulently effect a sale of the property as though it were common land, the law would interfere to annul the contract as soon as it was discovered, no matter after what lapse of time; it would oblige the purchaser to surrender his purchase, and the vendor or his heirs to make restitution of the purchase-money, together with interest at a very high rate; and the money thus forfeited was devoted to some public use of beneficence. Even this penalty, severe as it is, fell short of what the law prescribed in the case of those who had themselves violated a sepulchre. This was accounted so heinous a crime, that it was punished by banishment or perpetual labour in the mines, according to the condition in life of the offender; and the acts of violation subject to this penalty were such as these:â€”the breaking open of a sepulchre, the intrusion into it of a strangerâ€™s corpse,i.e., of one not belonging to the family, or not included in the list of those to whom the concession was made by the original testator, the carrying away of any stone, pillar, or statue, or even the erasure of an epitaph.

This was the common law of the land in Imperial Rome; and the most remarkable thing about it is this, that, except in times of civil war and great public commotion, it protected the tombs, not only of the rich and noble, but of those whom the law despised or even execrated, such as slaves and criminals. It was specially enacted that the bodies of public malefactors,who had suffered death at the hands of the executioner, were to be given up on the petition of their friends, to be buried where they pleased; and when once this had been done, the tomb fell under the guardianship of the Pontifices as effectually as any other tomb. Of course, there was occasionally exceptional legislation on this subject, as, for instance, with reference to some of the Christian martyrs; but these exceptions were rare, and prompted by special reasons; they do not invalidate the general truth of the statements which have been made, nor of the conclusion which may legitimately be drawn from them; viz., that at the very time when the Roman law was most severe against Christianity as a religion, aiming at nothing short of its extinction, this same law would, nevertheless, have extended its protection to Christian cemeteries, if there were any.

And how should there not have been? For Christians died like other folk, and had need to be buried; and what was to hinder some wealthy â€œbrotherâ€ from giving up some portion of a field of his, in as public a situation as he pleasedâ€”indeed, the nearer to the high road, the more closely would it be in accordance with the practice of his Pagan neighboursâ€”and allowing his Christian brethren to be buried there? He might confine the use of it, if he would, to members of his own family, or he might make it common to all the faithful, or he might fix whatever other limits he pleased to its use. He might alsobuild on the ground some house or chamber, or conspicuous monument; he might assign as much land as he chose all round it for its support; and underneath this house and land the work of excavation might proceed without let or hindrance; there was no need of concealment, and there is no proof that at the first commencement of the Church any concealment was attempted.

On the contrary, the tendency of all modern discoveries has been in the opposite direction. Now that we have learnt to distinguish one part of a cemetery from another, and to trace the several periods of their excavation in chronological order, it has been made clear that each several part was originally a separateareaas well defined as that of any Pagan monument, and its limits, like theirs, were determined by the course of the adjacent road, and walls of enclosure built for the purpose. We find, for example, that what is now called the Catacomb of St. Callixtus, is made up of eight or ten suchareÃ¦, each with its own staircase, and its own system of excavation, conducted with order and economy. Theareathat was first used here for purposes of Christian burial measured 250 Roman feet by 100, and its galleries were reached by two staircases, entering boldly from the surface, within sight of all passers-by along the Appian Way, and going straight to their point. By and by, a secondareawas added of the same dimensions; and in process of time, a third, 150 feet by 125; a fourth, of the same dimensions, and so on.

Entrance to a most Ancient Christian Sepulchre at Tor Marancia.

The internal arrangements of some of theseareÃ¦have undergone so much change in the course of centuries, that it is no longer possible to recover the precise form of their original entrances. But what is not found in one place is found in another; and one of the recent discoveries has been the entrance to a famous catacomb on the Via Ardeatina, not far from the cemetery of which we have just been speaking It is cut in the side of a hill close to the highway and has a front of very fine brickwork, with a cornice of terra-cotta, and the usual space for an inscription, which has now unfortunately perished. The sepulchre to which it introduces us is ornamented with Christian paintings of a very classical character; and it may be considered as proved that it once belonged to the Flavian family,â€”that imperial family whichgave Vespasian to the throne, and (as we learn even from Pagan authors) gave a martyr and several confessors to the Christian Church. The cemetery was begun in the days of Domitian,i.e., towards the end of the first century, and it is known by the name of his relative, St. Domitilla, on whose property (there is good reason to believe) it was excavated. The entrance is flanked on either side by a chamber, built of brick subsequently to the excavation of the subterranean sepulchre. The larger of these chambers, with the bench running all the way round it, was evidently the place of meeting for those whose duty or privilege it was to assemble here on the appointed anniversaries to do honour to the deceased; the smaller space, on the left, with its well and cistern, and fragments of a staircase, was no less obviously occupied by the dwelling-house of thecustode, or guardian of the monument.

We have said that the inscription has perished, but we can see where it once was, and we can supply a specimen of such an inscription from other catacombs;e.g., it might have been simplySepulcrum Flaviorum, like theEutychiorumlately discovered in the Catacomb of St. Callixtus, or it might have been longer and more explicit, like the inscription found in the cemetery of St. Nicomedes, found a few years ago on the other side of Rome. Not far from the entrance of this cemetery there lay a stone which declared to whom the monument belonged, viz., to one Valerius Mercurius and Julitta (who wasprobably his wife); then another gentleman is named, and one or two ladies, and finally their freedmen and freedwomen; but this important condition is added,AD RELIGIONEM PERTINENTES MEAM,â€”â€œif they belong to my religion.â€ It is true there is no Christian emblem on this stone to declare the faith of the writer, but the cemetery in which it is found is undeniably Christian; and among the thousands or tens of thousands of Pagan inscriptions that have come down to us, we do not find one that contains the remarkable expression I have quoted. Indeed, it is doubtful whether it would have had any meaning to Pagan ears; but a Christian or a Jew would have understood it well. And it reminds us of another very ancient inscription which may yet be seen in the Catacomb of St. Domitilla, where it served to appropriate a particular chamber as the family vault of its owner. The inscription runs in this wise:â€”â€œM. Aurelius Restutus made this subterranean chamber for himself and those of his family who believe in the Lord.â€

Our limited space will not allow us to produce further evidence of the liberty and publicity of the Christian cemeteries in their beginning; but further evidence ought not to be required, since there is really none whatever on the other side. It cannot be shown that the Roman Government ever interfered with the Catacombs before the middle of the third century, and not even then with reference to their original and more ordinary use as places ofburial, but rather to a later but very important use to which they were then being putâ€”as places of assembly and religious worship.

There is one objection, however, to our argument which cannot be passed over in silenceâ€”it will doubtless have already suggested itself to some of our readers. They will have called to mind the testimony of St. Paul, that not many mighty, not many noble, were among the first disciples of the faith, and therefore that what was possible for a Flavius Clemens, a Domitilla, or a Cecilia, was nevertheless quite beyond the reach of the humbler and more numerous part of the Christian community. Most true; but there is abundant evidence to show that burial of the dead was considered one of the highest works of Christian charity, in which the rich accounted it a duty and a pleasure to aid the poor. Moreover, where the work was not done by wealthy individuals, it might easily have been done by means of an association of numbers, and this too would have been protected by the law.

Under the laws of the old Roman Republic, there was scarcely any limit to the exercise of the right of association among its citizens; but from the days of Julius CÃ¦sar private clubs or corporations (collegia) were looked upon with grave suspicion, and the right of meeting was but sparingly granted by the Senate or the Emperor. We have a notable example of this suspicion in the refusal by the Emperor Trajanof a petition from his friend and trusted official, Pliny. Pliny had asked for leave to form in one of the towns of his province a body of firemen, 150 in number, and assured his imperial master that he would be careful in his selection of men, and vigilant over their conduct. But Trajan peremptorily refused, on the plea of political mischief, which (he said) experience showed to be the ordinary fruit even of associations apparently most harmless. One important exception, however, was made to this policy of stern repression. It was permitted to the poorer classes to form clubs for the purpose of providing for the expenses of their burial, and they were allowed to meet once a month to pay their contributions, and to make the necessary regulations for the management of their affairs with a view to the attainment of this object. An immense number of most curious and interesting monuments still survive, showing how largely the Roman poor availed themselves of this privilege in the second and third centuries of our era, and what sound practical sense they exhibited in establishing the laws and conditions of membership in these burial-clubs. It is a most tempting field, upon which, however, we must not dwell at any length. We can only call attention to the language of Tertullian in a work especially addressed to the Roman Government, and in which, using almost the very words of the law on the subject of these clubs, he explains how Christians on a certain day of the month make voluntary contributions for certain benevolentpurposes, of which he specifies the burial of the dead as one.

We cannot doubt, therefore, that as some of the Roman Catacombs may have been the private work, and even remained the private property, of individuals or families, so others, possibly from the first, certainly as early as the end of the second century, belonged to the Christian community collectively, and were administered for the general good by duly-appointed officers. The earliest instance of this, of which any written evidence has come down to us, is the cemetery of which we have already spoken on the Via Appia, and which was intrusted by Pope Zephyrinus to the care of his archdeacon, Callixtus, whose name it has ever since retained. A monument may yet be seen in it showing how, a century later, this same cemetery still remained under the immediate jurisdiction of the Pope, and was administered by his deacon; for this was the arrangement made. The bishops were the legal possessors of the cemeteries, churches, and other religious places; but it was well understood, and the very language of the imperial decrees often acknowledges, that they really belonged to the whole body of the Christians, and not to any private individual; and the deacons acted as thequÃ¦stores, or representatives and agents of the body.

It was not necessary that the Christians should obtain any special leave to form acollegium, nor seek for any special privileges. The ordinary libertiesof every Roman citizen were sufficient for their purpose. Most of the Pagan burial-clubs indeed had, or pretended to have, a certain religious character, being usually placed under the invocation of some one or other of the gods. But this was not an essential condition of their existence. It was not necessary, therefore, that the Christians should put forward any religious profession at all, nor even take the name of acollegium. They might have retained, and probably did retain, their own favourite and characteristic name ofFratres; and, provided the ostensible motive of their association was to provide the means of burial for their members, they might have held meetings and possessed property with impunity. In this way a sort of practicalmodus vivendiwas established for them under the reign of the more just and merciful Emperors. The religious character of their meetings, though well known, might yet be winked at, so that they were tolerated, just as many Egyptian, Greek, and Asiatic religious confraternities (erani, orthiasi), were not interfered with so long as they gave no umbrage to the Government; and the laws which forbade the profession of the Christian religion were at those times restricted in their application to individual cases of accusation as they arose, just as we know that Trajan at least had enjoined. Nevertheless, those laws still remained; and when the hour of persecution came, the charge of practising areligio illicitacould be insisted upon, and all Christian meetings forbidden.

Let us now briefly sum up what has been said, and see what light it throws on the origin of the Roman Catacombs. It has been shown that the habits of Pagan Rome about burials and burial-grounds, during the first centuries of the Christian era, unconsciously, yet most effectively, shielded the work of the infant Church. The extensiveareaso frequently attached to the monuments of the wealthy; the house or chamber built upon it; the assignment of property for its support to chosen friends, with the infliction of fines in case of neglect; the inalienability of any land which had once been used for purposes of burial; the power of admitting friends and excluding strangers by the mere will of the testator; the right of combination, or making clubs to secure and maintain such burial-places by means of monthly contributions; the habit of visiting the monument, and of eating and drinking there in solemn memory of the departed;â€”all these facts or principles, guaranteed by Roman law and practice as the privilege of every citizen, were of admirable convenience to the makers and frequenters of the Christian Catacombs. They furnished a real legal screen for the protection of the Christian Society in a matter that was very near their hearts. If a number of Christians were seen wending their way to this or that cemetery, and entering its adjacentcella, they would be to Pagan eyes only the members of a burial-club, or the relations, friends, and dependants of some great family going out tothe appointed place to celebrate the birthday or some other anniversary of a deceased benefactor; and if disposed to give evasive answers to inconvenient questions, some perhaps might have even dared to say that such was indeed their errand. It would be noticed, of course, that they did not use the funeral pile; but they could not be molested on this account, since custom only, and not law, prescribed its use. To these objectors they might answer boldly with Minucius Felix, â€œWe follow the better and more ancient custom of burial!â€ Again, the Pagans might grumble, but they could hardly punish, for neglecting to sprinkle roses or violets on the sepulchres of the dead. But as to the main external features of the case, we repeat that what the Pagans ordinarily did in the way of providing burial-places for their dead was very much the same as what the Christians desired to do; and under the screen of this resemblance the Roman Catacombs began.

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