In the early seventeenth-century Church of St. Anne, which stands at the northwest corner of the Place de la République, or Place Royale as it is now called, there are gathered together many beautiful fragments of the sculptured statues, busts, heads, and tombs that have been found in and around the town. The tombs, both Pagan and early Christian, are of exceptional historic interest, not only to the townsfolk, but to the world at large, for by their curious inscriptions much may be gathered of the occupations followed, and the lives led, by the early inhabitants of the town. To go through them all would require a work devoted to the subject alone, but they are varied enough to show that Arles enjoyed a wide celebrity as a burial-ground.
The Pagan and Christian tombs found in the Alyscamps (Elysian Fields) have been an inexhaustible mine of wealth, not only to collectors and museums, but to the inhabitants of the town and surrounding country. The massive monolithic stone coffins have been turned to use, and in the district one finds them converted into water-troughs, benches, washtubs, and even pig-troughs. The dust of the dead of twenty centuries amounts to very little, and the natives evidently thought it a work of supererogation to carve, with much labour, the limestone rocks into articles of daily use when they had such quantities lying ready to their hands.
The Church of St. Anne forms a very fitting museum for many of the interesting tombs that have been rescued from the hands of ruthless utilitarians, and there they can be studied in peaceful and solemn surroundings. Many of the more imposing of these ancient funeral monuments are now used as altars in the churches of Provence, as in the Church of St. Trophimus, immediately opposite the Museum.
The inscriptions on these tombs form an abbreviated biography of the former occupants of the town. They tell of “Nautæ Arlatenses,” or boatmen, who plied the craft that carried the merchandise up and down the Rhone; the “Fabrii navales,” or naval builders, a body that were held in high esteem by the most exalted in the city; and the naval architects, a grade higher still, professional gentlemen who mixed with intimacy with the “Upper Ten”; the “Utriculare,” a separate body of watermen who plied large rafts, supported by air bladders made of sheep-and-goat skins, over the shallow lagoons to outlying islands and to the port of Fos. From this source we learn of the oil merchants and sail or tarpaulin manufacturers, as well as of the students and scholars who flourished in the Gallic-Greco-Roman city.
One of the most interesting biographical tombs removed from the Alyscamps is that of Julia Tyrannia. It records not only the highly appreciated virtues and accomplishments of this young lady, whose life was cut short at the
age of twenty, but on two panels on one side the musical instruments on which she performed are cut in deep relief: a lyre, a guitar, very much like a modern mandoline, a water-organ with nine pipes, one of the earliest representations of this instrument (there is a similar one carved in the fourth century on the tomb of Theodosius at Constantinople), and a syrinx, or panpipes, in a box. Underneath this latter there is a lamb, which might either typify the gentle disposition of the occupant or that she was of the Christian faith.
There is often great difficulty in distinguishing between the Pagan and Christian tombs, owing to the similarity of the symbols used; but in some cases the newer faith expresses hopes that are lacking in the Pagan inscriptions, as a comparison of these two free translations clearly shows:
“Oh grief! how many tears have been shed upon this tomb
Of Julia Lucina, who in life was very dear to her mother:
Cut off in the flower of youth, she lies buried beneath this stone.
Would that she could return!
Were it only to know how great is my sorrow.
She lived twenty years ten months and thirteen days.
Julia Parthenope, her unhappy mother, raised this monument to her.”
And this on the tomb of Concordius, a Christian priest of the fourth century: