A visit to the Roman catacombs

by J. Spencer Northcote

Pope Damasus (for it is he of whom we are speaking) sought diligently for all the tombs of historical note that had been hidden in days of persecution and not yet recovered. He had no means, indeed, nor apparently any desire, to crown them with basilicas of royal grandeur such as Constantine had built; but he did what he could, and what he thought necessary, both for the avoidance of scandal and danger among the innumerable pilgrims who now flocked from all parts of the world to visit the tombs of the martyrs, and also to preserve their memory to future generations. First, therefore, he made new staircases and additional shafts to the upper world to admit more light and air; he blocked up certain passages, so as to check indiscriminate rambles in the subterranean labyrinth, and to guide the pilgrims perforce to those particular shrines where they wished to pay their homage. He strengthened the friable tufa walls of some of the galleries which needed support by means of arches of brick and stone work. He enlarged some of the chambers, and ornamented many more; sometimes encasing their walls from top to bottom with marble; sometimes—“not content with Parian marble,” as Prudentius says—even using much solid silver for the ornamentation of very special shrines. Finally, he composed short sets of verses in honour of some of the heroes he desired to honour—verses in which he either relates some interesting circumstance of their history which would otherwise have been lost, or records the repairs or ornaments which had been his own work. These inscriptions have been of the utmost service in fixing the geography of the cemeteries, and so in reconstructing their history. They are all exquisitely engraved on marble, and set up at the spots to which they severally belong; engraved, too, invariably by the same hand, the hand of an accomplished artist, Furius Dionysius Filocalus, who devoted himself to this work out of special love, as it would seem, to the Pontiff whom he so ably served.

The devotion of Pope Damasus to the Catacombs was as intelligent as it was ardent. He longed, as he himself tells us, to be buried in them, in a chamber where many of his martyred predecessors and other saints already lay; but he respected too much the integrity of their tombs, and prepared his place of burial therefore elsewhere. He built a place for the purpose aboveground, in which himself, his mother, and sister, were all buried. It would have been a happy thing for Christian archæology if others had been equally scrupulous; but numerous epitaphs tell us of men and women who had secured for themselves by purchase the right of a grave “behind the saints” (retro sanctos) or “near” (ad) such and such a saint, i.e., near his tomb; and many a subterranean chapel still testifies, by the destruction of its original decorations, to the frequent gratification of this natural desire. It is not improbable that Pope Damasus forbade its indulgence to others, as he certainly denied it to himself. Anyhow, there was a rapid decline in the number of those who were buried in any part of the Catacombs during the latter part of his Pontificate.

Then came the fatal year 410, the year in which Rome was taken by Alaric,—the year in which, as St. Jerome says, “the most beautiful light of the world was put out: the Roman Empire was decapitated, and, to sum up all in one word, in the destruction of one city the whole world perished.” In this year, the use of the Catacombs as Christian cemeteries came to an end, and it was never again resumed. Here and there, at rare intervals, a few exceptions may be found, even down to the middle of the fifth century; but, speaking generally, it may be said that they now ceased to be places of burial, and were only henceforth places of pilgrimage.

In 557, much mischief was done in them by the Goths, attracted, perhaps, by some report of the Parian marble and solid silver of which Prudentius had written with such enthusiasm. The mischief was repaired in part by the generosity of the people, in part by the care of the Popes. Pope Vigilius (A.D. 550) restored some of the monumental inscriptions of Pope Damasus which had been broken. It must be acknowledged that his restorations were not very successful; but this was not through any fault of his. Those were days of continual alarm and violence, and literature and the fine arts do not flourish in such an atmosphere. The artists, therefore, whom Vigilius had at his command were not worthy successors of Filocalus; they were both ignorant and unskilful. Sometimes they do not seem to have known the Latin words they had to reproduce, and, when they knew them, often they could not spell them. They committed many offences against the laws both of prosody and of orthography. Nevertheless, we owe the Pope a debt of gratitude for having done what he could, for he has preserved to us some valuable records which would otherwise have perished.

During the next two hundred years matters did not mend. We read of many ordinances by the Popes designed for the protection of the cemeteries and for the celebration of mass in them. But by and by, when the Lombards attacked Rome in 756, the work of ruin made fresh and rapid strides, and, in fact, was soon completed. These men were Arians, and they broke in and carried off some bodies of the saints to take them home to their own churches in the North of Italy; so that, immediately afterwards, Pope Paul I., finding himself quite unable effectually to protect so many cemeteries situated all round the city and so far from its walls, determined to bring the bodies of the martyrs for safer custody into churches within the city. This work of translation, as it was called, though not continued by either of his immediate successors, was resumed by Pope Paschal I. in 817, and carried on by others, the latest instance on record belonging to the days of Leo IV. (A.D. 848). All these Popes assign as the cause for the translation the state of ruin to which the cemeteries were now reduced, and the horrible profanation to which they were continually exposed, parts of them being even used by farmers of the Campagna for the stabling of their sheep and oxen. From this time the real living history of the Catacombs was at an end. As in the beginning of the fifth century they had ceased to be used as places of burial, so in the first half of the ninth they ceased to be frequented for purposes of devotion. Henceforward there was nothing to keep them in the minds and hearts of men. They were neglected and then forgotten.

A few exceptions must be made to these remarks. To some cemeteries religious congregations of men or women had been attached from a very early date. These houses were established for the singing of the Divine praises day and night, in continuation of the primitive practice, when clergy and laity used to keep watch and sing psalms and hymns at the martyrs’ tombs. As long as this was done, the adjoining cemeteries remained at least partially accessible, and were preserved from utter oblivion. This is why we read of occasional visits to the Catacombs of St. Agnes, St. Cyriaca, St. Sebastian, and one or two others, even during the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Numerous inscriptions, which the making of the modern Campo Santo in Rome has lately brought to light, demonstrate that there was a convent of nuns near San Lorenzo fuori le mura, as early as the fourth century. There had been another at the Basilica of St. Agnes since the days of Constantine; and Pope Sixtus III. established a congregation of men at the Basilica of St. Sebastian on the Via Appia. This last has an interesting connection with our subject; for the cemetery at St. Sebastian’s, which had been the temporary resting-place of the bodies of the Apostles Peter and Paul, was known as the Cemetery ad Catacumbas. How it came to be so called, or what is the meaning of the name, scholars are not agreed; neither would the settlement of the question add much to our knowledge of the Catacombs themselves, any more than if we could discover why another cemetery was called “The Cemetery at The Two Laurels” (ad duas lauros), and another, “The Cemetery at Cucumber Hill” (ad divum cucumeris). An accidental importance, however, attaches to the name of this particular cemetery, because it is now given also to all the other subterranean cemeteries of Rome, and even to the cemeteries of Naples, of Paris and Malta, of Sicily and Egypt, some of which have hardly any characteristics in common with them.

CHAPTER IV.
THEIR LOSS AND RECOVERY.

From the middle of the ninth century till nearly the end of the sixteenth, the Roman Catacombs had no history, and were practically unknown. At various times indeed during the fifteenth century, a few friars and strangers from Scotland, from Sicily, and the North of Italy, had somehow found their way into a corner of the Catacomb of St. Callixtus; and a few men of learning also, about the same time, visited both this and some other cemeteries. All these visitors have left their names inscribed upon the walls; but neither the friars nor the archæologists seem to have recognised the value of what they saw, nor taken pains to communicate their discovery to others. The whole subject lay in complete darkness, when, in the year 1578, an accidental circumstance brought it to light.

On the last day of May in that year, some labourers who were digging pozzolana in a vineyard on the Via Salara happened to break into a gallery of graves ornamented with Christian paintings, Greek and Latin inscriptions, and two or three sculptured sarcophagi. Such a discovery in an age of great intellectual activity naturally excited much curiosity, so that persons of all classes flocked to see it. “Rome was amazed,” writes a cotemporary author, “at finding that she had other cities unknown to her concealed beneath her own suburbs, beginning now to understand what she had before only heard or read of;” “and in that day,” says De Rossi, “was born the name and the knowledge of Roma Sotterranea.” Would that there had been born also at the same time, in the highest quarters of the Church, a sufficient appreciation of the importance of the discovery to have caused them to take it under their own immediate superintendence, and to pursue with care and diligence the researches to which it invited them. Had the ecclesiastical authorities of Rome adopted from the first some such means for the guardianship of the Catacombs and their contents as Pope Pius IX. in 1851, by intrusting them to a Commission of Sacred Archæology, or even as Clement IX. in 1688, by forbidding all excavations and removal of relics from them by private individuals, they would have been to us almost a Christian Pompeii—a true “city of the dead,” yet exhibiting such abundant and authentic records of the first ages of the Roman Church as would have enabled us to form a very lifelike picture of our forefathers in the faith.