A visit to the Roman catacombs

by J. Spencer Northcote

Their noble souls the palace of Heaven has taken to itself.

Here lie the companions of Xystus, who triumphed over the enemy;

Here a number of rulers, who keep the altars of Christ;

Here is buried the Bishop, who lived in a long peace;

Here the holy Confessors whom Greece sent us;

Here lie youths and boys, old men, and their chaste relatives,

Who chose, as the better part, to keep their virgin chastity.

Here I, Damasus, confess I wished to lay my bones,

But I feared to disturb the holy ashes of the saints.”

The first lines of this inscription seem to allude to a number of martyrs laid together in one large tomb, such as we know from other witnesses were sometimes to be seen in the Roman Catacombs. The poet Prudentius, for instance, supposes a friend to ask him the names of those who have shed their blood for the faith in Rome, and the epitaphs inscribed on their tombs. He replies that it would be very difficult to tell this, for that “the relics of the saints in Rome are innumerable, since as long as the city continued to worship their Pagan gods, their wicked rage slew vast multitudes of the just. On many tombs, indeed,” he says, “you may read the name of the martyr, and some short inscription; but there are many others which are silent as to the name, and only express the number. You can ascertain the number which lie heaped up together (congestis corpora acervis), but nothing more;” and he specifies one grave in particular, in which he learnt that the relics of sixty martyrs had been laid, but their names were known only to Christ. To some such polyandrium, then, the words of Pope Damasus would seem to allude, and the martyrologies and other ancient documents speak of three or four such tombs “near St. Cecilia’s;” and here in this very chamber, just where (as we shall presently see) it touches the crypt of St. Cecilia, we can still recognise a pit of unusual size and depth, intended apparently for the reception of many bodies, or perhaps only of the charred remains of many bodies; for, where the victims were numerous, the capital sentence was not unfrequently executed by fire.