A visit to the Roman catacombs

by J. Spencer Northcote

Of the martyrdom of St. Sixtus we have already spoken as having taken place in the Catacomb of Pretextatus ([page 31]), but his body was brought here to be laid with those of his predecessors. Pope Damasus only mentions his deacons, and not St. Sixtus himself, because he had composed another set of verses in honour of the holy Pontiff alone, and had set them up in this same crypt. It is easy to see where they were placed, above and behind the altar, and a copy of them has been preserved to us by ancient pilgrims and scholars. Scarcely a dozen letters of them, however, were found when the chapel was cleared out in 1854; they have not, therefore, been restored to their place, and need not be reproduced in this manual.

The numerus procerum in the fifth line of our present inscription are, of course, the Popes whose epitaphs we have seen, and others who were buried here; nor can we fail to recognise in the Bishop who enjoyed a long life of peace Pope Melchiades, who lived when the persecutions had ended. Finally, we have heard the story of some at least of “the holy confessors who came from Greece,” Hippolytus Maria and Neo, Adrias and Paulina ([page 37]); and the arenarium in which these martyrs were buried was in the immediate neighbourhood of the Papal crypt which we are describing.

CHAPTER II.
THE CRYPT OF ST. CECILIA.

A narrow doorway, cut somewhat irregularly through the rock in the corner of the Papal Crypt, introduces us into another chamber. As we pass through this doorway we observe that the sides were once covered with slabs of marble, and the arch over our heads adorned with mosaics. The chamber itself is much larger than that which we have left behind us. It is nearly 20 feet square (the other had been only 14 by 11); it is irregular in shape; it has a wide luminare over it, completely flooding it with light, and at the other end of it is a large portico, supported by arches of brick. Yet we see no altar-tomb, no contemporary epitaphs of popes or martyrs, nor indeed anything else which at once engages our attention and promises to give us valuable information. Nevertheless, a more careful examination will soon detect paintings and scribblings on the walls not inferior in interest to any that are to be seen elsewhere. We shall hardly appreciate them, however, as they deserve, unless we first briefly call to mind the history of the relics of St. Cecilia, before whose tomb we are.

We shall take it for granted that our readers are familiar with the history of the Saint’s martyrdom and pass on to the first discovery of her relics in the ninth century. Pope Paschal I. succeeded to the see of Peter in January A.D. 817, and in the following July he translated into different churches within the city the relics of 2300 martyrs, collected from the various suburban cemeteries, which, as we have seen, were lying at that time in a deplorable state of ruin. Amongst the relics thus removed were those of the popes from the Papal Crypt we have just visited. His cotemporary biographer, writing in the Liber Pontificalis tells us that Paschal had wished to remove at the same time the body of St. Cecilia, which the Acts of her martyrdom assured him had been buried by Pope Urban “near to his own colleagues;” but he could not find it; so at length he reluctantly acquiesced in the report that it had been carried off by Astulfus, the Lombard king, by whom Rome had been besieged, and the cemeteries plundered. Some four years afterwards, however, St. Cecilia appeared to him in a dream or vision, as he was assisting at matins in the Vatican Basilica, and told him that when he was translating the bodies of the popes she was so close to him that they might have conversed together. In consequence of this vision he returned to the search, and found the body where he had been told. It was fresh and perfect as when it was first laid in the tomb, and clad in rich garments wrought with gold, lying in a cypress coffin, with linen cloths stained with blood rolled up at her feet.

It is not essential to our history, yet it may be worth while to add that Paschal tells us he lined the coffin with fringed silk, spread over the body a covering of silk gauze, and then, placing it within a sarcophagus of white marble, deposited it under the high altar of the Church of Sta. Cecilia in Trastevere, where it was rediscovered nearly eight hundred years afterwards (A.D. 1599) by the titular cardinal of the Church, and exposed to the veneration of the faithful for a period of four or five weeks. All visitors to Rome have seen and admired Maderna’s beautiful statue of the saint; but not all take sufficient notice of the legend which he has inserted around it, testifying that he was one of those who had seen her lying incorrupt in her coffin, and that he has reproduced her in marble, in the very same posture in which he saw her.

Maderna’s Statue of St. Cecilia.