A visit to the Roman catacombs

by J. Spencer Northcote

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 economy’s sake, as places of burial.

Plan of Arenaria at St. Agnes’.

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 excavated either 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 possible the superficial soil. But the quarryman aimed at taking out as much of the material as he could, and with the least trouble; whilst the Christian fossor desired 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 this metamorphose 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!—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 hesitation—By Christians, and only to bury Christians. And if it is asked on what 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 say—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 say—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 Church’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 erected—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 dependants of 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.