A visit to the Roman catacombs

by J. Spencer Northcote

The motive of these testamentary dispositions is obvious; they were made in the vain hope that by these means the name and memory of the deceased might not utterly perish. And the Roman law did all that it could to secure the realisation of so natural a wish; it fenced every place of burial round about with divers safeguards, and punished its violation with the severest penalties. First of all, the burial of a single corpse (or the deposit of the little urn of ashes if the body had been burnt) sufficed to impart a sort of religious character to the spot where these remains had been laid for their last resting-place, provided the burial had been made with the consent of the owner of the soil. Henceforth that place no longer belonged to the category of ordinary landed property, but became subject to new and peculiar laws of its own. It did not pass by will as part of the inheritance; no prescriptive right had any power to alienate it; if at any time some undutiful descendant should secretly obliterate all visible tokens of its use as a place of burial, and fraudulently effect a sale of the property as though it were common land, the law would interfere to annul the contract as soon as it was discovered, no matter after what lapse of time; it would oblige the purchaser to surrender his purchase, and the vendor or his heirs to make restitution of the purchase-money, together with interest at a very high rate; and the money thus forfeited was devoted to some public use of beneficence. Even this penalty, severe as it is, fell short of what the law prescribed in the case of those who had themselves violated a sepulchre. This was accounted so heinous a crime, that it was punished by banishment or perpetual labour in the mines, according to the condition in life of the offender; and the acts of violation subject to this penalty were such as these:—the breaking open of a sepulchre, the intrusion into it of a stranger’s corpse, i.e., of one not belonging to the family, or not included in the list of those to whom the concession was made by the original testator, the carrying away of any stone, pillar, or statue, or even the erasure of an epitaph.

This was the common law of the land in Imperial Rome; and the most remarkable thing about it is this, that, except in times of civil war and great public commotion, it protected the tombs, not only of the rich and noble, but of those whom the law despised or even execrated, such as slaves and criminals. It was specially enacted that the bodies of public malefactors, who had suffered death at the hands of the executioner, were to be given up on the petition of their friends, to be buried where they pleased; and when once this had been done, the tomb fell under the guardianship of the Pontifices as effectually as any other tomb. Of course, there was occasionally exceptional legislation on this subject, as, for instance, with reference to some of the Christian martyrs; but these exceptions were rare, and prompted by special reasons; they do not invalidate the general truth of the statements which have been made, nor of the conclusion which may legitimately be drawn from them; viz., that at the very time when the Roman law was most severe against Christianity as a religion, aiming at nothing short of its extinction, this same law would, nevertheless, have extended its protection to Christian cemeteries, if there were any.

And how should there not have been? For Christians died like other folk, and had need to be buried; and what was to hinder some wealthy “brother” from giving up some portion of a field of his, in as public a situation as he pleased—indeed, the nearer to the high road, the more closely would it be in accordance with the practice of his Pagan neighbours—and allowing his Christian brethren to be buried there? He might confine the use of it, if he would, to members of his own family, or he might make it common to all the faithful, or he might fix whatever other limits he pleased to its use. He might also build on the ground some house or chamber, or conspicuous monument; he might assign as much land as he chose all round it for its support; and underneath this house and land the work of excavation might proceed without let or hindrance; there was no need of concealment, and there is no proof that at the first commencement of the Church any concealment was attempted.

On the contrary, the tendency of all modern discoveries has been in the opposite direction. Now that we have learnt to distinguish one part of a cemetery from another, and to trace the several periods of their excavation in chronological order, it has been made clear that each several part was originally a separate area as well defined as that of any Pagan monument, and its limits, like theirs, were determined by the course of the adjacent road, and walls of enclosure built for the purpose. We find, for example, that what is now called the Catacomb of St. Callixtus, is made up of eight or ten such areæ, each with its own staircase, and its own system of excavation, conducted with order and economy. The area that was first used here for purposes of Christian burial measured 250 Roman feet by 100, and its galleries were reached by two staircases, entering boldly from the surface, within sight of all passers-by along the Appian Way, and going straight to their point. By and by, a second area was added of the same dimensions; and in process of time, a third, 150 feet by 125; a fourth, of the same dimensions, and so on.

Entrance to a most Ancient Christian Sepulchre at Tor Marancia.

The internal arrangements of some of these areæ have undergone so much change in the course of centuries, that it is no longer possible to recover the precise form of their original entrances. But what is not found in one place is found in another; and one of the recent discoveries has been the entrance to a famous catacomb on the Via Ardeatina, not far from the cemetery of which we have just been speaking It is cut in the side of a hill close to the highway and has a front of very fine brickwork, with a cornice of terra-cotta, and the usual space for an inscription, which has now unfortunately perished. The sepulchre to which it introduces us is ornamented with Christian paintings of a very classical character; and it may be considered as proved that it once belonged to the Flavian family,—that imperial family which gave Vespasian to the throne, and (as we learn even from Pagan authors) gave a martyr and several confessors to the Christian Church. The cemetery was begun in the days of Domitian, i.e., towards the end of the first century, and it is known by the name of his relative, St. Domitilla, on whose property (there is good reason to believe) it was excavated. The entrance is flanked on either side by a chamber, built of brick subsequently to the excavation of the subterranean sepulchre. The larger of these chambers, with the bench running all the way round it, was evidently the place of meeting for those whose duty or privilege it was to assemble here on the appointed anniversaries to do honour to the deceased; the smaller space, on the left, with its well and cistern, and fragments of a staircase, was no less obviously occupied by the dwelling-house of the custode, or guardian of the monument.

We have said that the inscription has perished, but we can see where it once was, and we can supply a specimen of such an inscription from other catacombs; e.g., it might have been simply Sepulcrum Flaviorum, like the Eutychiorum lately discovered in the Catacomb of St. Callixtus, or it might have been longer and more explicit, like the inscription found in the cemetery of St. Nicomedes, found a few years ago on the other side of Rome. Not far from the entrance of this cemetery there lay a stone which declared to whom the monument belonged, viz., to one Valerius Mercurius and Julitta (who was probably his wife); then another gentleman is named, and one or two ladies, and finally their freedmen and freedwomen; but this important condition is added, AD RELIGIONEM PERTINENTES MEAM,—“if they belong to my religion.” It is true there is no Christian emblem on this stone to declare the faith of the writer, but the cemetery in which it is found is undeniably Christian; and among the thousands or tens of thousands of Pagan inscriptions that have come down to us, we do not find one that contains the remarkable expression I have quoted. Indeed, it is doubtful whether it would have had any meaning to Pagan ears; but a Christian or a Jew would have understood it well. And it reminds us of another very ancient inscription which may yet be seen in the Catacomb of St. Domitilla, where it served to appropriate a particular chamber as the family vault of its owner. The inscription runs in this wise:—“M. Aurelius Restutus made this subterranean chamber for himself and those of his family who believe in the Lord.”

Our limited space will not allow us to produce further evidence of the liberty and publicity of the Christian cemeteries in their beginning; but further evidence ought not to be required, since there is really none whatever on the other side. It cannot be shown that the Roman Government ever interfered with the Catacombs before the middle of the third century, and not even then with reference to their original and more ordinary use as places of burial, but rather to a later but very important use to which they were then being put—as places of assembly and religious worship.