Pagan and Christian Rome

by Rodolfo Amedeo Lanciani

When Rome was founded, this semi-barbaric fashion of burial was by no means forgotten or abandoned by its inhabitants. We have not yet discovered coffins actually dug out of a tree, but we have found rude imitations of them in clay. These belong to the interval of time between the foundation of the city and the fortifications of Servius Tullius, having been found at the considerable depth of forty-two feet below the embankment of the Servian wall, in the Vigna Spithoever. They are now exhibited in the Capitoline Museum (Palazzo dei Conservatori), together with the skeletons, pottery, and bronze suppellex they contained.

Nearly every type of tomb known in Etruria, Magna Græcia, and the prehistoric Italic stations has a representative in the old cemeteries of the Viminal and the Esquiline. There are caves hewn out of the natural rock, with the entrance sealed by a block of the same material; in these are skeletons lying on the funeral beds on either side of the cave, or even on the floor between them, with the feet turned towards the door, and Italo-Greek pottery, together with objects in bronze, amber, and gold. There are also artificial caves, formed by horizontal courses of stones which project one beyond another, from both sides, till they meet at the top. Then there are bodies protected by a circle of uncut stones; others lying at the bottom of wells, and finally regular sarcophagi in the shape of square huts, and cineraria like those described on page 29 of my "Ancient Rome."

Comparing these data we reach the conclusion that inhumation was abandoned, with a few exceptions, towards the end of the fifth century of Rome, to be resumed only towards the middle of the second century after Christ, under the influence of Eastern doctrines and customs. For the student of Roman archæology these facts have not merely a speculative interest; a knowledge of them is necessary for the chronological classification of the material found in cemeteries and represented so abundantly in public and private collections.

The acceptance of cremation as a national, exclusive system brought as a consequence the institution of the ustrina, the sacred enclosures in which pyres were built to convert the corpses into ashes. Several specimens of ustrina have been found near the city, and one of them is still to be seen in good preservation. It is built in the shape of a military camp, on the right of the Appian Way, five and a half miles from the gate. When Fabretti first saw it in 1699, it was intact, save a breach or gap on the north side. He describes it as a rectangle three hundred and forty feet long, and two hundred feet wide, enclosed by a wall thirteen feet high. Its masonry is irregular both in the shape and size of the blocks of stone, and may well be assigned to the fifth century of Rome, when the necessity for popular ustrina was first felt. When Nibby and Gell visited the spot in 1822 they found that the noble owner of the farm had just destroyed the western side and a portion of the eastern, to build with their materials a maceria, or dry wall.

The ustrina which were connected with the Mausoleum of Augustus and the ara of the Antonines have already been described in chapter iv. Another institution, that of columbaria, or ossaria, as they would more properly be called, owes its origin to the same cause. Columbaria are a specialty of Rome and the Campagna, and are found nowhere else, not even in the colonies or settlements originating directly from the city. They begin to appear some twenty years before Christ, under the rule of Augustus and the premiership of Mæcenas. Inasmuch as the Campus Esquilinus, which, up to their time, had been used for the burial of artisans, laborers, servants, slaves, and freedmen, was suppressed in consequence of the sanitary reforms described by Horace,[121] and was buried under an embankment of pure earth, and converted into a public park; as, moreover, the disappearance of the said cemetery was followed closely by the appearance of columbaria, I believe one fact to be a consequence of the other, and both to be part of the same hygienic reform. No cleaner, healthier, or more respectable substitute for the old puticoli could have been contrived by those enlightened statesmen. Any one, no matter how low in social position, could secure a decent place of rest for a paltry sum of money. The following inscription, still to be seen in the columbarium discovered in 1838, in the Villa Pamfili,—

has been interpreted by Hülsen to mean that Paciæcus Isargyros had sold to Pinaria Murtinis a place for one as. Tombstones often mention transactions of this kind, and state the cost of purchase for one or more loculi, or for the whole tomb. Friedländer, in a Königsberg Programm for October, 1881,[122] has collected thirty-eight documents concerning the cost of tombs; they vary from a minimum of two hundred sestertii ($8.25) to a maximum of one hundred and ninety-two thousand ($8,000).

There were three kinds of columbaria: first, those built by one man or one family either for their own private use, or for their servants and freedmen; second, those built by one or more individuals for speculation, in which any one could secure a place by purchase; third, those built by a company for the personal use of shareholders and contributors.

As a good specimen of the columbaria of the second kind we can cite one built on the Via Latina, by a company of thirty-six shareholders. It was discovered in 1599, not far from the gate, and its records were scattered all over the city. As a proof of the negligence with which excavations were conducted in former times, we may state that, the same place having been searched again in 1854 by a man named Luigi Arduini, other inscriptions of great value were discovered, from which we learn how these burial companies were organized and operated. The first document, a marble inscription above the door of the crypt, states that in the year 6 b. c. thirty-six citizens formed a company for the building of a columbarium, each subscribing for an equal number of shares, and that they selected two of the stockholders to act as administrators. Their names are Marcus Æmilius, and Marcus Fabius Felix, and their official title is curatores ædificii xxxvi. sociorum. They collected the contributions, bought the land, built the columbarium, approved and paid the contractors' bills, and having thus fulfilled their duty convened a general meeting for September 30. Their report was approved, and a deed was drawn up and duly signed by all present, declaring that the administrators had discharged their duty according to the statute. They then proceeded to the distribution of the loculi in equal lots, the loculi representing, as it were, the dividend of the company. The tomb contained one hundred and eighty loculi for cinerary urns, and each of the shareholders was consequently entitled to five. The distribution, however, was not so easy a matter as the number would make it appear. We know that it was made by drawing lots, per sortitionem ollarum, and we know also that in some cases the shareholders, as a remuneration to their chairmen, administrators, and auditors of accounts, voted them exemption from the rule, by giving them the right of selecting their loculi without drawing (sine sorte). Evidently some places were more desirable than others, and if we remember how columbaria are built, it is not difficult to see which loculi must have been most in demand.