To tell our story correctly, it is necessary we should step back into pagan times, and first take a peep at their laws and usages in the matter of burials. No classical scholar need be told how strictly prohibited by old Roman law was all intra-mural interment. Indeed every traveller knows that all the great roads leading into Rome were once lined on either side with sepulchral monuments, many of which still remain; and the letters inscribed upon them tell us how many feet of frontage, and how many feet at the back (into the field), belonged to each monument, [IN. FR. P. so many. IN. AG. P. so many. In fronte, pedum—. In agro, pedum—.] M. de Rossi (the brother of our author) has published a very interesting plan of one of these monuments with all its dependencies, as represented on an ancient marble slab dug up on the Via Lavicana. On this slab, not only are the usual measurements of frontage and depth carefully recorded, but also the private or public roads which crossed the [{416}] property, the gardens and vineyards of which it consisted, the swampy land on which grew nothing but reeds (it is called Harundinetum), and the ditch by which, on one side at least, it was bounded. Unfortunately the slab is not perfect, so that we cannot tell the exact measurement of the whole. Enough, however, remains to show that the property altogether was not less than twelve Roman jugera, or nearly 350,000 square feet; and other inscriptions are extant, specifying an amount of property almost equal to this as belonging to a single monument (e.g. Huic monumento cedunt agri puri jugera decem). The necessity for so large an assignment of property to a single tomb was not so much the vastness of the mausoleum to be erected, as because certain funeral rites were to be celebrated there year by year, on the anniversary of the death, and at other times; sacrifices to be offered, feasts to be given, etc.; and for these purposes exedrae were provided, or semi-circular recesses, furnished with sofas and all things necessary for the convenience of guests. A house also (custodia) was often added, in which a person should always live to look after the monument, for whose support these gardens, vineyards, or other hereditaments were set apart as a perpetual endowment. It only remains to add, that upon all these ancient monuments may be found these letters, or something equivalent to them, H.M.H.EX.T.N.S. (Hoc monumentum haeredes ex testamento ne sequatur); in other words, "This tomb and all that belongs to it is sacred; henceforth it can neither be bought nor sold; it does not descend to my heirs with the rest of my property; but must ever be retained inviolate for the purpose to which I have destined it, viz., as a place of sepulchre for myself and my family," or certain specified members only of the family; or, in some rare instances, others also external to the family. The same sacred character which attached to the monuments themselves belonged also to the area in which they stood, the hypogeum or subterranean chamber, which not unfrequently was formed beneath them; but it is a question whether it extended to the houses or other possessions attached to them.
Nor were these monuments confined to the noblest and wealthiest citizens. Even in the absence of all direct evidence upon the subject, we should have found it hard to believe that any but the very meanest of the slaves were buried (or rather were thrown without any burial at all) into those open pits (puticoli) of which Horace and others have told us. And in fact, a multitude of testimonies have come down to us of the existence, both in republican and imperial Rome, of a number of colleges, as they were called, or corporations (clubs or confraternities, as we should more probably call them), whose members were associated, partly in honor of some particular deity, but far more with a view to mutual assistance for the performance of the just funeral rites. Inscriptions which are still extant testify to nearly fourscore of these collegia, each consisting of the members of a different trade or profession. There are the masons and carpenters, soldiers and sailors, bakers and cooks, corn-merchants and wine-merchants, hunters and fishermen, goldsmiths and blacksmiths, dealers in drugs and carders of wool, boatmen and divers, doctors and bankers, scribes and musicians—in a word, it would be hard to say what trade or employment is not here represented. Not, however, that this is the only bond of fellowship upon which such confraternities were built; sometimes, indeed generally, the members were united, as we have already said, in the worship of some deity; they were cultores Jovis, or Herculis, or Apollinis et Diana; sometimes they merely took the title of some deceased benefactor whose memory they desired to honor; e. g. cultores statuarum et clipeorum L. Abulli Dextri; and sometimes the only bond of union seems to have been service in the same house or family. A long [{417}] and curious inscription belonging to one of these colleges, consisting mainly of slaves, and erected in honor of Diana and Antinous, and for the burial of the dead, in the year 133 of our era, reveals a number of most interesting particulars as to its internal organization, which are worth repeating in this place. So much was to be paid at entrance, and a keg of good wine beside, and then so much a month afterward; for every member who has regularly paid up his contribution, so much to be allowed for his funeral, of which a certain proportion to be distributed amongst those who assist; if a member dies at a distance of more than twenty miles from Rome, three members are to be sent to fetch the body, and so much is to be allowed them for travelling expenses; if the master (of the slave) will not give up the body, he is nevertheless to receive all the funeral rites; he is to be buried in effigy; if any of the members, being a slave, receives his freedom, he owes the college an amphora of good wine; he who is elected president (magister), must inaugurate his accession to office by giving a supper to all the members; six times a year the members dine together in honor of Diana, Antinous, and the patron of the college, and the allowance of bread and of wine on these occasions is specified; so much to every mess of four; no complaints or disputed questions may be mooted at these festivals, "to the end that our feasts may be merry and glad;" finally, whoever wishes to enter this confraternity is requested to study all the rules first before he enters, lest he afterward grumble or leave a dispute as a legacy to his heir.
We are afraid we have gone into the details of this ancient burial club more than was strictly necessary for our purpose; but we have been insensibly drawn on by their extremely interesting character, reminding us (as the Count de Champagny, from whom we have taken them, most justly remarks) both of the ancient Christian Agapae, or love-feasts, and (we may add) the mediaeval guilds. This, however, suggests a train of thought which we must not be tempted to pursue. De Rossi has been more self-denying on the subject; he confines himself to a brief mention of the existence of the clubs, refers us to other authors for an account of them, and then calls our attention to this very singular, and for our purpose most important fact concerning them: viz., that at a time when institutions of this kind had been made a cover for political combinations and conspiracies, or at least when the emperors suspected and feared such an abuse of them, and therefore rigorously suppressed them, nevertheless an exception was expressly made in favor of those which consisted of "poorer members of society, who met together every month to make a small contribution toward the expenses of their funeral;" and then he puts side by side with this law the words of Tertullian in his Apology, written about the very same time, where he speaks of the Christians contributing every month, or when and as each can and chooses, a certain sum to be spent on feeding and burying the poor. The identity of language in the two passages, when thus brought into juxtaposition, is very striking; and we suppose that most of our readers will now recognize the bearing of all we have hitherto been saying upon the history of the Christian catacombs, from which we have seemed to be wandering so, far.
We have already said that one of the first questions which persons are inclined to ask when they either visit, or begin to study, the catacombs, is this: How was so vast a work ever accomplished without the knowledge and against the will of the local authorities? And we answer (in part at least), as the Royal Scientific Society should have answered King Charles the Second's famous question about the live fish and the dead fish in the tub of water, "Are you quite sure of your facts? Don't call upon us to [{418}] find the reason of a problem which, after all, only exists perhaps in your own imagination." And so in truth it is. The arguments of the Cavaliere de Rossi have satisfied us that the Christians of the first ages were under no necessity of having recourse to extraordinary means of secrecy with reference to the burial of their dead; it was quite possible for them to have cemeteries on every side of Rome, under the protection of the ordinary laws and practices of their pagan neighbors.
But is not this to revolutionize the whole history of these wonderful excavations? We cannot help it, if it be so; it is at least one of those revolutions which are generally accepted as justifiable, and certainly are approved in their consequences; for when it is complete, everything finds its proper place; books and grave-stones, the cemeteries and their ancient historians, every witness concerned gives its own independent testimony, all in harmony with one another, and with the presumed facts of the case. Let us see how the early history of the catacombs runs, when reconstructed according to this new theory. The first Christian cemeteries were made in ground given for that very purpose by some wealthier member of the community, and secured to it in perpetuity in accordance with the laws of the country. There was nothing to prevent the erection of a public monument in the area thus secured, and the excavation of chambers and galleries beneath. And history tells us of several of the most ancient catacombs that they had their origin from this very circumstance, that some pious Christian, generally a Roman matron of noble rank, buried the relics of some famous martyr on her own property (in praedio suo.)
The oldest memorial we have about the tomb of St. Peter himself is this, that Anacletus "memoriam construxit B. Petri, and places where the bishops (of Rome) should be buried;" and this language is far more intelligible and correct, if spoken of some public tomb, than of an obscure subterranean grave; memoria, or cella memoriae, being the classical designation of such tombs. How much more appropriate also does the language of Caius the presbyter, preserved to us by Eusebius, now appear, wherein he speaks (in the days of Zephyrinus) of the trophies of the apostles being to be seen at the Vatican and on the Ostian way? Tertullian, too, speaks of the bodies of the martyrs lying in mausoleums and monuments, awaiting the general resurrection. From the same writer we learn that the areae of the Christian burials were known to and were sacrilegiously attacked by the enraged heathens in the very first years of the third century; and quite recently there has reached us from this same writer's country a most valuable inscription, discovered among the ruins of a Roman building, not far from the walls of the ancient Caesarea of Mauritania, which runs in this wise: "Euelpius, a worshipper of the word (cultor Verbi; mark the word, and call to mind the cultores Jovis, etc.), has given this area for sepulchres, and has built a cella at his own cost. He left this memoria to the holy church. Hail, brethren: Euelpius, with a pure and simple heart, salutes you, born of the Holy Spirit." It is true that this inscription, as we now have it, is not the original stone; it is expressly added at the foot of the tablet, that Ecclesia fratrum has restored this titulus at a period subsequent to the persecution during which the original had been destroyed; but both the sense and the words forbid us to suppose that any change had been made in the language of the epitaph, to which we cannot assign a date later than the middle of the third century. But, finally, and above all, let us descend into the catacombs themselves, and put them to the question. Michael Stephen de Rossi, the constant companion of his brother's studies, having invented some new mechanical contrivance for taking plans of subterranean excavations, [Footnote 78] has made exact [{419}] plans of several catacombs, not only of each level (or floor, so to speak) within itself, but also in its relations to the superficial soil, and in the relations of the several floors one with another. A specimen of these is set before us by means of different colors or tints, representing the galleries of the different levels, in the map of the cemetery of St. Callixtus, which accompanies this volume; and a careful study of this map is sufficient to demonstrate that the vast net-work of paths in this famous cemetery originally consisted of several smaller cemeteries, confined each within strict and narrow limits, and that they were only united at some later, though still very ancient period. For it cannot have been without reason that the subterranean galleries should have doubled and re-doubled upon themselves within the limits of a certain well-defined area; that they should never have overstepped a certain boundary-line in this or that direction, though the nature of the soil and every other consideration would have seemed to invite them to proceed; that they should have been suddenly interrupted by a flight of steps, penetrating more deeply into the bowels of the earth, and there been reproduced exactly upon the same scale and within the same limits. These facts can only be fully appreciated by an actual examination of the map, where they speak for themselves; but even those who have not this advantage will scarcely call in question the conclusion that is drawn from them, when they call to mind how exactly it coincides with all the ancient testimonies we have already adduced on the subject, and when they learn the singular and most interesting fact, that the Cav. de Rossi has been able in more than one instance, by means of the sepulchral inscriptions, to identify the noble family by whom the site of the cemetery was originally granted.
[Footnote 78: It was highly commended and received a prize at the International Exhibition of 1862.]
It will be of course understood that we have been speaking of the earliest ages of the Church's history, and that we are far from denying that there were other periods during which secrecy was an essential condition of the Christian cemeteries; on the contrary, did our space allow, we could show what parts of the catacombs belonged to the one period, and what to the other, and what are the essential characteristics of each. We might unfold also, with considerable minuteness, the economy of these cemeteries, even during the ages of persecution; under whose management they were administered, whether they were parochial or otherwise, together with many other highly interesting particulars. But we have already exceeded the limits assigned us, and we hope that those of our readers who wish to know more on the subject will take care to possess themselves of the book from which we have drawn our information, that so funds may not be wanting for the completion of so useful a work. Nothing but a deficiency of funds, in the present condition of the pontifical treasury, hinders the immediate issue of other volumes of this and its kindred work, the Inscriptiones Christianae, by the same author. He announces his intention to bring out the volumes of Roma Sotterranea and of the Inscriptions alternately, for they mutually explain and illustrate one another, and are in fact parts of the same whole; and the public has been long impatient for the volume which is promised next, viz., the ancient inscriptions which illustrate Christian dogma.