Fig. 9.—Plan of Double Chamber.
It is thought that in the celebration of worship one of these chambers was designed for men and the other for women. Sometimes separate passages to the chapels and distinct entrances to the Catacombs seem intended to facilitate this separation of the sexes. Sometimes three, or even as many as five, cubicula, as in one example in the Catacomb of St. Agnes, were placed on the same
axial line, and formed one continuous suite of chambers. The accompanying section of what is known as “The Chapel of Two Halls,” in the Catacomb of St. Prætextatus, illustrates this: A is the main gallery, D a large cubiculum known as “The Women’s Hall,” to the right, and to the left B, a hexagonal vaulted room with a smaller chamber, C, opening from it. The length of the entire range from G to F, according to the accurate measurement of M. Perret, is twenty-three and a half mètres, or nearly seventy-seven feet. The larger engraving ([Fig. 11]) gives a perspective view looking toward the left of the hexagonal chamber, (D. [Fig. 10],) and the smaller one, C, opening from it. By means of these connected chambers the Christians were enabled in times of persecution to assemble for worship in these “dens and caves of the earth,” surrounded by the slumbering bodies of the holy dead.
Fig. 10.—Section of Gallery and Cubicula.
Fig 11.—Perspective of Lower Chamber in Fig. 9.