The literary industry of this pioneer explorer was immense. He carefully examined all the Latin, Greek, and Oriental Fathers; all the ecclesiastical records, canons, and decrees of councils; the lives of the saints, the acts of the martyrs—everything, in fact, which could illustrate the history of the Catacombs and of the early church. The result of these labours is seen in the bulky MS. volumes, of many thousand pages, written with his own hand, which are still extant in the Oratorian Library at Rome. He was not permitted to see the publication of his great work, in which was disclosed to the world the wonderful terra incognita lying so long hidden beneath the busy life of the Eternal City, but died while writing the last chapter. It was too valuable a contribution to Christian archæology, however, to remain unpublished, and it was given to the world, under the appropriate title of “Subterranean Rome,”[262] in the year 1632, or five years after its author’s death.
This book contains an admirable topographical account of each cemetery which he had explored, taking in order the great consular roads leading from the city. Bosio’s attempted identification of the cemeteries and
principal tombs and shrines described in the ancient ecclesiastical records is not always sufficiently accurate. He is rather uncritical and confused in his arrangement, although honest and, in matters of personal observation, exact. His work is of great value as giving an account of many crypts and monuments, and copies of many paintings which have perished through the decay or vandalism of the last two hundred years, or whose position has been forgotten. Among these is the Jewish Cemetery before mentioned, of which no evidence is extant save Bosio’s description. His name, written in his own peculiarly bold style, is met with in many of the newly opened galleries of the Catacombs, showing that he had previously explored those parts since filled with earth.
Many objects of priceless value have been lost since Bosio’s day by the desultory and unsystematic excavations of private and independent explorers. These were conducted, not upon a system of enlightened archæological research, but upon mere caprice; and were guided too often by a superstitious zeal for the identification and translation of the relics of the saints, or by the more sordid motive of trafficking in their remains, or of pillaging the gold and silver with which some of the more illustrious shrines were still adorned. In this quest many paintings, sculptures, and inscriptions were destroyed or defaced of which no record has been preserved. After the year 1688 the excavations were pursued under pontifical supervision, though often neglected through indifference or embarrassed by want of funds.
In 1651 a Latin translation of Bosio’s great work[263]
was published by Padre Aringhi, a learned Oratorian priest, who added numerous important discoveries of his own. This book has been largely consulted in the preparation of these pages, collated, of course, with more recent and more accurate explorers.
The Catacombs were now frequently visited by travellers, who have left a record of their impressions in their published works. Among these were two distinguished Englishmen, John Evelyn and Bishop Burnet. The sturdy Protestantism of the latter, rejecting the unwarranted inferences drawn by the Roman archæologists from this testimony of the primitive ages, was betrayed into an unjust skepticism as to the character of that testimony. He does not scruple to affirm that “those burying places that are graced with the pompous title of Catacombs are no other than the puticoli mentioned by Festus Pompeius, where the meanest sort of the Roman slaves were laid,” and that they did not come into the possession of the Christians till the fourth or fifth century.[264] A more careful or more candid examination of those early evidences of Christianity would have shown him the error of this statement, in which he has been followed by Misson, a French Protestant, and by some other writers.
In 1681 Bertoli published an interesting work on the sepulchral lamps of the Catacombs[265] with numerous illustrations; but a more valuable contribution to the literature of this subject was a collection of Christian
epitaphs[266] by Raphael Fabretti, for many years custodian of these sacred crypts, who prevented the wholesale destruction of the inscriptions by their careless removal. The learned Benedictine, Mabillon, personally examined the evidences of the Catacombs, and wrote a treatise concerning the reverence of the unknown saints.[267] This led to the publication, under the patronage of Clement XI., of a theological and apologetic, rather than scientific, treatise on the cemeteries of the holy martyrs and early Christians of Rome,[268] by Marc Antonio Boldetti, the successor, for thirty years, of Fabretti, as custode of the Catacombs. But in his case, as in that of several other Roman archæologists, theological zeal was allied with antiquarian enthusiasm, and sometimes impaired or destroyed the value of his researches.
Gruter’s vast collection of ancient inscriptions,[269] published early in the century, and more especially that of Muratori,[270] were valuable contributions to Christian epigraphy. The learned Jesuit, Marangoni, prepared the material of a systematic work on the topographical principle of Bosio, when the labour of nearly a score of years was destroyed by fire. “It seems,” says De Rossi, recording the event, “that the literary history of the Catacombs is but an Iliad of disaster and irreparable losses.”