Construction of Catacombs. The Roman Catacombs

The settled conditions of comparative security which marked the early years of the Roman Empire greatly favoured the rapid diffusion of the Christian faith. Yet to churchmen of the first and second centuries, faced by opposition from the Jews and regarded by the man in the street as tiresome and fanatical, the world seemed no easy place in which to live, nor were there, generally speaking, either the desire or the resources available for carrying out works of architecture or any other art. The earliest evidences of Christian practice on any large scale are therefore connected with the pious impulse to care for the dead, as shown particularly in the catacombs of Rome.

The word 'catacomb' originally meant no more than 'by the hollow'. It is a description applied to one particular district of Rome, near the Circus of Romulus on the Appian Way, where, in the fourth century, the church of St Sebastian was built. Beneath the church there was a large cemetery in which the bodies of the apostles Peter and Paul were thought to have rested for a time, and the lasting repute of this cemetery caused its name to be applied in a general way to any subterranean burial-place in Rome and indeed elsewhere, as, for instance, at Naples.

The Romans thought it right that their dead should be disposed of beneath the earth, although, for reasons of convenience, this was often done after cremation. The Jews, however, objected to the practice of cremation, and preferred to place the bodies of their dead in recesses cut from the rock in a series of underground galleries. And the Christians, influenced by thoughts of resurrection or at any rate by a keen sense of the fellowship of believers in death as in life, adopted the Jewish custom, constructing large groups of burial-chambers close to the cemeteries which, as the law directed, lay just outside the city boundaries and usually along the main roads. Quite apart from the Jews, pagan practice furnished ample precedents for underground burials in the fashion of the catacombs.

A number of Roman households and guilds saw to it that there were excavated 'dove-cotes' (columbaria)—so called from the rows of openings like pigeon-holes in which urns, containing the ashes of the deceased, were stored: the columbarium assigned to the household of the empress Livia contained as many as three thousand urns. All burial places enjoyed the protection of the law, and disturbance of tombs was, at least in theory, strictly avoided. Thus the emperor Alexander Severus, who was quite prepared to persecute Christians if occasion arose, defended their tenure of one such property against the rival claims of a group of restaurant-proprietors.

It was no very difficult task to excavate the tombs in the soft volcanic tufa of the Roman district, and to be a grave-digger (fossor) was a recognized calling. A fourth-century picture in the Catacomb of Domitilla shows one such grave-digger, named Diogenes, clothed in a loose tunic and holding a pickaxe over his shoulder, with a lamp in his other hand. Nearby one can see other tools of his trade—axe, hammer and pair of compasses. The method of constructing catacombs was to start with a piece of ground already designated as a graveyard, whether privately owned or bestowed on the Christian community as a gift. From the surface, steps were cut leading downwards and giving access to a number of horizontal galleries fig. 9), normally about two metres high and one metre wide, driven at right angles and then continued in a network of gridiron pattern.

9. The Roman Catacombs: a typical gallery with burial-niches

The burial-niches were ranged in tiers along both sides of the gallery walls, each space being sealed by a slab of marble or terracotta. When the space corresponding to the owner's plot of ground had been fully used, there was no alternative but to strike downwards with another flight of stairs giving access to galleries at a second, lower level. As soon as it was judged that enough interments had taken place on this level, if collapse of the walls was to be avoided, further descent was made to a third level. Thus the older tombs are at the top and the newest at the bottom of the catacomb. The number of levels linked in this way sometimes extends to five or, exceptionally, as in the Cemetery of Callistus, to seven.

The monotony of the rows of niches (loculi) may be varied here and there by a sepulchre of more distinctive character. This is the table-tomb, in general form resembling a medieval altar-tomb and either cut in a piece of soft rock or built up with stone or tile, the whole being topped by a slab of marble. A tomb of this nature may be set in a rectangular recess or, as an arcosolium, beneath a semicircular arch, but they appear most frequently within the private burial- chambers (cubicula) which lead from the galleries in the manner of bedrooms from a hotel corridor. It is in these cubicula, corresponding to the tombs of other well-to-do citizens above ground, that decoration, usually painting on plaster, is found.

The burial-chambers, which vary considerably in size and shape, resemble the family vaults sometimes constructed in English churchyards during the eighteenth century, in that they were thought large enough to receive Several generations of the family which owned them. In later periods, this desire to remain with the family in death no less than in life or, more particularly, to be associated with the bodies of the martyrs, led to some rather casual hacking of the walls in order to create niches for an increased number of corpses, and the gravediggers, who had by then gained a firm control, found it not unprofitable to sell burial sites 'retro sanetos'—just behind the saints.