Soil Feature of Rome for Catacombs

Rome is not the only place where the nature of the soil permitted easy excavation of subterranean burial-grounds, but the Roman catacombs are on an altogether different scale from those found elsewhere, amounting to some thousand kilometres of passages with much still to be explored and mapped. After lying for centuries in almost complete oblivion and neglect, the catacombs aroused some slight interest among dilettanti during the Renaissance, but it was not till the year 1578, when workmen, digging in a vineyard near the Via Salaria, happened to discover the Catacomb of the Jordani, that any popular enthusiasm was aroused.

For here it was not just a case of another row of dark and featureless passageways: the complex of rooms, some of them richly decorated, appeared, as a contemporary observer put it, to resemble 'a city underground', demonstrating the antiquity of the Roman Church and powerful to confute all disbelievers and heretics. The Cemetery of the Jordani was soon forgotten once more, but the Catacomb of Priscilla nearby remained in mind and was one of those commented on with scholarly zeal by the antiquary Antonio Bosio in the early years of the seventeenth century.

Thereafter progress was very slow until Giovanni Battista de Rossi (1822-1894), combining historical genius with fanatical industry, initiated the modern, systematic study of the catacombs, Byron's 'choked- up vaults and frescos steep'd / In subterranean damps'. De Rossi was inclined to carry the dating of the oldest catacombs back as far as the first century. He considered, for instance, that the Catacomb of Cal- listus had belonged to Christian members of the Caecilian house during the reign of Nero, on the strength of an allusion made by the historian Tacitus to a certain member of that family, Pomponia Graecina, who was accused of 'foreign superstition' in the year 58 ad. But it is by no means certain that Pomponia's 'superstition' was in fact Christianity, and a similar doubt affects the Catacomb of Domitilla.

De Rossi favoured the suggestion that the ground had once belonged to a certain Flavia Domitilla, exiled by the emperor Domitian about 90 ad, and that a number of her kinsfolk who 'rushed headlong to observe Jewish customs'⁶ were in fact Christians who met a martyr's death and were buried in this catacomb. But the view that any of the Flavii embraced Christianity as early as the first century is conjectural, and the evidence used to support it can no longer stand. For this evidence consists primarily of inscriptions which prove to be of somewhat later date, and which found their way into the catacomb as so much rubbish hurled there from outside. In any case the Catacomb of Domitilla is probably earlier than the oldest Jewish catacombs, of which the most remarkable is that of the Villa Torlonia, on the Via Nomentana.

The Torlonia catacomb resembles Christian examples in that, where decoration occurs, it consists of emblems proclaiming the traditional piety of a particular faith but combined with art-forms of universal appeal. In one semicircular recess, for example, may be noted a pedimented building, drawn in childish fashion, which represents Jerusalem. On each side stands a large, indeed lumpy, seven-branched candlestick, fashioned 'in the likeness of a trident" according to directions laid down in the Book of Exodus for furnishing the Ark of the Covenant. Other cult emblems shown in the picture include the lulab and the ethrog. The first of these is a palm-branch, denoting victorious immortality, and as such taken over by the Christians and customarily placed, by later artists, in the hand of the martyrs.

The ethrog, or citron, carried by all in the procession which marked the Feast of Tabernacles, stood for the fruit of the Tree of Life and therefore also hinted at immortality. But this emblematical scene, of singular appropriateness in a Hebrew burial-chamber, is accompanied by a band of classic decoration which might have appeared in any third-century Roman house. And not far away in the same catacomb one sees a dolphin, swimming, perhaps, to the Islands of the Blest, but not particularly characteristic of the Jewish faith.

As some of the Christian catacombs seem to be slightly older than those of the Jews, they may be said to derive their form not so much from Hebrew originals as from the common stock of funeral customs practised by the Etruscans and handed down to such families as the Volumnii, for whose interment, near Perugia, an underground vault with a number of passages was constructed in the second century вс. The development of the catacombs was to some extent conditioned by the needs which they were designed to serve. While the humbler members of the Christian fellowship had to be content with the simplest and least pretentious sepulchres, the general custom was for the interment to be accompanied by prayers, and commemorative meals (refrigeria) were regularly held at which family and friends took part. This meant that, in cases where the money was available, a certain amount of space was asked for and provided.