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Christian Study Resource Catacombs were underground cemeteries with narrow winding tunnels normally about 8ft. high. They were used by the early Christian and Jewish communities for the burial of the dead - early Christians rejected the custom of cremation, because they believed that bodies would one day rise from the dead. At first the catacombs were used for funerals and then for memorial services, but later they became centers of devotion and pilgrimage. Then, when relics became popular, they were stripped of their contents.
The Christians of Rome were for the most part ordinary people. They lived in densely populated neighborhoods in the suburbs, near the places that offered the chance of good trade in supplies for the capital, or along the banks of the Tiber, or near industries like the transport services on the Appian Way. Strangely enough, soldiers in the army seem to have been ready to listen to Christian teachings, and there were also many Christians among entertainment workers - in the circuses, amphiteatres, theatres, and naumachias dedicated to the public spectacles which were so important a part of Roman life. Many more came from the great number of slaves who worked in Rome - from the imperial palace and the rich patrician residences to the city at large, where they made up the swarms of public servants employed in construction work, in the maintenance of aqueducts, road and drainage systems, and in fire-fighting and street cleaning. See Slaves for case studies of three slaves who appear in the Old and New Testaments.
But there were also rich and powerful figures among the Christians of Rome. By the end of the first century even the niece of the Emperor Domitian, Flavia Domitilla, had been sentenced to exile as a Christian and had ended her life on the island of Ponza with a 'longum martyrium' as St Jerome says. After all, who but the wealthy could provide the economic means for organizing the Christian community? Believers gathered in their homes
During the 3rd century a certain number of these rich homes became established centers of Christianity, much like modern parishes today.
Because of the enormous population, residential Roman architecture developed upwards rather than outwards. The limits of the city walls forbad urban sprawl. Buildings in Rome, unlike the ones in Pompeii and other cities, were up to four or five stories high.
So, in a sense, were the cemeteries. They were not build underground out of a desire for safety from persecution, which is a romantic fantasy - as in the film 'Quo Vadis', either the old Hollywood version with Robert Taylor and Deborah Kerr, or the new Polish version. The ancients willingly made use of underground land when it could be easily and safely excavated. The soft tufa of Latium was ideal for a vast network of subterranean tunnels for waterworks, of chambers and galleries for graves, and even of recreation areas concealed in places called 'cryptoporticus' beneath summer villas. The Christians and Jews of Rome simply used underground cemeteries to solve a problem which the large number of community members, and the choice of burial rather than cremation, had made increasingly difficult in a city where space was at a premium. Without too much trouble, the multi-levelled network of catacomb galleries could be brought to a height of five meters. The chambers offered room for thousands of tombs along the walls and in the ground.
Each corpse was wrapped in a sheet before being placed in the tomb, which often contained two or more members of the same family. The name of the deceased was painted or sculpted on the brick or marble slab serving as its door, together with other information, usually the day and month of death. Small terracotta lamps and vases for perfume were often placed above the tomb, like the lights and flowers in cemeteries today.
The sombre galleries lit by the dancing lamp flames must have made an impressive sight. The simplest were the loculi, rectangular cavities dug one above the other in the tufa walls. A richer type of tomb was the arcosolium, a cell for the dead hollowed out of the tufa and often plastered and frescoed, with a horizontal slab for a lid over the grave, surmounted by an arch. Arcosolia are most often found in cubicula, small rooms constituting family or corporation vaults. They are sometimes illuminated by pit-like openings in the vaulting like a skylight, which originally allowed for the removal of earth during the excavations. The catacombs were used as cemeteries until the early fifth century. They became enormous underground cities, especially after the cult of the martyrs began, since ordinary people wanted to be buried closer to the sacred tombs as a near guarantee of salvation.
When burials there came to an end, the catacombs became holy places. Immense numbers of pilgrims thronged to Rome from every part of Europe. In spite of the wars against the Goths in the sixth century, the Longobard raids of the seventh and the growing insecurity and poverty of the Roman countryside, the martyrs' sanctuaries were still regularly restored and embellished by the popes. The Itinerari, guides for pilgrims written in the seventh and eighth centuries, show that devotion to them was still alive at that period. Nearly all of them were restored again in Pope Hadrian's time (772-95). But during the first decades of the ninth century they were looted for the relics they contained, which were transferred from the original tombs to churches within the city walls. Each and every catacomb was doomed to extinction, for the cult of the martyrs had been the only reason for their maintenance. When the relics disappeared, upkeep stopped. The entrances to
that dark underground world finally vanished beneath subsidences of the earth
and an overgrowth of vegetation. Except for a few galleries, the catacombs
remained
See other fascinating links between
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Bible Study Resource, Catacombs in ancient times - Archaeology of The Bible:
Burying the Dead, Burial Customs in the New Testament |
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