Download PDF | Antonio Ferrua - The Unknown Catacomb_ A Unique Discovery of Early Christian Art, Geddes & Grosset, 1991.
183 Pages
INTRODUCTION
For anyone entering a Christian catacomb for the first time, the impression is of making one's way down into a dark, mysterious kingdom—into another world, made up of tall narrow galleries, corners and sudden bends, openings with other tunnels branching off, stairways and shafts.
The sensation of unease and disquiet is a natural one, reminiscent of the nagging apprehension of losing oneself in a labyrinth. Even at a time when the catacombs would have been regularly frequented by people visiting the tombs of martyrs or those of members of their own families, such feelings appear not to have been uncommon. As St Jerome wrote, "When I was a boy at Rome and was being educated in liberal studies, I was accustomed, with others of like age and mind, to visit on Sundays the sepulchres of the apostles and martyrs. And often did I enter the crypts, deep dug in the earth, with their walls on either side lined with the bodies of the dead, where everything is so dark that it almost seems as if the psalmist's words were fulfilled: 'Let them go down alive into hell' (Psalms 55:15). Here and there the light, not entering through windows, but filtering down from above through shafts, relieves the horror of the darkness. But again, as one cautiously moves forward, the black night closes round, and there comes to the mind the lines of Virgil: 'Surrounding horrors all my soul affright I And more, the dreadful silence to the night.' " Of over fifty known catacombs in Rome, most are denied to our curiosity in order to protect their wall paintings, which even human breath could damage irreparably. The five open to the public—Agnes, Callistus,Domiti\la,Prisci\la.,andAdCatacumbas (St Sebastian) — are visited by more than a million people each year.
After the long exploration underground, the visitor re-emerges into the light of day with a sense of relief, almost as if a secret tension had been relaxed, because visiting catacombs is not an objective experience. Still implicit in such a visit are the risks that were run from the first to the fourth centuries AD by the sect called the Christians, against whom the Roman Senate had issued severe edicts and for whom more than one Emperor had demonstrated his aversion.
Kata kumbas, in Greek, literally means "at the hollows," and in ancient times referred to a natural cavity alongside the Via Appia (where the Basilica of St Sebastian now stands) in which were buried the corpses of those who, believing in bodily resurrection, refused the pagan rite of cremation. It is the catacomb that developed here. Ad Catacumbas, that has given its name to the language, and it was the only one in Rome whose existence was never forgotten in subsequent centuries, continuing to be visited by pilgrims despite the upheavals of Roman history. The Via Latina catacomb, on the other hand, disappeared from history for over a thousand years, and its rediscovery in the 1950s, so admirably described in this book.
has revealed a new source of information about — and insights into — early Christian art. First, however, we must look at the context within which the Roman catacombs developed. PJominum mortuum in urbe ne sepelito neve urito, "A dead man may neither be buried nor burned within the city," was laid down in the tenth bronze tablet of Roman law, and this was imposed on all citizens of the urbe, whatever their religious belief. Burial grounds had, therefore, to be situated at a suitable distance from the city walls. Archeologists now challenge the centuries-old belief that the catacombs existed before the Christian era, and were used as hiding places to protect the first followers of the apostles Peter and Paul. But it would have seemed reasonable to expect the first architects of Christian cities of the dead to have modelled their structures on the cities of the living. One might have expected a definite orientation towards the four cardinal compass points, and the traditional cardusund decumanuspattern, as used throughout the Roman Empire. But no. We find instead a maze of narrow passageways, a sort of underground casbah designed to make it difficult or impossible for an outsider or infiltrator to escape or find the way hack.
At the very least, those first tunnel diggers must be allowed the legitimate concern of seeking to safeguard the tombs from what would otherwise have been all-tooeasy sacrilege by enemies or thieves. In a singular and now rare publication of late in the nineteenth century, the Neapolitan hcrmctist Giustiniano Lehano quoted pertinent original sources to support his theory that the Pontum to which the poet Ovid was expelled by Emperor Augustus was in fact an underground "exile" near Rome, where Nee coelum, nee aquae faciunt, nee Terra, nee aurae, "No sky is there, nor rain, nor fields, nor breezes" (Tristia, EhVIII). He deduces that exile to the Arena eruta—"to the sandstone," in other words—was not unusual for a certain elite from the capital. In the second century BC, Rome had imported the mysteries of Isis and Osiris, and failure in the difficult tests associated with the initiation rites was severely punished. In Egypt, the pun ishment for the unfortunate novice was to be thrown to the crocodiles of the Nile. In Rome, the sentence was hard labour for life, digging deep, blind tunnels in the bowels of the earth. This is not to say that the first Christians fled from the persecution of Tigellinus' or Nero's praetorians to the refuge of the subterranean labyrinths that they knew to be feared and avoided because of popular superstition. Nonetheless, we cannot deny the existence of a mysterious, lightless suburban Pontum where Nee mihi solstitium quicquam de noctibus aufert, "Nor does any solstice ever bring the night to me," so it is possible that the knowledge of existing underground passageways may have suggested the idea of a necropolis that it would be hard to penetrate. What is certain is that in the later Republican period and the first centuries of the Empire a new concept of man and of the world was developing in Rome, with an increase in introspective analysis and in the freeing of the body from instinctual natural forces.
The purification rites associated with Isis were exercising a strong influence well beyond Egypt, and the cults of Attis and Astarte, Serpides and Mithras had reached Rome from Asia Minor. As Von Poelmann writes1 : "After the night battle at Bedriaco, Vespasian'y soldiers saluted the rising sun in the Syrian manner." These were the veterans who brought the Phrygian and Mesopotarnian cults to Rome, mixed with the beginnings of a Christian-style syncretization. From the eastern provinces, in fact, came those cults which the Roman pantheon had not yet found room for and which aimed to make men better in a world made better. They proliferated within the Empire. The cult of the sun god Mithras spread throughout the entire Roman military machine, from Africa to Britain, and, as from the second century AD, had its altars and rites within the city itself. Emperor Commodus was initiated into its mysteries and the sol invictusof Aurelian, elevated to state divinity, was a symbolic personification of Mithras.
There were many analogies between the Mithraic and Christian cults. Ahura Mazda is the father and Mithras the son who is consubstantial with Him. Helios is the mediator between father and son. The creative force of the father is contained in the cosmic bull which generates the universe. Mithras is portrayed in the act of ritual sacrifice of a bull. The blood from the wound flows over the novice who kneels beneath the sacrificial stone. The dying bull's life force falls like rain on the neophyte in the same way as the life force of the cosmic bull, from whose blood life is born, the wheat from its kernel, every living species from its seed. A tacit understanding with the Christians, temporary hospitality in the catacombs, or a takeover with the Emperor's consent? Christianity was not taken over by this cult— it was strengthened by it.
The strictly masculine religion of Mithras excluded women from its mysteries and engaged its adepts in the strenuous defence of good against the forces of evil. In the Christian religion, a virgin was the mother of God and interceded with Him on man's behalf. Perhaps even more than their menfolk, Christian women witnessed to the truth of the Gospel with their lives, in prison and in the arenas. The bull could not stand up against the lamb, rectitude and force had to yield before the power of love as preached by the apostles of Christ.
The image of the Good Shepherd soon look the place of Mithras plunging his sword into the neck of the bull. And when Tertullian began to suggest among the soldiery that it might not be legitimate to kill one's brothers in Christ, whatever their race, nation or religion, the cult of Mithras began to decline, even among the legions, and Christian solidarity became dominant. The catacombs reflect Roman life from the first to the fourth centuries AD, up to the time, that is, of the Edict of Constantine in 313, which tolerated the Christian cult, and the later Edict of Theodosius in 384, which finally proclaimcxl Christianity as the state religion. The first catacombs were probably family burial grounds for an elite. These would be noble Romans, converted to the Gospel, who had tombs dug in their own land and subsequently allowed them to be enlarged—and not just in territorial extent— to accept the burials of brethern and acquaintances.
But it was in the second and third centuries that the catacombs took on their full importance and conquered the faithful. The first signs appeared on the burials—a memorial, a greeting, words of comfort or regret. Words written in red or black, later cut into the tufa, stone or marble. The images confirm and strengthen a belief in the afterlife by means of symbols full of hope: Christ's monogram, the phoenix rising from its ashes, the anchor symbolizing the firmness of faith, the fish as cryptogram for Christ, the peacock as emblem of immortality. Yellow and green colours were used to bring messages of sunlight.
In accordance with Semitic practice, the dead body was completely wrapped in linen bands, over which a layer of lime was then spread (hence Christ's scornful reference to the "whited sepulchres"). The corpse was then placed in the loculus, dug horizontally into the wall of tufa or sandstone. The loculus was then closed up by means of a vertical wall of stones or tiles. In order to recognize the tomb, the relatives would wall in with the bricks such conventional items as the bases of glasses or goblets, potsherds, metal objects which had belonged to the dead person, or else they would write or sculpt the name and the age of the deceased. In his recent book on Christian inscriptions,2 Carlo Carletti states, "More than half of all the epigraphs of the Orbis christianus antiquus belong to Rome: 45,000 inscriptions, of which 75 per cent are of funerary nature."
He continues, "An apparently surprising fact emerges on first examination, and that is the very high percentage, approximately 80 per cent of the inscriptions, which have no specifically Christian sign—but, it should be noted, no specifically pagan sign either." The sign of the new faith is unambiguously present in only 13 per cent of the inscriptions, almost exclusively in the form of a series of expressions centring on the word "peace," in either Latin or Greek. Note that where inscriptions are reproduced, square brackets indicate a supposition where a letter or letters are missing or illegible, while round brackets complete an abbreviated form of a term. The most ancient epigraphs are in the Priscilla catacomb — for example, the epitaph of one Octavia: Pax ti[bi Oc]tavia inp[ace!}.
This is followed by those in the Lucina crypt in the Callistus complex, where eight third-century pontiffs were buried in the cubiculum called "the popes' crypt." From the middle of the third century can he dated a substantial decrease in the use of Greek in epigraphs, with an increase in the extent of the eulogies to the dead, although still within the modest range of terms such as dulcis, dulcissimus, earns, carissimus, together with the ever more frequent exhortation in pace—etpr)VT| in Greek - "in peace." Meanwhile, the frequency of conversions and the sheer weight of numbers in Christian communities brought with them the logistical and organizational problem of burial.
The faithful looked to the afterlife and required that they and their relatives be properly remembered. Hence the rush to purchase a locus, or "place, "which could become a bisomus, trisomus, or quadrisomus for multiple burials. Sales were managed or mediated by the undertaker, who was also \hefossor, or digger of the loculi as well as their guardian. As from the middle of the fourth century, and especially during the pontificate of Damasus (366-384), many sanctuaries dedicated to martyrs were created in the catacombs. To these were brought the mortal remains of "heroes of the faith," who had given up their lives to witness to the teachings of Christ.
To record their sacrifice, monuments were erected in memoriam. Faith in the martyrs' powers of intercession led people to try to buy one or more loculi close to where the sacred relics were buried, in the belief that this proximity would act as a benevolent mediation between the soul of the dead person and God, in the search for eternal peace in paradise.
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