OUR ROMAN LETTER

New Zealand Tablet, 8 May 1919, Page 34

OUR ROMAN LETTER

(By "Scottus.")

.'._;.;Not' long.ago., an archaeological discovery of. the highest importance very opportunely came to turn one's thoughts from the turmoil and horror of the present to the memories and memorials of those, who in days long past lived and labored and suffered and died in Rome that Christianity might grow and spread and flourish throughout the vast Empire ruled from the City of the Caesars during the first three or four centuries of our era. By a curious irony of fate these memorials owe not only their existence but even their preservation to the very institutions of that pagan •'Rome which tried its best to crush the new Christian power that iiad come to transform by precept and example the crude and cruel social fabric built up and imposed on practically the whole world by half a dozen centuries of political success. The lust of 'conquest burned fiercely in the veins of the ancient Romans but conquest for conquest's sake he neither understood nor practised. Rivals had indeed to be crushed, nationalities small and great to be absorbed, new outlets for commerce won from the Irish Sea to the Black Sea. But if Rome took away much, she was always ready to offer something, if not many things, in returncivilisation, as she understood it, community of interest, fellow-citizenship, a share in the secular glories that time and fortune and the red right hand of the conqueror had so well known how to focus on the banks of the Tiber. To effect her object, a net-work of roads connecting the city with every corner of the Empire was essential. As the Empire spread out to north and south and east and west, new highways, converging from the centre of the city, led out towards all the points of the compass, each highway linked with a name or names that had been made great by the very fact of having laid it down, and each untiringly improved and embellished as something to be proud of, from generation to generation, until pride in the great highways leading to and from the city grew into a devotion linking the living with the dead and handing down to the yet unborn children of Rome lasting memorials of the rise and growth and gathering greatness of their native city. The chief mode of embellishment was practical if peculiar. One of the earliest laws providing for the welfare of the city, was that forbidding burials within its boundaries. On the other hand cemeteries, as we understand them, were never very fashionable. In course of events it had grown into a sacred custom with the Romans to lay their dead to rest along the great roads that connected the heart of the Empire with its dependencies in many lands ; and thus the first sight the stranger had of the glories of the capital, was that of an almost unbroken series of stately tombs lining each highway for a distance of nearly twenty miles from the city, each monument being regarded by law and custom as something sacred, inviolable, and venerable. The rich man had a sepulchre built for the interment of himself, his household and descendants : and the poorer man carefully subscribed the customary coin from year to year to the burial club which would see that when his bones had to be , gathered to rest they would find a fitting place in as

stately a sepulchre' as' that of the 'millionaire;hard by. < Cremation was the : custom. The body being burnt, the ashes were then collected : and placed in a small urn which was then laid in the sepulchral monument known as the columbarium jdoveoc), so called because containing a number of little niches or nests, like so many pigeon-holes, erected all round the walls within, as the last resting-place of the members of the family or club, one such columbarium being known to have contained the ashes of as many as 6000 human beings. ■'. • •"• fi To the Christian mind there was always something repellent in the idea of cremating a body that should one day rise from the dead to join the soul in the kingdoms of the blessed; and accordingly, it was always a matter of Christian practice that the mortal remains of the dead should be laid to rest with reverence and respect in the breast of mother earth, just as the dead body of the Master had been deposited in the , fresh-made grave by the loving hands of the faithful lew. Wealthy Christians were not many, and burial plots were costly. To meet the difficulty, the early Christians freely adopted the system of burial clubs that had been long in vogue in Rome. But with a difference. Cremation was not to be thought of, and separate graves dug on the surface were unattainable by men whose means were scant, and whose standing was often simply that of a slave. Monuments above ground, then, were clearly out of the question, and surface burial was impossible for want of space. Another plan was found. The subsoil round Rome is of peculiar formation, something half and half between rock and sand, sufficiently hard not to crumble away, and sufficiently soft to be worked without much difficulty. The surface of the burial plot was left untouched ; but at a depth of some feet an underground gallery three or four feet wide and eight or ten high was cut through the centre of the plot from end to end, and off this a number of cross galleries running at right angles were cut as required, fill the whole extent was a network of narrow galleries, dimly lighted from above by a skylight here and there. When the first series of galleries, the first storey or floor, so to say, was used up, a second storey was excavated in a similar way some half a dozen feet below the first, and this was followed as occasion served by a third, fourth, and even fifth series of galleries, the last at a depth of 50 or more feet below the surface, each connected with those above by sets of suitable stairs. A series of niches or shelves, each the length of the average man, was cut into the side walls of the galleries, to the number of four or five, one above the other, each niche forming a grave. In a shelf thus prepared, the dead body was laid to rest, the niche was then closed with slab and mortar, and the dead troubled the living no more. * ■ * * * *

Famous beyond all others was the Appian Way, the Queen of Roman roads, "because of tho grander scale on which it was constructed, the greater magnificence of the buildings and sepulchres which adorned it, the greater variety of conquered nations which used it, and the number and celebrity of events connected with it. The history of Christian Rome gives to this same road titles of glory incomparably more solid, just, and indisputable." For it soon became the favor-

ite burial ground of Christian Rome, and in the number of \ saints, martyrs, and « ■ illustrious if dead ( laid ~? to rest, and venerated in the underground galleries and crypts that lie along its route, it presents an obvious claim to the title, which has sometimes been given it, of Queen of Christian Roads. , - - ; Time spares few things.; . Great empires wither and fall. That of Rome was no exception to the common lot. Goth and Vandal swooped down in their day on the city, sparing little in their advance. The Christian cemeteries being all outside the city walls, became unsafe in course of time, and it was considered advisable in the ninth century to remove the bodies of the saints and illustrious dead from their resting-place outside the walls, where they had been long honored by the faithful, to the safer refuge afforded by the churches and shrines within the sheltering city. For some time the places where the holy bodies of the champions of the faith had reposed continued to be visited and venerated by the devout. . But gradually the cemeteries became abandoned. The heavy hand of time choked up the entrances to them and effaced all visible traces of them, until the very memory of them was forgotten and they became as if they had never been, till accident brought them back to memory and loving hearts faced the task of restoring them once more to the veneration they had enjoyed in happier days. It was a proud day for John Baptist De Rossi, and a memorable day in the history of the Catholic Church, when in 1852, after many years of patient persevering toil he was able to open up the cemetery of St. Calistus beside the Appian Way, and lay bare the crypt in which the sacred remains of the Popes of the third century, many of them martyrs, once reposed—St. Zepherinus, St. Pontianus, St. Antheros, St. Fabian, St. Lucius, St. Stephen, St. Sixtus, St. Dionysius, St. Eutychianus, and St. Cains, together with "the Holy Confessors who came from Greece, as well as youths and boys and old men and their chaste offspring," to use the words of an inscription set up on the spot in later years by Pope St. Damasus, the deyoutest of all the admirers of the Christian cemeteries of Rome. The work begun by De Rossi has never been allowed to flag. The greater part of the Christian cemeteries have been cleared of the refuse of centuries and made accessible to the public, so that one may now walk freely through the dark and silent streets of the dead, with feelings similar to those recorded by St. Jerome of himself nearly sixteen hundred years ago: "When I was being educated at Rome it was my custom on Sundays, accompanied by other boys of my own age and tastes, to visit the tombs of the Apostles and Martyrs, and to go down into the crypts excavated for them in the bowels of the earth. The walls on either side as you enter are full of the bodies of the dead, and the whole place is so dark that one almost seems to see verified the words of the prophet, 'Let them go down alive-into Hades.' Here and there a little light from overhead affords a momentary relief to the horror of the darkness; but as you go forward, and find yourself again immersed in the utter blackness of the night, the words of the poet spring to your mind: The very silence fills the soul with dread.' " (To be concluded next week.)