II.

ORIGIN AND HISTORY OF THE CATACOMBS.

IT has been conjectured by some writers, that these excavations were commenced long before the founding of the Eternal city by that race who made it famous under the name of ROME. There are traces everywhere of a former mighty people inhabiting these sites, long anterior to the age assigned to Romulus and Remus, when the massive Etruscan tombs were reared, and those temples built in Pæstum, which, two thousand years ago, the Romans were accustomed to visit as antiquities. But they were a people all knowledge of whose language and records has perished. No Rosetta stone has yet been found to furnish a key to the literature of this mysterious race, and their existence is only known by the inscriptions, and sculptures, and vases, dug out of the earth, and filling the museums of Italy, or by their rifled tombs presenting objects of curious study to the antiquarian. We speak of them as the Etruscans, but beyond this everything with regard to them is a blank.

It is supposed that by them these quarries may have been first opened, for there is a massiveness in

the character of their architecture which enables us at once to distinguish it, even from the earlier Roman. These ancient quarries abound, too, not only at Rome, but at Naples, and through all the south of Italy. They are traced, too, in Sicily, in Greece, in nearly all the Greek isles, and in Asia Minor; and perhaps the celebrated labyrinth in the island of Crete was formed originally by excavations of this kind. But they are never found except in the vicinity of some considerable and ancient city, or near the spot where some such city once stood.

The Romans inherited the domains of this mys-terious race, and we find allusions to the Catacombs in their writers long before the Christian era. The great increase of the city in the latter days of the republic, led again to the working of quarries in the immediate neighborhood, to procure the materials necessary for building. The soil of the Campagna rests on tufa and puzzolana, a volcanic, sandy rock, easily quarried, and from its texture well adapted to the excavation of long galleries, while the Esquiline hill was undermined to obtain sand for making cement. These subterranean works were referred to by Cicero in his oration for Cluentius, when Asinius, a young Roman citizen, was inveigled to the gardens of the Esquiline, and precipitated into one of the sand-pits-"in arenarias quasdam extra portam Esquilinam." It was, too, in these caverns, Suetonius tells us, Nero was afterward advised to conceal himself in his hour of danger; on which occasion he made answer to his freedman, Phaon, that "he would not go under the ground while living."

In this way it was that these crypts or galleries were first formed, until the whole subsoil on one side of Rome was in the course of time perforated by a network of excavations, which ultimately extended to a distance of fifteen or, as some say, twenty miles. But when these quarries were exhausted of their original stores, they stood vacant, ready to be appropriated to any other use. And none, of course, would know their intricate windings but those whose hands had formed them, and by whose labor these excavations had been made.

Then came the advent of the Christian faith. The arenarii, or sand-diggers, and the workmen in the quarries, were persons of the lowest grade, and cut off by their occupation from the crowds in the busy city, probably formed a separate and distinct community. There is reason to believe, that Christianity found among them its earliest proselytes, for its first followers everywhere were the lowest in the social scale. These "hereditary bondsmen," in-" deed, scarcely calling their lives their own in this world, would most naturally gladly welcome the hopes which dawned upon them from the world to come. One of the most common figures found portrayed in nearly all these quarries—and which can easily be distinguished from the Christian order of the fossors-is that of a man carrying some implement of labor, often for the purpose of excavation, and wearing the short tunic and scanty dress of the slave. In times of persecution, therefore, the converts employed in the subterranean passages had already provided for them a secure retreat, which also they opened to their brethren in the faith, until

it became the place of refuge of the Roman Church. In addition to this, we learn from a number of testimonies, that the early Christians themselves, as a punishment for abandoning the ancient faith, were often sentenced to labor in these sand-pits. In the "Acts of the Martyrs," we are told, that the Emperor Maximian "condemned all the Roman soldiers, who were Christians, to hard labor; and in various places set them to work, some to dig stones, others sand. He also ordered Ciriacus and Sisinnus to be strictly guarded, condemning them to dig sand, and to carry it on their shoulders." Thus it was that the members of the early Church, and they alone, became familiar with these winding recesses.

We can easily imagine how concealment in these gloomy labyrinths became practicable. The earliest victims selected in a persecution would, of course, be those most prominent in the Church— its bishop, or ministers, or officers.* These, therefore, would at once take refuge in the Catacombs, where the humbler members of the Church, whose obscurity for a time gave them safety, could easily supply them with all the necessaries of life. Springs, too, which still exist in various corridors, and wells-some of which are supposed to have been dug for the purpose of draining parts of the Catacombs-show some of the means by which life was preserved.

* When, in 1809, Napoleon was pressing his demands upon Pius VII., that pontiff, in refusing to comply, said: "I shall make no resistance; I am ready to retire into a convent, or into the same Catacombs of Rome that afforded shelter to the first successors of St. Peter."