From Columbaria to Catacombs: Communities of the Dead in Pagan and Christian Rome - 2008

Commemotatingthe Dead

Texts and Artifacts in Context

Studies of Roman, Jewish, andChristian Burials

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Laurie Brink, O.P. and Deborah Green

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Brink – Commemorating the Dead – 2. Satzlauf – 23. 11. 2007

Patronal Relationsand Changes in Burial Practices

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John Bodel

Chapter 6

From Columbaria to Catacombs:Collective Burial in Pagan and Christian Rome

1 Mommsen fait ma desolation.Il entre dans l’erudition ecclésiastique

comme un rhinoceros dans un champ de vigne,écrasant à droite et à gauche, sans s’émouvoir du dégat.*

Students of classical Roman institutions and scholars of early Chris-tianity have not always seen eye to eye, nor do historians and archaeo-logists invariably agree. More than a century and a half ago, two of thegreatest, Theodor Mommsen and Giovanni Battisa De Rossi, foundmutual inspiration and took equal pleasure in debating the role ofRoman associations (collegia) in burial at Rome during the first threecenturies of the common era; together they set a high standard for pro-ductive and amicable disagreement on a subject central to our con-

1 Louis Duchesne, Director of the École française de Rome, in a letter to GiovanniBattista De Rossi from Paris, 13 November 1892, quoted by Jonathan S. Perry,The Roman Collegia: The Modern Evolution of an Ancient Concept (Leiden andBoston: Brill, 2006), 56. My thanks are due to many: first, to the editors and es-pecially to Laurie Brink, for the inspiration and dedication needed not only toproduce this volume but to arrange the splendid study tour and conference thatpreceded it; to Patricia Duncan and Bradley Peper, my learned and tactful re-spondents in Chicago; to my fellow participant Carolyn Osiek, who provideddetailed criticism on a subsequent written draft; to Simonetta Serra, whose pro-bing skepticism and generously shared knowledge helped to make the argumentless vulnerable; to Vincenzo Fiocchi Niccolai, for valuable conversation and ex-pert opinion at a late stage; and to responsive audiences in Chicago, New York,New Haven, Cologne, Bonn, Munich, and Rome, who improved individual pointsin more ways than can be mentioned. For all the help given, the essay ought tobe better than it is; remaining errors of judgment and fact are the author’s re-sponsibility alone.

**

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cerns.1 This chapter (to compare small things to great), the product ofan equally amicable and stimulating collaboration and debate, hopesto cultivate the more useful elements of that example without wreakingunnecessary havoc in the vineyard.

Burial at Rome:Problems of Evidence and Interpretation

Burial space in ancient Rome was always limited and frequently con-tested. This was true from the beginning of the Iron Age in Italy,around 900 B.C.E., when the few cremation graves in what later be-came the Roman Forum began to be intermingled with inhumationburials of the sort found among the indigenous peoples of the Apen-nine hills, to the fourth century C.E., when Constantine destroyed anearly imperial necropolis along the Via Triumphalis in order to buildan imposing funerary basilica above the spot on the Vatican hill be-lieved to mark the tomb of St. Peter.2 During the three and a half cen-

1 On this rivalry, see the illuminating discussion of Perry, Roman Collegia, 23–60.2 For the early Iron Age culture in Latium, see Timothy J. Cornell, The Beginnings

of Rome (London: Routledge, 1995), 48–53. The discovery in early 2006 of a fewlate Bronze Age pit inhumation burials in the Forum of Caesar on the lowerslopes of the Campidoglio has pushed back by about a century the earliestknown graves – and thus the earliest evidence of human habitation – in the area.Constantine’s basilica rose on the site of an earlier (mid second century) shrineto St. Peter: see Jocelyn Toynbee and John Ward Perkins, The Shrine of St. Peterand the Vatican Excavations (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1956), 12–13for the destruction of existing tombs; further on the Via Triumphalis necropolis,Eva Margareta Steinby, Caterina Coleti, M.-B. Carre, and Maria Teresa Ci-priano La necropoli della via Triumphalis il tratto sotto l’autoparco Vaticano (Attidella Pontificia Accademia Romana di Archeologia, ser. 3. Memorie, vol. 17,Quasar Rome: Pontificia Accademia Romana di Archeologia, 2003), esp. 22–39.For the history of the site, see briefly Mary Beard, John North, and Simon Price,Religions of Rome, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998),268–69 (shrine of the 170s), 368–69 (Constantine’s basilica), 376–77 (subsequentbuilding), with further bibliography. It was not until 563 C.E., when the FirstCouncil of Braga reversed the longstanding Roman prohibition against intra-mural graves by allowing burials around the walls of churches, that the competi-tion for burial space in the suburban zone began to ease: see R. Naz, Dictionnairede Droit Canonique, vol. 3 (Paris: Letouzey et Ané, 1942), col. 730; cf. Orma Ro-binson, “The Roman Law on Burials and Burial Grounds,” The Irish Jurist 10(1975): 186.

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turies of pre-Christian imperial Rome between the reigns of Augustusand Constantine, when the population of the city numbered between750,000 and 1,000,000 inhabitants, the suburbs of the city must haveaccommodated between 10,500,000 and 14,000,000.3 Of these we havetraces of perhaps 150,000 or less than 1.5 percent of the total.4 In gen-eralizing about broad trends, even during the best documented peri-ods, we should not forget how little we know. Nor does the survivingevidence provide a representative selection of all Roman burials; oursample is biased by the chances of survival and recovery and inherentlytends to favor commemorative monuments and epitaphs over un-marked and anonymous graves and thus tells us mainly about com-paratively privileged segments of the population.

Columbaria and Collegia

If the state of our evidence raises one set of problems, our explanationsof it raise another. Major changes in Roman funerary behavior havetraditionally been linked to changes in the social or cultural order –mass migrations to the city in one scenario, the arrival of a newreligion in another – but the conventional hermeneutical strategy ofinterpreting historical outcomes in light of their presumed historicalcauses in this case meets an impasse in the evidence. The invention ofa new form of burial monument (the columbarium) around 25 B.C.E.and the emergence in the management of funerary rites at about the

3 Estimates of the population of early imperial Rome and Italy continue to sparkcontroversy, in part because the confines of “the city” are variously defined(or presumed), but scholarly consensus seems to have settled on a figure between750,000 and 1,000,000 for Rome and its surrounding suburbium during the firstthree centuries C.E.: see recently, Geofrey Kron, “The Augustan Census Figuresand the Population of Italy,” Athenaeum 93 (2005): 487 and n. 251 for Rome;Rob Witcher, “The Extended Metropolis: Urbs, Suburbium, and Population,”JRA 18 (2005): 126 and n. 44, 129. Elio Lo Cascio, “Le procedure di recensusdalla tarda repubblica al tardo antico e il calcolo dela popolazione di Rome,” inLa Rome impériale: démographie et logistique (Collection de l’École Française deRome 230) (ed. Catherine Virlouvet; Rome: École française de Rome, 1997),3–76. For ancient mortality rates, see John Bodel, “Dealing with the Dead,” inDeath and Disease in the Ancient City (eds. Valerie M. Hope and Eireann Mar-shall; London: Routledge, 2000), 128–29.

4 See the Appendix.

From Columbaria to Catacombs

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same time of a social institution previously unconnected with them(the collegium) have usually been linked together and explained as theresult of the demographic pressures created by a large influx of newresidents to the capital following the Augustan peace.5 According tothis view, as the city expanded beyond the capacity of the traditionalsocial support network of families and private patrons to meet theburial needs of an increasingly heterogeneous and rootless urban poor,new mechanisms sprang up to fill the void. Social upheaval exposedgaps in the system, which the organism then evolved in order to fill.There is much of value in such an analysis, but columbaria were ex-pensive structures and served no-less-privileged groups – indeed, inmany respects, no different groups – than traditional tomb monumentsof the same period.6 Nor, as several recent studies have shown, did thecollegia replace the family in caring for the burial of the dead. Whatevidence we have in fact shows families operating in their customaryroles within the framework (both administrative and architectural)of the collegia and columbaria.7 What these institutions represented in

5 So, e.g., Keith Hopkins, Death and Renewal (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1983), 215–17; Nicholas Purcell, “Tomb and Suburb,” in RömischeGräberstraßen: Selbstdarstellung, Status, Standard: Kolloquium in München vom28 bis 30. Oktober 1985 (eds. Henner von Hesberg and Paul Zanker; Munich:Verlag der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften: in Kommission bei derC. H. Beck’schen Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1987), 38–39; John Patterson, “Patron-age, Collegia and Burial in Imperial Rome,” in Death in Towns: Urban Responsesto the Dying and the Dead, 100–1600 (ed. Steven Bassett; Leicester: LeicesterUniversity Press, 1992), 22–23.

6 Columbaria represented a substantial financial outlay: Ian Morris, Death-Ritualand Social Structure in Classical Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1992), 42–47. For the commercial trade and speculation in tomb monu-ments, see also Stefan Schrumpf, Bestattung und Bestattungswesen im römischenReich: Ablauf, soziale Dimension und ökonomische Bedeutung der Totenfürsorge imlateinischen Western. (Götingen: V+R unipress/Bonn University Press, 2006),162–72, discussing (inter alia) CIL 6.9189 and the dossier of texts relating to col-umbaria and attesting transactions involving large numbers of burial niches, oftenin multiples of ten: CIL 6.7803 (10 columbaria, 40 ollae), 13557 (100 ollae), 15551(65 ollae), 17780 (30 ollae), 28126 (20 columbaria, 43 ollae); further below, n. 81.

7 See, e.g., Patterson, “Patronage, Collegia and Burial,” 23; Hopkins, Death andRenewal, 213–14; Kinuko Hasegawa, “The collegia domestica in the Elite RomanHouseholds: The Evidence of Domestic Funeral Clubs for Slaves and Freed-men,” in Studies in Latin Literature and Roman History XII (ed. Carl Deroux,Collection Latomus 287; Brussels: Latomus, 2005), 260; Onno Van Nijf, TheCivic World of Professional Associations in the Roman East (Amsterdam: J. C.Gieben, 1997), 33; further Jean Pierre Waltzing, Étude historique sur les corpor-

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most cases were not alternatives to the traditional mechanisms of sup-port but overarching structures that enabled the family and individualpatrons to perform their conventional roles within newly defined so-cial and physical contexts. Demographic change necessitated new so-lutions to traditional problems but did not fundamentally alter thesocial channels through which they were addressed.

Christian Catacombs?

The situation is similar with the advent of Christianity, the early im-perial shift from cremation to inhumation, and the invention of cata-combs. Despite repeated attempts to prove otherwise, what has rightlybeen called “the biggest single event in ancient burial” – the change inpractice of tens of millions of people across the western empire fromburning to interring their dead, which transformed the suburban land-scape of Rome – has persistently defied both theological and socio-his-torical explanation.8 That the main period of transition, from the latefirst century C.E. to the late second century, roughly coincides with thebeginning of the spread of Christianity across the western empire nodoubt helps to explain the appeal of linking these two major culturalshifts, one involving practice, the other belief, but no plausible causalrelationship between the two has ever been found.9 As for catacombs, a

ations professionelles chez les Romains, (Brussels and Louvain: C. Peeters,1895–1900), vol. 4:509–10, 518–20, listing many examples. The continuity of thenuclear family as the primary social unit represented in epitaphs is demonstratedby Richard Saller and Brent Shaw, “Tombstones and Roman Family Relationsin the Principate: Civilians, Soldiers, and Slaves,” JRS 74 (1984): 124–56.

8 Quote from Morris, Death-Ritual and Social Structure, 31, who ultimately favorsa modified version of the demographic explanation: it was not people carryingthe idea but the idea itself that came from the east and percolated from thetop down, through the diffusion of Hellenistic culture among the upper classes,rather than from the bottom up, via proselytic immigrants from Palestine andJudaea.

9 The rate of growth of the early Christian community must have varied widelyover time and place, but it clearly began small, with fewer than 1,000 members(mainly, no doubt, in the eastern Mediterranean) around the middle of the firstcentury, and grew by the end of the third century, on one widely accepted esti-mate, to perhaps 10 percent of the population of the empire, or roughly six mil-lion: see Keith Hopkins, “Christian Number and Its Implications,” JECS 6, no. 2(1998): 185–226, esp. 192–95. The popular transition from cremation to inhu-mation around Rome began around the middle of the first century and is evident


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handful of tendentious texts written during the third century by evenfewer Christian bishops and apologists about particular circumstancesat Carthage, Alexandria, and Rome has been taken to show that Chris-tians of that era systematically segregated themselves in death inspecial Christian cemeteries under ground, but the evidentiary value ofthe testimony from such proselytizing polemicists is questionable, andthe archaeological record, though regularly pressed into argument, re-mains equivocal.10 In fact, early Christian bishops seem to have takenlittle interest in the funerary behavior of contemporary Christians andevidently exercised only minimal control over cemeteries before thetime of Constantine.11 Of the three texts regularly cited to demonstratethat Christians avoided burial with pagans, the only one dating to be-

already then among the lower classes (slaves and freedmen): see Franca Taglietti,“Ancora su incinerazione e inumazione: la necropolis dell’Isola Sacra,” in Rö-mischer Bestattungsbrauch und Beigabensiten in Rom, Norditalian, und den Nord-westprovinzen von der späten Republik bis in die Kaiserzeit (eds. MichaelHeinzelmann, Jacopo Ortalli, Peter Fasold, and Marion Witteyer; Palila 8;Wiesbaden: Dr. Ludwig Reichert Verlag, 2001), 149–58; cf. Steinby, La necrop-olis della Via Triumphalis, 29–30.

10 For the most frequently cited texts – Tertullian, Scap. 3.1 (ca. 203 C.E.), Apol.39.5–6 (ca. 197 C.E.); Cyprian, Epist. 67.6.2 (251 C.E.) (North Africa); Origen,Hom. Jer. (ca. 200–230) (Alexandria); and [Hippolytus], Philosoph. 9.12.14(ca. 198–217) and Traditio Apostolica 40 (Rome) – see below, yyy, yyy andn. 54. The difference between perception and reality must be weighed carefullyin assessing the value of such testimony: see Hopkins, “Christian Number,”186–87, expressing skepticism. For a good recent statement of the accepted view,see Vincenzo Fiocchi Nicolai, “The Origin and Development of Roman Cata-combs,” in The Christian Catacombs of Rome, History, Decoration, Inscriptions(eds. Vincenzo Fiocchi Nicolai, Fabrizio Bisconti, and Danilo Mazzoleni; Re-gensburg: Schnell and Steiner, 1999), 13–17.

11 The last point is controversial, but see Éric Rebillard, Religion et sepulture: l’ég-lise, les vivants, et les morts dans l’antiquité tardive (Paris: Éditions de l’École desHautes Études en Sciences Sociales, 2003); Mark J. Johnson, “Pagan-ChristianBurial Practices of the Fourth Century: Shared Tombs?” JECS 5, no. 1 (1997):40–49; and Jill Harries, “Death and the Dead in the Late Roman West,” in Deathin Towns: Urban Responses to the Dying and the Dead, 100–1600 (ed. StevenBassett: Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1992), 61, all emphasizing the dis-tinction between official concern for martyrs’ tombs and relics and the generallack of interest in the burial of ordinary Christians; see also Osiek, below in thisvolume; and below, XXX. It is not until the Council of Paderborn in 785 C.E.that a general rule was promulgated that Christians be buried in church cem-eteries rather than in pagan tombs: see Charles Hefele, Histoire des Councilesd’après les documents originaux, (trans. Henri Leclerq; Paris: Letouzey et Ané,1910), vol. 3 994.

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fore the time of Constantine shows exactly the opposite. In a letter of251 C.E. to the clergy and Christians of Spain, Cyprian accuses twoSpanish bishops, Basilides and Martial, of having accepted letters ofidolatry during the persecutions of Decius and complains that Martialhad long been frequenting the “disgraceful and filthy banquets” of apagan collegium and “had placed his sons in the same collegium and, inthe manner of foreign peoples, had buried them with strangers amongprofane graves.” At the time, Cyprian was quarrelling with Stephen,bishop at Rome, who had previously reinstated both Basilides andMartial to their sees, so his charges against the two Spaniards werehardly disinterested and must be seen as part of a larger polemic withhis Roman rival. More importantly, Stephen’s actions show that, re-gardless of Cyprian’s opinion, when Martial as bishop had buried hissons according to the practices of a pagan funerary collegium, he didnot violate any ecumenical principle serious enough to prevent his sub-sequent rehabilitation and moreover had done so openly and withoutfear of retribution. Whatever the currency of Cyprian’s views amongthe Christian community at Carthage, the attitude they representedwas parochial and had no authority over or bearing on Christianburial practices in Spain and at Rome.12

This is not the place to review the remaining literary and archeologi-cal evidence in detail, but a simple demographic consideration mayperhaps illustrate one problematic aspect of the current orthodoxy. Ifwe accept the consensus opinion that the population of imperial Romecomprised between 750,000 and 1,000,000 residents during the thirdcentury, and if we further accept a reasonable estimate of the size of theChristian community at Rome of possibly as many as 7,000 at the be-ginning of that century and follow a plausible model of its projectedgrowth across the empire of 40 percent per decade, then we must sup-pose that by the middle of the century the community counted some37,000 members, and about the time that Diocletian began persecutingChristians systematically, during the first years of the fourth century,they numbered around 200,000 at Rome and constituted between 20 and

12 Cyprian, Epist. 67.6.2, Martialis quoque praeter gentilium turpia et lutulentaconvivia in collegio diu frequentata et filios in eodem collegio exterarum gentiummore apud profana sepulcra depositos et alienigenis consepultos … The other twopassages – Hilary of Poitiers, Mat. 7.11 and Theodoret, Graec. affect. curatio8.29 – belong to the middle of the fourth century and to the first half of the fifthcentury respectively. On all three see Johnson, “Pagan-Christian Burial Prac-tices,” 45–46.


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27 percent of the urban population.13 Those figures compare favorablywith the most careful existing attempt to estimate the number of Chris-tians at Rome from the literary sources, made originally more than acentury ago, which arrived at a figure for the middle of the century of30,000.14 (At the same rate of growth, the community of Roman Chris-tians would have surpassed 750,000 by the year 340 and 1,000,000 bythe year 350. Once Christians constituted nearly 100 percent of theurban population, then virtually all Roman burials, whether in cata-combs or elsewhere, would naturally in some sense have been “Chris-tian.” At this point, of course, the notion of purely “Christian” cata-combs becomes unproblematic.15)

13 Calculating the size of the early Christian community is fraught with difficulties,but one recent estimate for the entire empire places their number around210,000 at the beginning of the third century and close to six million at its close,with a disproportionate concentration in urban centers, especially in the easternMediterranean: see Hopkins, “Christian Number,” 192 and Fig. 1. For the sizeof the Christian community at Rome around 200 C.E., see Robert M. Grant,Early Christianity and Society: Seven Studies (San Francisco: Harper and Row,1977), 6. For the growth rate of 40 percent per decade and other relevant figures,see Rodney Stark, The Rise of Christianity: A Sociologist Reconsiders History(Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1996), 4–13, 129–45 (on cities acrossthe empire). The actual (projected) number of Christians at Rome in 250 C.E.would be 37,647; in 300 C.E. 202,474.

14 Adolf von Harnack, Die Mission und Ausbreitung des Christentums in den erstendrei Jahrhunderten vol. 2(4th ed.; Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs, 1924), 806, relying pri-marily on a famous letter written by Cornelius, bishop at Rome in 251–253, toFabius, bishop of Antioch, boasting of the diversity and number of episcopalpersonnel at the capital – 46 priests, 7 deacons, 7 subdeacons, 42 acolytes, 52exorcists, and various lectors – and claiming that 1,500 widows and poor personswere supported by communal charity: Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 6.43.11. All such fig-ures must be regarded with caution: see Hopkins, “Christian Number,” 187–92;cf. Luce Pietri, “Les resistances: de la polemique païenne à la persecution deDioclétien,” in Histoire du Christianisme des origines à nos jours II. Naisanced’une Chrétienté (250–430) (ed. Luce Pietri: Paris: Desclée-Fayard, 1995), 134.

15 The actual (projected) figures: in 340 C.E., 777,826 Christians at Rome; in350 C.E., 1,088,956. Across the empire a rate of growth of 40 percent per decadewould have resulted in some 33,880,000 Christians by 350 C.E., or 56.5 percentof a population of 60 million: see Stark, The Rise of Christianity, 7 and Table 1.1.Of course as the absolute numbers, and thus the percentage of a more or lessstatic (if not actually declining) urban population, increased, the rate of growthwould have slowed, but the contours of an exponential curve make it clear thatby the middle of the fourth century virtually all those buried in catacombs wereprobably in some sense “Christian.” Who counted as “Christian,” of course, isproblematic and largely a matter of perception: among early Christian writers,

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If we then compare this hypothetical number of urban Christiansaround the year 300 with the estimated number of individual burialspaces provided by the Roman catacombs before the time of Constan-tine – some 41,800 (see the Appendix) – we confront a notable para-dox. If virtually all the spaces in these purpose-built catacombs wereoccupied by Christians, as is regularly maintained, and if Christiansdied at the same presumed rate as other Romans (roughly 40 per 1,000per year), then, supposing that the rate of growth of the urban Chris-tian community over the course of the century was constant (it almostcertainly was not, but we are here interested only in a hypotheticalmodel), some 234,500 Christians would have died at Rome over thecourse of the century. Bearing in mind the general figures proposedearlier for the percentage of burials of all types at Rome during thethree and a half centuries before Constantine for which we have anyevidence at all (less than 1.5 percent), we must then conclude that – re-markably – we have evidence for nearly 18 percent of all the Christianburials of the third century but only a minuscule portion – less thanone hundredth of one percent – for the disposition of others who diedat Rome during the same period. All of these figures are crude esti-mates and any could be disputed, but even if each were off by 50 per-cent we would still be left with a disproportionately high represen-tation of Christian graves. That is possible, of course, but perhapsunlikely. Even if we grant the pious efforts of later generations ofChristians to cultivate the tombs of their early brethren (to say nothingof the cult of the martyrs), and even if we note the general lack ofChristian concern for the graves of non-believers (to say nothing of thewillful destruction of them during the middle ages), a more plausiblehypothesis might suppose that the evidence we have for Roman burialduring the third century is more or less equally unrepresentative of allgroups and that Christians and non-Christians filled the burial spacesof the catacombs, as well as the other sorts of graves in use during theperiod, in numbers more or less reflective of their numbers within thegeneral population.

If that is so, then not only did Christian dogma about the fate of thesoul after death have little to do with the broad change in preferred

the term was “a persuasive, hopeful and often porous category, used optimisti-cally”: Hopkins, “Christian Number,” 186–87, quote from 187. Among lapsedbelievers who abrogated their faith during the persecutions, on the other hand,many must subsequently have regarded themselves as (again) Christian.


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method of disposal that accompanied the rise of Christianity in thewest, but the impulse of urban Christians to be inhumed in collectivecemeteries underground may not have particularly distinguished themfrom their pagan and Jewish contemporaries.16 Two points, related butdistinct, are relevant in this regard. First, and most easily demon-strated, the creation of private cemeteries by groups identified by acommon religious bond was not peculiar to the Christians at Rome.In addition to half a dozen well-recognized Jewish catacombs , we maynote, for instance, during the same periods and in the same regions inwhich the so-called Christian catacombs were being created and devel-oped, collective cemeteries established by collegia of Aesculapiusand Hygia and of Silvanus beside the Via Appia between the first andthe third mile.17 Indeed, if a recent reassessment of the organization ofJewish burials at Rome is correct, Roman Christians will have learnedthe use of catacombs from the local Jewish community, who had devel-oped their own subterranean burial grounds at Rome beginning al-

16 The idea that Christian ideology influenced the change in preferred method ofburial goes back to a misapprehension of Minucius Felix, Octavius 11.4, on theChristian condemnation of cremation. See the famous refutation of Arthur D.Nock, “Cremation and Burial in the Roman Empire,” HTR 25 (1932): 321–59;repr. in Arthur Darby Nock: Essays on Religion and the Ancient World (ed. ZephStewart; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972), 277–307 and, on“Christian” imagery in funerary art of the same period, “Sarcophagi and Sym-bolism,” AJA 50 (1946): 140–70; repr. in Arthur Derby Nock: Essays, 606–41. For“pagan” catacombs, see Philippe Pergola, “Il ‘praedium Domitillae’ sulla via Ar-deatina: analisi storicotopografica delle testimonianze pagane fino alla metà delIII sec. d.C.,” RACrist 55 (1979): 313–35, hedging the argument, and the dis-cussion among Pergola, Umberto Fasola, and Vincenzo Fiocchi Niccolai, inActes du XIe Congrès International d’Archéologie Chrétienne (Rome: École fran-çaise de Rome and Pontificio Istituto di Archeologia Cristiana, 1989), 2:1207–10.

17 For the Jewish catacombs of Rome, see Cinzia Vismara, “I cimiteri ebraici diRoma,” in Società romana e impero tardoantico II. Roma. Politica, economia,paesaggio urbano (ed. Andrea Giardina: Rome: Laterza, 1986), 351–92, 490–503and (less reliably) Leonard V. Rutgers, The Jews in Late Ancient Rome: Evidenceof Cultural Interaction in the Roman Diaspora (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1995). For col-lective cemeteries of other religious groups, see Lucrezia Spera, Il paesaggio sub-urbano di Roma dall’antichità al medioevo. Il comprensorio tra le vie Latina eArdeatina dalle Mura Aureliane al III miglio (Rome: L’Erma di Bretschneider,1999), 53 (Aesculapius and Hygia: a schola and burial facilities on the left side ofthe Via Appia between the first and second mile, ca. 150 C.E.; cf. CIL 6.10234;ILS 7213; AE 1937, 161); 138–39 (Silvanus: between the second and the thirdmile, second century.; cf. CIL 6.10231 = ILS 7313); further 358–61, 463–64; and,in general, Waltzing, Étude Historique, 1:197–98.

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ready in the first century B.C.E., and who, like Diaspora Jews elsewherethroughout the Mediterranean, relied on family for burial arrange-ments and followed the funerary customs and organization of the localpopulation.18 Second, and more importantly, not only is it obviousthat not all followers of a particular religion were buried in such col-lective monuments, it is equally clear that burial in such places was notnormally restricted to devotees of a particular religion. Occasionallyone finds testators or the owners of tombs attempting to prescribeburial within them to followers of a specific sect – an epitaph of thethird century from the catacombs of Domitilla, for example, declaresthat a certain M. Antonius Res(ti)tutus “made the hypogeum forhimself and his household trusting in the Lord”; another (which mayor may not be Christian) of late-second-century date from beside theVia Nomentana identifies a monument owned by a Valerius Mercuriusand two other persons and intended for freedmen and descendantswho “belong to my religion” – but these declarations, which (it may benoted) do not explicitly exclude burial to anyone but merely designatecertain categories of persons welcomed, are the exceptions that provethe rule.19 More often with collective monuments established by groupslinked with a specific religious identity we find envisaged the possibil-ity if not the actual fact of the burial of others who do not belong tothe same sect. So, for example, the foundation document of the colle-gium of Aesculapius and Hygia explicitly allows for a member tobequeath his place to “a son, or brother, or freedman,” without spec-ifying any other qualification than payment of a funerary fee.20

18 Margaret H. Williams, “The Organisation of Jewish Burials in Ancient Romein the Light of Evidence from Palestine and the Diaspora,” ZPE 101 (1994):165–82, especially 175–82, arguing convincingly for the absence of control bysynagogues over the burial arrangements of Jews at Rome.

19 ILCV 1597 = ICUR 6555, M. Antonius Restutus fecit ypogeu(m) sibi et suisfidentibus in Domino; CIL 6.10412 = ILCV 3824 = ILS 8337, MonumentumValeri Mercuri et Iulittes Iuliani et Quintilies Verecundes libertis libertabusqueposterisque eorum ad religionem pertinentes meam …; cf. also ILCV 3681 = AE1923, 66, Faltoniae Hilaritati dominae filiae carissimae quae hoc coemeterium asolo sua pecunia fecit et huhic religioni donavit with Éric Rebillard, “KOIMH-THRION et COEMETERIUM: tombe, tombe sainte, nécropole,” MEFRA 105(1993): 979, Osiek, below, yyy; CIL 6.10411 = ILCV 3826.

20 CIL 6.10234: … si quis locum suum legare volet filio vel fratri vel liberto, dumtaxatut inferat arkae n(ostrae) partem dimidiam funeratici. Exclusivity was not un-known in Roman collegia but was more characteristic of the associations organ-ized by trades than of those defined by religions: see below yyy.


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In fact, it is now generally recognized that throughout the third andfourth centuries many Christians continued to be buried in familialmonuments of the traditional sort, long after catacombs came intowidespread use; that the Christian ideology of egalitarianism, which thenetworked galleries supposedly promoted –, is belied by their accom-modation from the outset of privileged areas for monumental tombs setoff from the other burial spaces both architecturally and decoratively;and that many of the so-called Christian catacombs originated fromand regularly incorporated subterranean pagan burial areas.21 To thesenow generally conceded points, especially the last, we may add that un-equivocal evidence exists not only for the incorporation within “Chris-tian” catacombs of earlier pagan hypogea but for the contemporaryburial side by side, throughout the third and fourth centuries, of Chris-tians and pagans, not only within a single monument but in adjacentsubterranean spaces connected by tunnels and galleries. Among themore striking examples of the latter are the catacombs of Agnese besidethe Via Nomentana, where pagan hypogea were left intact and access-ible after a Christian cemetery was installed on the site, and the so-called catacombs of Vibia next to the cemetery of Praetextatus at thesecond mile of the Via Appia, where the frescoes decorating certainarched inhumation niches (arcosolia) identify the burial spaces of threepriests of Mithras, a devotee of Sabazius, and his pagan wife, whileother inscriptions clearly mark the graves of Christians – all, it seems,dating from the second half of the fourth century.22

21 See recently, e.g., Vincenzo Fiocchi Nicolai and Jean Guyon, “Introduzione,” inOrigine delle Catacombe Romane. Atti della giornata tematica dei Seminari diArcheologia Cristiana (Roma – 21 marzo 2005) (eds. Vincenzo Fiocchi Nicolaiand Jean Guyon; Vatican City: Pontificio Istituto di Archeologia Cristiana, 2006),which Prof. Fiocchi Nicolai kindly shared with me in advance of publication;for non-egalitarian design, see further, below p. 224. Notable examples at Romeof “Christian” catacombs originating from pagan hypogea include the so-calledhypogeum of the Flavii in the cemetery of Domitilla and the hypogaeum of theAcilii in the catacombs of Priscilla: see, e.g., Philippe Pergola, “La region dite des‘Flavii Aurelii’ dans lacatacombe de Domitille,” MEFRA 95 (1983): 183–248 andAntonio Ferrua, “Iscrizioni pagane della Catacomba di Priscilla,” Archivio dellasocietà romana di storia patria 110 (1987): 5–19, both with further references.

22 See Johnson, “Pagan-Christian Burial Practices,” 50–59, with examples fromRome and elsewhere. For S. Agnese, see also Umberto Fasola, “La ‘Regio IV’ delcimitero di S. Agnese,” RAC 50 (1974): 175–205, with the remarks of Johnson,“Pagan-Christian Burial Practices,” 50; for Vibia, see CIL 6.142 = ILS 3961 = CLE1317 and Spera, Il paesaggio suburbano, 174–75, 400–1, with further references.

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When all the exceptions are taken into account and all the qualifi-cations have been duly noted, little remains at the foundation of theconventional view but the conviction that purpose-built catacombsmust have been Christian from the outset because after Constantinethe cult of the martyrs caused Christians to vie for burial in close prox-imity to the tombs of their saints and thus to expand the already exist-ing networks of galleries into vast subterranean complexes, whichChristians (numerically predominant now, in the urban population)naturally controlled and eventually monopolized. Whether the origi-nal underground cemeteries developed during the third century wereexclusively Christian, on the other hand, is considerably less certain.Such a situation is demographically improbable and archaeologicallydubious and, on the basis of the ambivalent literary sources availableto us, must remain decidedly open.

Collective Burial

The conventional explanations of these two major innovations in burialpractices during the first three centuries C.E. – the invention of colum-baria and the development of catacombs – fail to convince because thenew funerary forms did not in fact respond to the social pressures thatare thought to have given rise to them: columbaria and collegia did notreplace families and patrons, and catacombs were not invented and de-signed to accommodate the particular ideological beliefs and religiousbehavior of early Christians. What columbaria and catacombs have incommon, and what distinguishes them from other Roman monumenttypes, is their capacity to accommodate burials in groupings larger thanand different from the traditional units of the nuclear family (normallyburied in so-called sepulchra hereditaria) and the extended householdprovided for in sepulchra familiaria, which included, in the well-knownepitaphic phrase, “freedmen and freedwomen and their descendants”(libertis libertabusque posterisque eorum).23 If we start from this obser-

23 For the basic definition, see Dig. 11.7.5 (Gaius), Familiaria sepulchra dicunturquae quis sibi familiaeque suae constituit, hereditaria autem quae quis sibi heredi-busque suis constituit. The distinction was purely a matter of law: see Sergio Laz-zarini, Sepulcra familiaria: un’indagine epigrafico-giuridica (Milan: CEDAM,1991), 7–11 (on Dig. 11.7.6.pr, below n. 73) with Fernand de Visscher, Le droitdes tombeaux romains (Milan: Giuffrè Editore, 1963), 93–102. Architecturallythere was no difference in form between the two types, and the legal distinction


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vation and ask first what possibilities for collective burial the newarchitectural forms encouraged and only then proceed to considerwhat social purposes they may have served, we may perhaps avoidsome of the pitfalls that have impeded progress from the opposite di-rection. First, however, it will be necessary to establish one basic me-thodological point about the analysis of ancient burial practices and todispel two common misconceptions about Roman funerary behaviorthat have led some otherwise valuable investigations astray.

Wild Geese and Red Herrings

Method first. In considering the disposition of collective cemeteries wemust resist the tendency to assume that burial arrangements for thedead corresponded directly to the social organization of the living, andin particular we must avoid succumbing to the “housing” fallacy ac-cording to which the internal configuration of columbaria and cata-combs somehow reflected the distribution of space in contemporarydomestic architecture.24 The social arrangements articulated withina columbarium or catacombs are unlike those ever lived out in a houseor apartment block. Romans did not, in fact, live as they died, nor didthey arrange themselves in death as they did in life: the easy analogiesbreak down almost as soon as they begin to be examined, whether we

between them could become blurred in practice: see e.g., Valerie Hope, “A Roofover the Dead: Communal Tombs and Family Structure,” in Domestic Space inthe Roman World: Pompeii and Beyond (eds. Ray Laurence and Andrew Wallace-Hadrill; Portsmouth, R.I.: Journal of Roman Archaeology, 1997), 69–88; MarioAmelotti, “Una Visita a Pietro … e a Popilio Eracla,” in Collatio iuris romani:études dédiées à Hans Ankum à l’occasion de son 65e anniversaire (eds. R. Feen-stra, A. S. Hartkamp, J. E. Spruit, P. J. Sijpestein, L. C. Winkel: Amsterdam:J. C. Gieben, 1995), 4–5.

24 Purcell, “Tomb and Suburb,” 39, for example, corrects Hopkins’s comparison ofcolumbaria to insulae (Death and Renewal, 214) by arguing that “the housingwhich parallels it [the columbarium] is the domus,” Each view has something torecommend it, but both are fundamentally incorrect. More cautious (and moreaccurate) is the view of Hope, “A Roof over the Dead,” who likens familial andhousehold structure to tomb configuration only to the extent that both werefluid and changed unpredictably. For the organization of space within theRoman house, see Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, “The Social Structure of the RomanHouse,” PBSR 56 (1988): 43–97 and, briefly, id., Houses and Society in Pompeiiand Herculaneum (Princeton, N. J. Princeton University Press, 1994), 14–16.

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consider the positioning of sarcophagi within the tomb of the Scipiosor the placement of grave markers in the familial tombs of imperialRomans of moderate means. A recent analysis of a selection of earlyimperial tombs from Isola Sacra and from the section of the ViaTriumphalis necropolis under the Vatican parking lot, for example,shows that in many cases no particular burial place within a monu-ment was marked out more than any other and that where a hierarchi-cal arrangement privileging a central location is found, the principalfocus was less often centered on the proprietor of the tomb or thepaterfamilias than on the first person buried in the monument or onone whose principal claim seems to have been the affection in which heor she was held by the owner.25

It hardly requires observing that Romans of the empire groupedthemselves socially according to various criteria, depending upon thecontext. Within the home, familial ties and hierarchies dominated, butoutside the household, various criteria might dictate not only member-ship but rank within a group. Domestic collegia regularly and naturallysubsumed familial structures in organizing the burial behavior of theirmembers within collective monuments, but other formal or semiformalvoluntary associations – for instance, those that channeled politicalactivity or access to social services – bore more complex and variable re-lationships with the funerary activities of their constituents. The vici ofRome, for example, provided administrative structure and corporate or-ganization for various political, social, and religious activities, but resi-dency in a neighborhood played little, if any, role in determiningfunerary behavior.26 Similarly, at Pompeii neighborhood groups ex-hibited corporate organization and acted collectively at times in endors-ing local politicians – as did professional collegia of dyers (infectores)and fruit-sellers (pomarii), religious associations such as the devotees of

25 Francisca Feraudi-Gruénais, Inschriften und ‘Selbstdarstellung’ in stadtrömi-schen Grabbauten (Libitina 3; Rome: Quasar, 2003), 25–42, esp. 41–42. Evenwhen an original decorative scheme or arrangement of burial places seems de-signed to focus attention on a particular location, the practicalities of continueduse of the monument frequently subvert the program, notably when subsequentgraves intrude into the decorative framework: in brief, functionality trumpedaesthetics in determining how burial spaces were used (42–54, esp. 43).

26 See J. Bert Lott, The Neighborhoods of Augustan Rome (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 2004), 45–60, 106–17. For the mistaken idea that the region inwhich Jews in Rome were buried depended upon the location of their syna-gogues, see Williams, “Organisation of Jewish Burials,” 165–75.


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Isis (Isiaci universi), the inhabitants of a single residential block (the in-sula Satriorum), the patrons (it seems) of the baths of Venus (Veneri orVeneriosi), and informal groups waggishly identifying themselves aspetty-thieves (furunculi), gladiatorial fans (spectaculi spectantes),sleepers (dormientes), and late-drinkers (seri bibi) – but none of thesegroups appears anywhere in the organization of Pompeian cemeteries ortombs.27 In certain cases, however, corporate identity in life might be re-framed (rather than replicated) in death. Groups of clients collectivelyendorsing a patron for political office might expect in return to havetheir burial arrangements provided for, and worshippers of a particularcult, as noted earlier, might band together in death in collective cem-eteries. Professional associations sometimes projected their exclusivityinto their funerary facilities: at Rome a collegium of cooks in the im-perial household had a special burial complex between the second andthird mile of the Via Appia, and an association of ivory and citron-woodworkers, which probably provided burials as well as banquets, restrictedmembership to practitioners of those trades.28 Soldiers lived a highlyregimented life and found in their military units a social institution thatprovided much of the structure traditionally associated with the family.Special units of them at Rome, such as the equites singulares and the de-tachment of sailors from the Misene fleet assigned to rigging the awn-ings above the Colosseum, segregated themselves in separate burialgrounds, but others of no less specialized and even more élite status,such as the praetorian guards, preferred individual burial among civil-ians in the general necropoleis outside the city gates.29 Even with corpor-

27 For the topographical organization of Pompeii, see Paavo Castrén, Ordo Popu-lusque Pompeianus: Polity and Society in Roman Pompeii (2nd ed.; Rome: BardiEditori, 1983), 79–82. For the groups of electoral supporters, see James L.Franklin, Pompeii: The Electoral Programmata, Campaigns and Politics, A.D.71–79 (Rome: American Academy in Rome, 1980), 21–24, with references. Forthe humorously named pseudo-collegia, Waltzing, Étude historique, vol. 1, 51 n. 2aptly compares the jocular references in Horace (Serm. 1.2.1) and Apuleius(Metam. 7.7.4) to associations of Syrian flute-girls (ambubaiarum collegia) andbandits (latronis collegium) respectively.

28 For the imperial cooks, see Spera, Paesaggio suburbano, 187–88 with CIL6.7458, 8750, 8751, the last reused to cover a loculus in the nearby catacombs ofCallistus, a section of which, to judge from a pair of graffiti (ICUR 14815a–b),was evidently known as the regio cocorum. For the collegium of ivory and citron-wood workers, see CIL 6.33885 = ILS 7214.

29 For the legion as a social institution, see Ramsay MacMullen, “The Legion as aSociety,” Historia 33 (1984): 440–56. For the equites singulares, see Jean Guyon,

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ate institutions, the correspondence between membership in life andcommunity in death was variable and unpredictable. It stands to reason,then, that principles of organization and hierarchy recognizable in oneare seldom found reflected in the other. Burial architecture in antiquitydid not intend to replicate the circumstances of the living but instead en-abled abstract expressions of ideal social orders that seldom, if ever, cor-responded directly to the way human relationships were enacted in life.30

Finally, before we turn to the problematic question of definition,it will be necessary to dispel two common misconceptions about theso-called sepulchra familiaria, those which provided for freedmen andfreedwomen to be buried along with their patrons. First, it is not thecase, as is sometimes maintained, that this type of monument, whichwas most characteristic of the second century C.E. and thus representsthe principal alternative method of group burial to columbaria at thebeginning of the century and to catacombs toward the end, first cameinto use during the latter half of the first century.31 Familial tombsexisted already during the final decades of the Republic, when (itseems) it was ex-slaves themselves (often the innovators in commemo-rative funerary behavior) who favored the form.32 Whatever role fam-ilial tombs played in the changing face of collective burial during the

Le cimitière aux deux lauriers: recherches sur les catacombes romaines (Rome:École française de Rome, 1987), 30–33; for the Misene sailors, see Spera, Paes-aggio suburbano, 158; for the praetorian guard, see Marcel Durry, Les CohortesPrétoriennes (Paris: De Boccard, 1968), 60–63.

30 For the basic methodological point, see, e.g., Bruno D’Agostino, “Società deivivi, communità dei morti: Un rapporto difficile,” Dialoghi di archeologia 3,1(1985): 47–58 and, more polemically, Rick Jones, “Rules for the Living and theDead: Funerary Practices and Social Organization,” in Römerzeitliche Gräberals Quellen zu Religion, Bevölkerungsstruktur und Sozialgeschichte (ed. ManuelaStruck: Mainz: Institut für Vor- und Frühgeschichte der Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz, 1993), 247–54.

31 So, e.g., Francisca Feraudi-Gruénais, Ubi diutius nobis habitandum est. DieInnendekoration der kaiserzeitlichen Gräber Roms (Palilia 9; Wiesbaden: Dr. Lud-wig Reichert Verlag, 2001), 152–53, and ead. Inschriften und ‘Selbstdarstel-lung,’ 36, apparently confusing the advent of the architectural form of theKammergräber with the juridical capacity for familial burial, which clearlyexisted earlier.

32 The clearest indication is provided by epitaphs that include the standard phraselibertis libertabusque (in various orthographies), e.g., CIL 12 1226, 1236, 1277,1278, 1330, 1401, 1638; sometimes libertis alone, e.g., CIL 12 1286, 1308, 1313,1355, 1398, 1568; occasionally in the complete formula with posteris also, e.g.,CIL 12 1319, 1334, 2213; AE 1990, 345.


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second century, they were not first invented to respond to new needsfirst arising then. Second, we should not imagine that familial tombs,by including freedmen as well as family members within the monu-ment, somehow reflect a growing magnanimity of patrons towardtheir households. Roman landowners establishing testamentary foun-dations and trusts to allow generations of ex-slaves to inherit theirmonuments were less interested in preserving landed property withintheir families than they were in perpetuating their own names by pas-sing the properties on to their freedmen.33 In this respect, what familialtombs illustrate is not generosity but ego. Nor, on the other hand,should we imagine that during the Republic Roman slaves were norm-ally deprived of formal burial and that columbaria first made thisopportunity available to them. Since slaves did not have juridicalpersonae, testamentary dispositions and the epitaphic formulae thatreflect them naturally took no formal account of their ultimate fate indeath. Although definitive physical evidence of the gravesites of slavesis difficult to identify, psychological plausibility and the apparentlycommonplace presence of unmarked or anonymous graves withintomb enclosures suggest that household slaves often found burial infamilial and even hereditary monuments.34

Let us assume that the primary reason for the introduction of boththe columbarium and catacombs was the simple demographic need cre-ated by a limited amount of land on the outskirts of Rome and the ever-accumulating demands placed on it by successive generations of Ro-mans united (whatever their religious beliefs or social circumstances)by a persistent desire to bury their dead in the suburban soil and a re-

33 David Johnston, “Trusts and Tombs,” ZPE 72 (1988): 81–87 and id. The RomanLaw of Trusts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 77–97.

34 Werner Eck, “Römische Grabinschriften. Aussageabsicht und Aussagefähigkeit imfunerären Kontext,” in Römische Gräberstraßen: Selbstdarstellung, Status, Stan-dard (eds. Henner von Hesberg and Paul Zanker; Munich: Verlag der BayerischenAkademie der Wissenschaften: in Kommission bei der C. H. Beck’schen Verlags-buchhandlung, 1987), 73–74 argued the point persuasively for the second andthird centuries C.E., and the same can be said for the period of the late Republic aswell. Eck believes that during the Republic dead slaves were unceremoniouslydumped in the Esquiline puticuli; I have argued elsewhere that disposal in theseloca publica was more often the fate of the indigent free: “Dealing with the Dead,”128–35. A contract of Augustan date for the undertaking concession at Puteoliprovides for regular, albeit less formal, burial for slaves: see AE 1971, 88 II.22–23,with François Hinard and Jean C. Dumont, Libitina: pompes funèbres et supplicesen Campanie à l’époque d’Auguste (Paris: De Boccard, 2003), 131–32 ad loc.

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luctance to give up the commemorative habit of regular pilgrimages tolocal grave sites. It remains to investigate how these new burial formsaccommodated those desires and what further possibilities for socialexpression they may have supported or imposed. Here we are ham-pered by some fundamental problems of definition, which we mustnow address, for it is clear that those who write about columbaria, cata-combs, and cemeteries do not always mean the same things by the terms.

Problems of Definition

Our problems of interpretation begin with terminology. Unfortunatelythey are acute, since each of the three principal terms used to describecollective burial spaces during the first three centuries C.E. – colum-barium, catacombs, and cemetery ( or coemeterium) – is,in standard usage, a modern invention that remains elusively ambiva-lent or imprecise.

Columbarium, in antiquity, meant “dovecote,” a nesting-box for apair of pigeons, and then, in a transferred sense, “niche for an ash urn”or more precisely, since pigeons kept for breeding were (and are) norm-ally kept in pairs, “bipartite niche for a pair of urns,” the most charac-teristic form.35 The word is never used in literary sources in this lattersense but is found in some forty inscriptions, all but two from Rome orOstia.36 This extended usage, like the form itself, evidently originatedat the capital and was virtually restricted to its environs.

In modern usage, however, the term columbarium does not normallyrefer to the individual niches or cavities for urns but to the architectural

35 For the Roman dovecote (columbarium or, in fashionable Greek parlance,φ), see the description by Varro, Rust. 3.7.4: Singulis paribus(sc. columbarum) columbaria fiunt rutunda in ordinem crebra, ordines quam plu-rimi possunt a terra usque ad cameram; “Round nesting places are made for eachpair (sc. of pigeons), close to each other in a row, and as many rows as possibleare built from the ground up to the vaulted ceiling.”

36 Cf. Thesaurus Linguae Latinae 3:1734, s.v. “columbarium.” Of the two textsfound elsewhere, one is from Spain (CIL 2.2002); the other, from Antium, 30miles southwest of Rome (CIL 10.8299), evidently describes a bipartite niche:columbaria II ollarum IIII. See further Diz. Epigr. 2:464–65, s.v. “columbarium”(Ettore De Ruggiero); RE IV.1:593, s.v. “columbarium” (E. Samter). Othertransferred uses applied to the niches in walls to hold beams and, in ships, tooarlocks (TLL). For the primary sense of dovecote, see also Pliny, Historia Natu-ralis 17.51 and Palladius 1.24.


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structures that housed them – large or small tomb buildings, built aboveor below ground (or sometimes both) and distinguishable from othermonumental tombs mainly by their interior configuration, which ismarked by plastered walls and pillars systematically lined, from floor toceiling, with rows of niches accessible via wooden ladders or stairwaysand scaffolding (Fig. 6.1). Regimented order and symmetry are charac-teristic of the form. Each niche contained one or more cavities – ollae –normally a pair, sometimes as many as four or six, usually incorporatinga terracotta funerary urn within the wall but occasionally allowing anurn to be inserted and removed independently. Individual niches some-times received personal attention – small shelves built out of the wall tohold offerings, a painted border or marble frame surrounding the niche,personalized decoration, a terracotta or stone tablet cut to cover overthe opening to the niche and inscribed with the name of the owner or ofthe person buried there – but the interior decoration of the chamber wasnormally uniform and sometimes divided the rows of niches by horizon-tal bands of thematically related motifs (Fig. 6.2).37 The architecturalform flourished from the time of Augustus to that of Hadrian, littlemore than 150 years; as a funerary fashion, in other words, it was short-lived. The term columbarium first appears with this modern sense in theeighteenth century in reference to the very largest such structures, theones originally intended for the massive households of the great familiesof Rome, and only became common in the nineteenth century.38 Today it

37 For the decorative program of the largest of the columbaria in the DoriaPamphilj necropolis (for which see below. n. 57), which exhibits themes similarto (but less systematicaly disposed than) those in the nearby columbarium ofC. Scribonius Menophilus (see Fig 6.2), see Roger Ling, “The Paintings of theColumbarium of Villa Doria Pamphili in Rome,” in Functional and SpatialAnalysis of Wall Painting (Proceedings of the Fifth International Congress onAncient Wall Painting) (ed. Eric M. Moormann; Leiden: Stichting BulletinAntieke Beschaving, 1993), 127–35, emphasizing the generic (non funerary) na-ture of the scenes represented, and esp. 129 on the uniformity of the design.

38 Maria Letizia Caldelli and Cecilia Ricci, Monumentum familiae Statiliorum. UnRiesame (Rome: Edizioni Quasar, 1999), 76 n. 93 cite an unpublished tesi dilaurea by Simona Crea that traces the modern sense of the term to AntonioFrancesco Gori’s publication of the largest known columbarium, that of thehousehold of the empress Livia, under the title Monumentum sive columbariumlibertorum et servorum Liviae Augustae et Caesarum Romae detectum in ViaAppia anno MDCCXXVI (Florence, 1727). For this work and for Gori’s un-stated rivalry with Francesco Bianchini, who published first, under the titleCamera ed inscrizioni sepolcrali de’ liberti, servi, ed ufficiali della casa di Augustoscoperte nella Via Appia (Rome 1727), the same excavations of 1726 that un-

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has grown in application to encompass almost any tomb monumentwith niches for cremation burials in the walls.

In contrast to the origin of the term columbarium, “catacombs” hasno basis whatsoever in ancient terminology (the singular noun is a lexi-cal anomaly) but derives instead from the Greek phrase «

covered the monument, see Maria Raina Fehl, “Archaeologists at Work in 1726:The Columbarium of the Household of Livia Augusta,” in Ultra Terminum Va-gari. Scritti in onore di Carl Nylander (eds. Börje Magnusson, Stefania Renzetti,Paolo Vian, and Sever J. Voicu; Rome: Edizioni Quasar, 1997), 89–92.


6.1. Drawing by Antonio Buonamici of the long wall of the first room of thecolumbarium of the household of Livia beside the Via Appia (reproduced fromFrancesco Bianchini, Camera ed inscrizioni sepulcrali de’liberti, servi, ed ufficialidella casa di Augusto scoperte nella Via Appia, ed illustrate con le annotazioni diMonsignor Francesco Bianchini Veronese, l’anno MDCCXXVI (Rome: GiovanniMaria Salvioni, nell’archiginnasio della Sapienza, 1727), tav. IV [BAV CicognaraVIII 3617A], after Maria Raina Fehl, “Archaeologists at Work in 1726: The Col-umbarium of the Household of Livia Augusta,” in Ultra Terminum Vagari. Scrittiin onore di Carl Nylander (eds. Börje Magnusson, Stefania Renzetti, Paolo Vian,

and Sever J. Voicu: Rome: Edizioni Quasar, 1997), fig. 2.

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(“near the hollows”) in reference to the abandoned quarries, sandpits,and cisterns from which, later in the fourth and fifth centuries, profes-sional gravediggers (fossores) often started digging the networksof burial tunnels to which the term nowadays regularly applies.39 In an-

39 So, convincingly, Bruno Luiselli, “Il toponimo ‘Catacumbas’ e Odilone di SanMedardo,” MEFRA 98 (1986): 852–54, finding a Latin parallel for the usage in

6.2. Columbarium of C. Scribonius C.l. Menophilus on the Janiculum hill besidethe Via Aurelia, main room, long wall, showing rows of niches with painted tabulaeansatae beneath each niche. The rows are divided systematically by painted bandsof (from bottom to top): garlands; flowers, fruits, birds, and Dionysiac motifs;sacro-idyllic landscapes; and narrative scenes with human figures. Several of theniches are sealed with mortar or with stone or terracotta plaques; two, one of whichhad been enlarged and enhanced with a marble tablet bearing an epitaph (in situ),

have had marble frames removed. (author’s photo)

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tiquity the phrase occurs specifically, and for a long time only, in thetopographical designation cimiterium ad catacumbas, in reference tothe subterranean Christian cemetery excavated out from the pozzolanaquarries near the third mile of the Via Appia in the vicinity of S. Seb-astiano, where already by the middle of the third century there was animportant memorial cult of the apostles Peter and Paul.40

Colloquial and vague, the original topographical designation leavesopen the question of a typological distinction between the purpose-built networks of tunnels designed to accommodate hundreds of inhu-mation burials, and other linked hypogaea and underground cemeteries,which are occasionally found beside the Via Appia and elsewhere

the Passion of Saint Sebastian in the phrase ad arenas used to describe the placewhere the martyrs Marcus and Marcellianus were buried (Act. Sanct., Ian.II:642). The neologism “catacumbas” is first attested in the Chronica UrbisRomae inserted in the register of the Chronographer of 354 and edited sometwenty years previously in reference to building activity in the region by the em-peror Maxentius (fecit et circum in catecumbas). Otherwise in antiquity it occursonly and always in reference to the Christian cemetery on the site (see the nextnote). Giuseppe Marchi, Monumenti delle arti cristiane primitive nella metropolidel cristianesimo (Rome: Tip. di C. Puccinelli, 1844), 209 and De Rossi, Romasotterranea 3:427, interpreted kymbas as deriving from Latin cubare, “to sleep”.More recently, Antonio Ferrua, La basilica e la catacomba di S. Sebastiano (2nded.; Vatican City: Pontificia Commisione di Archeologia Sacra, 1990), 11, hasassociated it with cumba, “ship,” in reference to a hypothetical sign or relief inthe area advertising an inn and depicting two or more ships. Kata in the phrasemeans “in the vicinity of” (a late usage), so that, strictly, the construction adcatacumbas in the phrase cimiterium ad catacumbas is redundant. Such bilingualtautologies are not uncommon in late Latin topographical designations. Petro-logical explorations during the early 1940s showed that understanding of thegeophysical properties of the tufa quarries outside Rome was greater amonggravediggers during the first and second centuries than later during the third andfourth, which explains why later diggers often built new complexes off of theolder networks: see Gioacchino De Angelis D’Ossat, La geologia delle cata-combe romane (3 vols; Vatican City: Pontificio Istituto di Archeologia Cristiana,1939–943). For the role of the fossores, who not only dug but sold burials spacesin the catacombs, see Jean Guyon, “la vente des tombes à travers l’épigraphie dela Rome chrétienne (IIIe – VIIe siècles): Le role des fossores, mansionarii, prae-positi, et prètres,” MEFRA 86 (1974): 549–96.

40 For the site and its designation, see Anna Maria Nieddu, “Catacumbas ad,” inLexicon Topographicum Urbis Romae. Suburbium, C-F (ed. Adriano La Regina;vol. 2; Rome: Edizioni Quasar, 2004), 79–82, on the name and “Catacumbascoemeterium. Cimitero sopratterra,” ibid., 82–86; Rafaella Giuliani, “Cimiterosotterraneo,” ibid., 86–93.


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outside Rome already during the second century.41 Whereas the la-bel columbarium aims to characterize an architectural form, the term“catacombs” merely identifies a place. What is more, the burial modeprimarily associated with the phrase can only be inferred from develop-ments of a later period than that when the expression was originallyemployed. In reference to the earliest underground cemetery on thesite – a concentrated grouping of columbaria and familial mausolea,three of them disposed around a sunken “piazzola” with niches forinhumations excavated out of the sides – the term is not only anachron-istic but misapplied.42 The only distinctive architectural featuresuniversally recognized are columns and rows of large niches forinhumation burials (loculi) lining the walls (Fig. 6.3). Since many cata-combs incorporated or originated from earlier hypogea, and since thedeveloped versions regularly included quadrilateral burial chambers(cubicula) similar in form to the earlier and independent subterraneanmonuments, the question naturally arises when a series of linked hypo-gea becomes a catacomb. The solution most commonly proposed is toidentify as proper catacombs only those that could be entered directlyfrom the ground and were designed from the outset to offer as manyspaces for inhumation burials as possible, but typological distinctionsare difficult to draw when one considers closely the various architec-tural configurations of underground burial complexes outside Romeduring the second and third centuries, and in practice the term cata-combs has come to be reserved for those that are presumed to have beencontrolled by official religious authorities and therefore to be charac-terized by exclusive religious affiliations (“Christian,” “Jewish”),whereas those of indeterminate or private status are labeled hypogea. Aspurious semantic precision in this case does not conceal the circularityof the reasoning, nor does it resolve the basic terminological problem.43

41 For an overview of various types of subterranean burial complexes dating fromthe second century, see Spera, Paesaggio suburbano, 355–62.

42 See Spera, Paesaggio suburbano, 209–25; Nieddu, “Cimitero sopratterra,” 82–83.43 For the standard distinction between “Christian” catacombs and “pagan” hypo-

gea, see, e.g., Fiocchi Nicolai, “Origin and development,” 16–17 and LeonardV. Rutgers, Subterranean Rome: in Search of the Roots of Christianity in theCatacombs of the Eternal City (Leuven: Peeters, 2000), 64. For a typically prob-lematic case, compare the discussions of the so-called “Catacombs of Vibia”by Spera, Paesaggio suburbano, 172–76 and Palmira Maria Barbini, in PhilippePergola, Le catacombe romane: Storia e topografia (Rome: La Nuova ItaliaScientifica, 1997), 177–80.

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6.3. Catacombs of Domitilla, gallery with loculi, after Vincenzo Fiocchi Nicolai,Fabrizio Bisconti, and Danilo Mazzoleni, The Christian Catacombs of Rome,History, Decoration, Inscriptions. (Regensburg: Schnell and Steiner, 1999), p. 76.

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Coemeterium, the transliterated form of the Greek ,came into Latin usage in Christian contexts toward the beginning ofthe third century, when it referred to the final “resting place” of a deadperson.44 The classical Greek term, based on a verb used metaphor-ically of the sleep of death already in the Iliad and attested in its de-nominative form, both in a literal sense (“sleeping room”) and meta-phorically of a burial chamber, already by the third century B.C.E.,had an obvious appeal to those who imagined death as, a transitionalsleeping period (the refrigerium interim) between life and the resur-rection.45 By the end of antiquity this metaphorical usage had beenextended and transferred, by a process of pars pro toto similar tothat which created the modern concept of the columbarium, to ourconcept of “cemetery,” that is a collection of individual tombs or “rest-ing places”; but “cemeterium” and continued to be regu-larly used also in the literal sense in reference to sleeping places (indi-vidual and collective, that is, dormitories) down into medieval andByzantine times.46

The philological crux lies in determining at what point this later, ex-tended usage first came into currency, but the more important histori-cal question is what, precisely, our earliest literary sources mean whenthey refer to coemeteria – or rather what one source meant in usingthe Greek term , since all the earliest Latin attestationsof coemeterium, both pagan and Christian, clearly refer to individualtombs. In a poorly transmitted passage of an anonymous pamphletwritten against the election of Callistus as bishop at Rome in 217 andattributed to Hippolytus, the author claims that Zephyrinus, bishop atRome in 198, in the following year recalled Callistus from exile and as-

44 Tert. Anima 5.17 (of 197 C.E.) appears to be the earliest attestation of the term ina Christian context, but note also CIL 8.7543; 11.1700 = ILCV 2171; ILCV3681. It first appears in Greek in [Hippolytus], Philosoph. 9.12.14 (below n. 48).

45 E.g., Homer, Il. 11.241; “sleeping room”: IG 7.235.43;“burial chamber”: IG3.3545. For the Christian “sleep of death,” see, Marbury B. Ogle, “The Sleep ofDeath,” MAAR 11 (1933): 81–117, esp. 85–86 and Alfred C. Rush, Death andBurial in Christian Antiquity (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of AmericaPress, 1941), 12–22. Both rightly trace the Christian (and Jewish) usage to thelong classical tradition of figuring death as sleep in funerary epigraphy and art.

46 Rebillard, Religion et sepulture, 14 n. 11 cites Philippe Gauthier, Revue desÉtudes Byzantines 43 (1985): 5–165, for a typicon of Theotokos Kecharitomene(twelth century) in which is applied both to a dormitory and to acemetery.

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signed him « µ .47 In attempting to deduce the meaningof this appointment, de Rossi, through a series of possible but by nomeans inevitable suppositions, arrived at the conclusion that Zephyri-nus had placed Callistus as deacon in charge of a Christian funerarysociety and had given him management over the first official Christiancemetery in Rome.48 Subsequent scholarship has long since discardedimportant elements of de Rossi’s formulation – there were no officialChristian funerary societies or indeed specifically funerary collegiaof any sort, and the notion of a central “Church” at this date, let aloneof an official cemetery “owned” by a church, is doubtful – but onlyrecently has a careful study of the Greek and Latin terms by ÉricRebillard shown there to be no firm evidence for the use of either tomean “cemetery” in a general sense before the beginning of the sixthcentury; in earlier Christian texts the words seem always to refer tomartyrs’ tombs or to the shrines surrounding them (martyria).49 That

47 [Hippolytus], Philosoph. 9.12.14, M’ Zφ« <³«>()() µ <> <> µ« κ ! ,"< "λ> )$ %) )$, λ <> &&Ω $µ !#A « µ . “After the death of [Victor],Zephyrinus, wishing to have him (Callistus) as a colleague in the institution ofthe clergy, honored him to his own detriment and, transferring him for his sakefrom Antium (?), appointed him to the koimeterion.”

48 Giovanni Battista de Rossi, “Esame archeologico e critico della storia di s. Cal-listo narrata nel libro nono dei Filosofumene,” Bulletino di Archeologia Cris-tiana 4 (1866): 1–14, 17–33; and La Roma sotterranea cristiana (Rome:Cromo-litografia Pontificia, 1864), 1:197–204. The syllogistic argument is car-ried mainly by assertions of the “must have …” variety, e.g., “Egli è impossibile,che la chiesa romana tanto numerosa e potente non abbia avuto a quei dì alcungrande cimitero commune …” (197).

49 Rebillard, “KOIMHTHRION et COEMETERIUM,” summarized in Religion etsepulture, 11–23. Hippolytus himself uses to mean tomb in his com-mentary on Daniel 11, 36–46 (4.51). For the long standing legal restriction on cor-porate ownership of property, especially as regards Christian cemeteries, see, e.g.,Peter Lampe, From Paul to Valentinus: Christians at Rome in the First Two Cen-turies (ed. Marshall D. Johnson; trans. Michael Steinhauser; Minneapolis, Minn.:Fortress Press, 2003), 369–72, assembling also the supposed evidence – none of itunequivocal – for a change in legal situation around the time of Fabian’s pontifi-cate (ca. 236–250 C.E.). For the fiction of a specific class of “funerary” collegia,see Frank Ausbüttel, Untersuchungen zu den Verein im Westen des römischen Rei-ches (Kallmünz: M. Lassleb, 1982); cf. John S. Kloppenborg, “Collegia and Thia-soi: Issues in Function, Taxonomy, and Membership,” in Voluntary Associations inthe Graeco-Roman World (eds. John S. Kloppenborg and Stephen G. Wilson; Lon-


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Callistus himself, according to the Liber Pontificalis, was ultimatelyburied in the catacombs of Calepodius on the Via Aurelia proves noth-ing but lends little support to de Rossi’s view that he was appointed bythe Church as official overseer of the first or most important Christiancemetery of Rome.50 The position held by Callistus was in any case nota regular post but an ad hoc assignment, probably coincident with theend of the practice of burying high-ranking clergy near the tomb ofSt. Peter on the Vatican, specifically, perhaps, in order to oversee thearrangement of a new collective tomb for Rome’s bishops on Zephyri-nus’s private plot.51 The custom of appointing overseers to manage pri-vate tomb properties was common in Roman society, and there is noreason to suspect that Callistus’s role departed in any fundamentalway from that tradition.52

The same charge of overreading can be levelled against De Rossi’sinterpretation of the burial enclosures used by Christians in NorthAfrica. Tertullian’s accusation of local hostility toward Christians andthe areae of their burials (areae sepulturarum nostrarum) at Carthage,like several similar references to Christian burial enclosures elsewherein his writings, says nothing about official ownership or adminis-tration of these cemeteries by the church.53 Individual Christians could

don and New York: Routledge, 1996), 20–23; and Rebillard, Religion et sepulture,51–71.

50 Lib. Pontif. I:62, cymiterio Calepodi, via Aurelia. Extraordinary efforts to explainthe burial of Callistus elsewhere than in the catacombs that bear his name –recently, for example, by invoking the tumultuous circumstances of his deathin Trastevere (Acta Sanctorum octobris, V [Paris 1868], 430): see Roberto Gior-diani, “‘Et sepultus est iuxta corpus beati Petri in Vaticano’: qualche consider-azione sul problema delle sepolture dei papi nell’antichità,” Vetera Christiano-rum 40 (2003): 304–5 – betray discomfort with the inconvenience of thecircumstantial evidence for the conventional view.

51 Rebillard, “KOIMHTHRION et COEMETERIUM,” 988–91. For the likeli-hood that Zephyrinus personally owned the property, see Lampe, From Paul toValentinus, 26–27.

52 For custodes (often freedmen of the proprietor) assigned to private tombs, see,e.g., Petr. 71.8; CIL 6.9832; EDR 5184; cf. Liber Pontificalis 51.8 (314 C.E.), cus-tos martyrum. More often in inscriptions the revenue-producing propertiesattached to tomb monuments custodiae causa are explicitly recorded, whereasthe managers of the properties themselves go unmentioned: see Diz. Epigr.2:1426 s.v. “Custodia” (Ettore De Ruggiero).

53 Tert. Ad Scapulam 3.1, addressed to the proconsul of Africa in 212 but invokingan episode of a decade earlier: Tamen, sicut supra diximus, doleamus necesse est,quod nulla civitas impune latura sit sanguinis nostri effusionem; sicut et sub Hil-

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and no doubt often did congregate together in death (especially withinChristian families) and may well have been inclined toward a form ofeuergetism that favored burial of the poor over more traditional dis-tributions of public largesse, but the areae to which Tertullian refers fitcomfortably into a long pagan tradition of private donations by indi-viduals of cemetery plots for public use (sometimes with restrictionsimposed on those who could be buried in them) and have no precedentor likelihood of precedent in official sponsorship by a corporate entitysuch as a church.54

ariano praeside, cum de areis sepulturarum nostrarum acclamassent: ‘Areae nonsint!’ Areae ipsorum non fuerunt: messes enim suas non egerunt. Rebillard, Re-ligion et sepulture, 17–22, notes the double entendre in Tertullian’s phrase (areae= “threshing floors” and “burial enclosures”) and rightly dismisses the notion ofa technical, specifically Christian, application of the term in the present context.For areae as burial enclosures in non-Christian texts, see below, n. 55.

54 Christian concern for the nourishment and burial of the poor (egeni) is touted byTertullian elsewhere (Apol. 39.5–6); cf. also Aristides of Athens, Apol. 15.6;Lactantius Inst. 6.12; and [Hippolytus], Trad. Ap. 40, a work of composite andprobably later date falsely attributed to Hippolytus: see Alistair Stewart-Sykes,On the Apostolic Tradition (Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press,2002), 20–22. For private donations of land for Christian catacombs at Rome,see Vincenzo Fiocchi Niccolai, “Euergetismo eccleisastico e laico nelle iscrizionipaleocristiane del Lazio,” in Historiam pictura refert: miscellanea in onore diPadre Alejandro Recio Veganzones (Vatican City: Pontifico Istituto di Archeolo-gia Cristiana, 1994), 243–45 (on ILCV 3681A) and Carolyn Osiek, below in thisvolume. For traditional Roman precedent, note the late Republican donation ofa private cemetery at Sarsina by a certain Horatius Balbus for individual burialsof “his fellow townsmen and residents, except those who pledge themselves asgladiators, or commit suicide by hanging, or practice a dirty profession” (muni-cipibus [su]eis incoleisque … extra au[ct]orateis et quei sibei [la]queo manu(m)attulissent et quei quaestum spurcum professi essent) (CIL 12.2123 = 11.6528 =ILS 7846 = ILLRP 662) with Giancarlo Susini, “Fundus Fangonianus,” StudiRomagnoli 20 (1969): 333–39; id. Sarsina. Studi di anitichità (S. Giovanni in Per-siceto: F.A.R.A.P, 1982), 263–69; a similar donation at Tolentinum in the firstcentury C.E. “to the townspeople of Tolentinum” (municipibu[s] Tolentinati-bu[s]) (CIL 9.5570 = ILS 7847) with Gianfranco Paci, “Tolentinum,” in Supple-menta Italica, nuova serie 11 (Rome: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 1993),65–67; and the early imperial funeral subsidy of Marius Lupercianus at Bergo-mum (CIL 5.5128 = ILS 6726), with John Bodel, Graveyards and Groves: AStudy of the Lex Lucerina (American Journal of Ancient History 11) (CambridgeMass.: E. Badian, 1994), 18–19 and 34 n. 137. For the long-standing legal pro-hibition against corporate ownership of property, especially in reference toburial sites, see above, n. 49.


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The terms and coemeterium, which say nothing aboutany particular form of burial arrangement, raise a semantic problem ofa different sort from the challenges posed by the ambiguities inherentin “columbaria” and “catacombs.” Areae, surface enclosures forburial, present no particular interpretive difficulties of any sort, sinceneither the name nor the significance of the term is in dispute, andboth are found already in earlier non-Christian sources.55 What re-mains in doubt is merely the question of the supervision of individualChristian areae, which can only be determined, if at all, in individualcases. The key to understanding the significance of the major inno-vations in collective burial arrangements during the first three cen-turies of the common era – the rise of the columbarium during the firstcentury and then, accompanying a widespread change in method ofdisposal during the second, the proliferation of catacombs in thethird – lies in interpreting the form and function of these two osten-sibly similar and yet fundamentally different modes of burial. It is tothat question that we now turn.

Form and Function

Two related tendencies have characterized, and impeded, recent studyof the historical significance of columbaria and catacombs. The first isa failure to distinguish clearly between formal and functional criteriain classifying and analyzing the archaeological evidence; the second isan assumption that, because the two modes of collective burial sharesuperficial similarities of form, their functions must also be similar.Each may be addressed briefly.

We noted above that the term columbarium is nowadays used as apurely formal designation to describe any monumental tomb charac-terized by rows of cremation niches lining the walls. Recently, however,the usefulness of such a broad application of the term has begun to bequestioned: as currently employed, the word is appropriately appliedto most of the tombs of first-century date found in the outskirts ofRome, which housed the remains of nuclear families and their immedi-ate households as well as larger, more or less differentiated groups. The

55 See, e.g., ILS 7296, 7899, 8217, 8325, 8326, 8334, 8339, 8347 with Diz. Epigr.1:654 s.v. “Area pura 5, Area di sepolcri” (Ettore De Ruggiero).

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authors of the most recent detailed study of one of the large columba-ria of Rome, that of the familia of the Statilii near the Porta Maggiore,advocate a return to the more restricted usage of the eighteenth cen-tury, when it applied only to the largest such monuments, those of thehouseholds of the most prominent senatorial families of Rome, andsuggest that the identification of a niche tomb as a columbarium not bebased merely on size.56 Although they do not specify what other cri-teria might be relevant to distinguish columbaria from other monumentsdesigned for cremation burials, a helpful distinction emerges fromtheir discussion between those intended to house the remains of familymembers and household staff together (traditional familial tombs),which tend to be smaller, and those exclusively devoted to the burialof members of a slave household or of a mixed group not defined byties of kinship. According to these criteria only nine monuments fromthe city of Rome – and none from elsewhere – qualify as columbaria inthe proper sense, the smallest of which accommodated more than200 burials.57 According to this typology, the total number of niches isa characteristic but incidental feature of the classification. Whether ornot such a restrictive definition is of use to archaeologists interestedin categorizing different types of tomb monuments, it is helpful for our

56 Caldelli and Ricci, Monumentum familiae Statiliorum, 60.57 Of more than 40 “columbaria” excavated between 1700 and 1920 and published

in CIL, the only ones that fit the description are the monumentum familiae Li-viae, which housed more than 1100 burials over little more than seventy years(ca. 10–80 C.E.?); the monument of the Statilii, with three rooms: one compris-ing some 700 loculi, of which only 381 were used, from the Augustan or earlyTiberian era until 53 C.E., the other two first opened in 66 C.E. and in use untilend of the first century; two columbaria discovered beneath the Villa Doria Pam-philj, one, in 1838, with some 500 niches for nearly 1,000 burials (ca. 10 C.E.),the other in 1984 (the monument of C. Scribonius C.l. Menophilus), with morethan 500 burials of the Julio-Claudian era; three from the Vigna Codini betweenthe Via Appia and Via Latina: one, possibly of late Tiberian date, containing500 niches, another (late Augustan?) with some 150 niches, each comprising twocavities for urns for some 300 burials, and the third of unknown capacity butyielding some 180 inscriptions (of Tiberian date but in use, perhaps, until thesecond century); the monumentum familiae Volusiorum Saturninorum, with some200 burials (and over 190 inscriptions) (ca. 20–97 C.E., most ca. 50 C.E.); and amonument of Augustan date unearthed outside the porta Praenestina in thesame region as the monument of the familia of the Statilii, with 118 niches fordouble burials: cf. Caldelli and Ricci, Monumentum familiae Statiliorum, 60–64,with further references.


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purposes in shifting the focus from an architectural form and an arbi-trary number to a social use, which usefully highlights the area inwhich the new funerary facilities (an outgrowth, precisely, of the fam-ilial monuments favored by the more prominent families of the lateRepublic) marked a change in the organization of burial at Rome: forthe first time, it seems, collective tombs housed together, on the onehand, slaves and freedmen of particular households apart from theirfreeborn owners and patrons and, on the other, miscellaneous groupsof persons (sometimes in familial groupings, but not exclusively so) notrelated to each other by blood or ownership.

The separation of form and function is not so clear in current dis-cussions of subterranean cemeteries and graves. As noted above, theprimary criteria used to identify proper “catacombs” are purely for-mal: independent entrances from ground level, intensive use of avail-able space for inhumation burials, and “open” design intended toallow expansion through the extension of existing galleries or the cre-ation of new ones, normally according to a regular plan. In an effortfurther to distinguish purpose-built communal catacombs from pri-vate underground burial complexes, Hugo Brandenburg draws a func-tional distinction between smaller hypogaea comprising up to a dozenor so clearly “mixed,” pagan and Christian burials and larger catacombsaccommodating hundreds and thousands, in which religious distinc-tions are less apparent; but he then compromises the categorization byextrapolating from it a formal rule that correlates size with religiousexclusivity.58 As it happens, and as he notes, intermediate numbers arerare, but they do exist, and where they do they tend to be problematic,since it is not always easy to tell when smaller hypogea were expandedand made more uniform haphazardly or when they were extended byoriginal design, nor indeed can we presume to know in most cases whatconsiderations may have motivated the development of private hypo-

58 Hugo Brandenburg, “Überlegungen zu Ursprung und Entstehung der Kata-komben Roms,” in Vivarium. Festschrift Theodor Klauser zum 90. Geburtstag(eds. Ernst Dassmann and Klaus Thraede; Münster: Aschendorff, 1984), 39 and44–45. The idea that pagans disdained the use of larger catacombs because theyprovided little opportunity for those of greater wealth and status to display it(45) is disproved by the abundant evidence of funerary “self-representation” incubicula already at an early date: see Fiocchi Niccolai, “Origin and Develop-ment,” 22–23 and above, n. 21.

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gea into larger funerary complexes.59 Recent analysis of the architec-tural and decorative program of the controversial Via Latina cemetery,for example, a supposedly private hypogeum complex of the thirdquarter of the fourth century that provided burial for up to 400 per-sons (and thus approaches the size of proper “catacombs”), whereindisputably “pagan” figured scenes are intermingled with Chris-tian iconography throughout a series of luxurious cubicula joinedby galleries with loculi, shows that all the spaces were designed, con-structed, and (variously) decorated according to a single homogeneousplan.60

Philippe Pergola proposes an ostensibly more clear formal distinc-tion between “closed” and “open” underground cemeteries, the formerbeing those intended to house a predetermined and fixed number ofburials, the latter those capable of expansion through existing galleriesand along the principal axes, but then complicates it by drawing a sec-ondary distinction within the “open” type between those centered onand systematized according to a monumental presentation of thefamily of the owner and those which, though not entirely unreflectiveof distinctions of status, nonetheless present a more uniform andhomogeneous aspect.61 He would have done better to stop with thecategories “open” and “closed” – a useful polarity for typologicalanalysis – or to begin with “familial” and “communal” (or perhapsbetter “collective”), concepts useful for evaluating purpose and use,than to have mixed together the two types of criteria, so that form andfunction become confused. It is clear that in Roman funerary architec-ture the two categories are indeed related, but not we will be able to

59 The dating of catacombs is fraught with difficulties and often hangs precariouslyon the stylistic dating of frescoes: see, e.g., J. G. Deckers, “Wie genau ist eine Ka-takombe zu datieren? Das Bespiel SS. Marcellino e Pietro,” in Memoriam Sanc-torum Venerantes. Miscellanea in onore di Monsignor Victor Saxer (Studi diAntichità Cristiana 48; Vatican City: Pontificio Istituto di Archeologia Cris-tiana, 1992), 217–38, and Norbert Zimmermann, Werkstattgruppen römischerKatakombenmalerei (Jahrbuch für Antike und Christentum Ergänzungsband 35;Münster Westfalen: Aschendorff Verlag, 2002, who advocates a more scientificapproach through analysis by workshops and iconography together.

60 See Zimmermann, Werkstattgruppen, 61–125; cf. Johnson, “Pagan-ChristianBurial Practices,” 56–58.

61 Pergola, Le catacombe romane, 60–62. The division into classes (60) inevitablyallows for a variety of indeterminate intermediate types.


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recognize either for what it is if we fail to distinguish each clearly fromthe other in our initial analysis.62

Apart from this categorical confusion of design and purpose, noth-ing has clouded the picture more thoroughly than a repeated insistenceon the obvious but superficial points of formal similarity between col-umbaria and catacombs and a failure to recognize their less strikingbut more fundamental formal differences. To observe that catacombs,like columbaria, feature multiple rows of niches and were designed toaccommodate numerous burials within a minimum amount of spacesays no more than that both offered an economical response to the(demographically predictable and socially inevitable) ever-increasingdemand for burial space in the neighborhood of Rome. But to claimthat “[columbaria] were not the only solution: the catacomb works inthe same way” is, I think, to misrepresent their essential differences inorientation.63 The question of how these two modes of collective burialchanneled that demand must non longer be addressed.

Columbaria: Members Only

With columbaria, the architectural form, though capable of housinglarge numbers of burials, remains closed (if we may borrow Pergola’sformulation for the classification of catacombs). In this respect thelargest of the collective monuments is essentially no different from thesmallest familial tombs restricting entry to named family membersand, in the formulaic phrase, “freedmen and freedwomen and their de-scendants.” The possibilities for membership within the communityare finite, even if, in principle, they extend (with the inclusion of allpossible descendants) indefinitely into the future. The largest of thecolumbaria, ironically – those devoted to the slave and freed staff of thegreat houses of Rome – provide the clearest indications of the limi-tations of the form, and the very largest of them, that of the householdof Livia, offers the most unequivocal evidence of all (see Fig. 6.1,

62 In fact, one can point to individual examples of the “closed” type of hypogeumwhich present a largely uniform appearance and do not privilege any one burialspace or chamber – which is simply to say that Roman hypogea are equally sus-ceptible to formal and functional analysis: see, e.g., Feraudi-Gruénais, Inschriftenund ‘Selbstdarstellung’, for examples from the Vatican necropolis: 29–30 (mau-soleum F), 33–34 (Tomb of the Octavii), 39–41 (Tomb yyy).

63 Purcell, “Tomb and Suburb,” 39.

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p. yy).64 Among some 140 surviving epitaphs from the first room ofthe monument, which was in use from the end of the Augustan eradown to the time of Claudius, more than 50 were inscribed more thanonce and another 40 record two independent names in the nomi-native.65 The implication is that individual ollae were used for morethan one burial and, despite a no doubt already-existing legal prohib-ition against defacing or erasing epitaphs, were being reused – and thiswithin the space of a few decades. Evidently the nearly 1,100 spaces setaside for Livia’s staff and their dependents were insufficient to housethe remains of those eligible for burial in the monument, and the desireto be included among that group apparently outweighed fear of theconsequences of violating the burial of another.66 Nothing could illus-trate more clearly the comparative pull on funerary behavior of thecompeting social forces of solidarity with fellow members of a corpor-ate group (the staff of Livia) and social ambition for individual repre-sentation within a privileged community.

At the same time, the monument, which was evidently administeredby a collegium of Livia’s slaves and freedmen, housed burials also ofthe servants of Livia’s husband, son, daughter-in-law Antonia, andgrandchildren, as well as persons with no obvious connection to theimperial house.67 Furthermore, other of Livia’s slaves and freedmenwere buried in columbaria primarily devoted to different households(such as those of the children of Drusus or the younger Marcella) or in

64 For the monument, its discovery, and interpretation, see Helke Kammerer Grot-haus, “Camere sepolcrali de’ liberti e liberte di Livia Augusta ed altri Caesari,”MEFRA 91 (1979): 315–42; Fehl, “Archaeologists at Work.”

65 Double burials in a single olla: e.g., CIL 6.3945, 3946, 3992, 8944.66 See Caldelli and Ricci, Monumentum familiae Statiliorum, 60–61, aptly citing

Paulus, Sententiae 5.1.21.8, qui monumento inscriptos titulos eraserit … sepul-chrum violasse videtur.

67 See, e.g., CIL 6.3951 (a slave of Tiberius); 6.3959 (a freedman of Augustus);6.3971 (a slave of Nero Caesar); 4.4049 (P. Caetennius Heraclis); 6.4051 (Corne-lius Chius); 6.4057 (Fuscus, slave of a freedwoman of Antonia, the mother ofClaudius); etc. Jukka Korpela, “Die Grabinschriften des Kolumbariiums Liber-torum Liviae Augustae: eine Quellenkritische Untersuchung,” Arctos 15 (1981):53–66 analyzes onomastic aspects of the 670 names recorded on the 376 surviv-ing inscriptions from the monument: 137 are certain slaves, 184 freedmen (55);two thirds are men; of the 114 identifiable persons who erected epitaphs, only 30are women (57). No system seems to have controlled the elements of nomencla-ture used, and the names of those who erected the monuments were evidentlyless important than those of the ones commemorated. For the collegium itself,see CIL 6.4305 and below, n. 69.


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their own individual monuments.68 Though closed, membership in thegroup of those admitted to Livia’s monument was not strictly definedaccording to membership in the group for which it was intended. Per-sonal associations, marital relationships in some cases but clearly notin all, evidently determined who sought access to this limited resource;deciding who was to be included and where apparently fell to the ad-ministrators of the collegium, probably with the necessary approval ofthe aristocratic patron.69

Normally the problem of overcrowding did not arise. Three of thelargest columbaria in Rome were evidently never used to capacity, buteven in more modest familial tombs, the invitations to “freedmen andfreedwomen and their descendants” to be buried within the familymonument may never have been taken up by more than a few.70 Manyex-slaves and, a fortiori, their descendants preferred to advertise theirnames on their own monuments. Indeed, if we accept the implicationsof Lily Ross Taylor’s classic discussion of the number of urban resi-dents of the first and second centuries carrying some mixture of servileblood in their veins, most people in Rome would have had their burialassured several times over by the pervasive opportunities held out bythese largely underactivated formulae.71 Accordingly, many of thoseadvertising such magnanimity on their tombstones must have countedon the limits of their generosity not being put to the test.72 The promise

68 For slaves buried elsewhere, cf., e.g., CIL 6.4448 (monumentum Marcellae)6.6213; 6. 8727; 6.8903, with Susan Treggiari, “Jobs in the Household of Livia,”PBSR 43 n.s. 30 (1975): 48–49 and the lists on 72–77. With the familia of theStatilii, at least 39 slaves and freedmen were buried outside the household col-umbarium: Caldelli and Ricci, Monumentum familiae Statiliorum, 135–40.

69 See Kammerer Grothaus, “Camere sepolcrali,” 326, on the collegium libertorumet servorum Liviae and the collegium magnum tribunorum divae Liviae; in general,Hasegawa “Collegia domestica,” 252–56, for the administrative organization ofthe collegia domestica, and 261–65 for the role of patrons in granting permissionfor burial within the columbarium; see also below, n. 98.

70 Caldelli and Ricci, Monumentum familiae Statiliorum, 57.71 Lily Ross Taylor, “Freedmen and Freeborn in the Epitaphs of Imperial Rome,”

AJP 82 (1961): 113–32, esp. 128.72 A striking illustration of this confidence is found in an epitaph of perhaps Fla-

vian date from the section of the Via Triumphalis necropolis under the Vaticanparking lot dedicated by a husband to himself, his wife, and their descendants –and inscribed on a single stele marking (it seems) an individual burial! SeeVeikko Väänänen et al., Le iscrizioni della necropoli dell’autoparco Vaticano(Rome: Institutum Romanum Finlandiae, 1973), 40–41 n. 27, with Steinby, Lanecropolis della Via Triumphalis, 57.

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to provide burial could never be considered completely idle, however,when the judgment of the pontiffs, who controlled Roman tomb law,could be expected generally to follow the written wishes of the testator,as indicated, even, by an inscribed epitaphic formula. So we find, atthe beginning of the third century, the jurist Papinian expressingthe opinion that “freedmen can neither be buried nor bury others [ina familial monument] unless they are heirs to their patron, althoughsome people have inscribed on their tomb that they have built it forthemselves and their freedmen.”73 For the patron, it was the idea ofrepresenting oneself publicly as a beneficent dominus or domina thatmade the gesture worth making, despite the potential cost. In the samefashion, for slaves and ex-slaves of the empress Livia (who were in abetter position than most to control independent financial resources ina peculium), obtaining even ephemeral recognition in a prestigiousburial location was evidently preferable to securing a more permanentmemorial elsewhere. What mattered was to be on the inside, no matterhow futile the hope for lasting commemoration.

This emphasis on the right to be included finds its counterpart in ex-clusionary expressions prohibiting one or more persons by name fromburial in a familial tomb or monument.74 More stridently, if vainly,since such privately (and posthumously) imposed penalties had nolegal force, impressively large fines were threatened against any who in-troduced alien burials into the tomb.75 With columbaria and the later

73 Dig. 11.7.6.pr. (Ulpian 25 ad ed.), liberti autem nec sepeliri nec alios inferrepotuerunt, nisi heredes extiterunt patrono, quamvis quidam inscripserint monu-mentum sibi libertisque suis fecisse. After citing Papinian, Ulpian goes on to saythat “there has often been a ruling to this effect,” et ita Papinianus respondit etsaepissime idem constitutum est.

74 E.g., ILS 7602, 7660, 8283–8286, and many examples of more specific formulaeof inclusion and exclusion, often used in combination, in ILS 8259–8282. Seenow also Silvia Orlandi, “Heredes, alieni, ingrati, ceteri. Ammisione ed esclu-sioni,” in Libitina e dintorni (Libitina 3; ed. Silvio Panciera; Rome: EdizioniQuasar, 2004), 359–84. For the legal aspects, see also de Visscher, Droit des tom-beaux, 103–6.

75 On the increasingly extravagant (if idle) threats to exact monetary fines, see GianLuca Gregori, “Si quis contra legem sepulcri fecerit: violazioni e pene pecu-niare,” in Libitina e dintorni (Libitina 3; ed. Silvio Panciera; Rome: EdizioniQuasar, 2004), 391–404, esp. 402–3: fines ranged from HS 1,000 to HS 350,000during the second and early third centuries, with HS 50,000 evidently represent-ing a standard amount; beginning in the third century amounts of HS 100,000and higher became common; cf. de Visscher, Droit des tombeaux, 112–23.


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familial monuments of this sort, what mattered was to be in or out. De-fining the space physically, with a perimeter barrier (maceria) en-closing the plot and an imposing monumental structure designed toimpress those viewing it from the outside, and verbally, with a titulusdeclaring the size of the plot (pedes tot in fronte, tot in agro) and speci-fying persons and categories of persons eligible to be included withinthe monument, served to segregate the members of that circumscribedcommunity from the rest of society.76 So deeply did this impulse pen-etrate into the mentality of those who chose this form of burial that wesometimes find miniature family tombs erected within columbaria andepitaphs marking individual ollae that include the standard formulaepromising burial also libertis libertabusque posterisque eorum.77

Once inside, with the exception of a distinctive emphasis sometimes,but not always, or even normally, focused on a central burial spot, littleattention is devoted to distinguishing individuals: small uniform head-stones line the rear and side walls of familial tombs at Pompeii, andcolumbaria, as noted earlier (above, yyy) generally exhibit uniformdecoration across rows of niches if not entire walls.78 In the colum-barium of C. Scribonius Menophilus in the Villa Doria Pamphilj, theolla identified by Menophilus’s epitaph is unobtrusively located in thesecond row from the bottom next to a door into a secondary room. Inthe monument of Livia’s household, the draftsmanship and carving ofsome of the small placards found in front of individual ollae are sopoor that it is difficult to imagine the broken and reused stones as eventemporary markers of actual graves rather than mere place holders,

76 For the practice of staking out the dimensions of tomb plots with declarativeinscriptions, see Giovannella Cresci Marrone and Margherita Tirelli, eds., “Ter-minavit sepulcrum.” I recinti funerari nelle necropoli di Altino (Rome: EdizioniQuasar, 2005), especially the article by Gian Luca Gregori, “Definizione e mis-urazione dello spazio funerario nell’epigrafia repubblicana e protoimperiale diRoma. Un’indagine campione,” 77–126.

77 For miniature family tombs, see Hanne Sigismund Nielsen, “The Physical Con-text of Roman Epitaphs and the Structure of ‘the Roman Family,’” ARID 23(1996): 41, 56, 58 n. 27; cf. also above, n. 72. For columbaria inscriptions dedi-cated libertis libertabusque posterisque eorum, see, e.g., CIL 6.5678, 7729, 8100,and especially 6823, for a plot measuring 2 × 3.5 Roman feet.

78 For the rarity of central focus in a sample of familial monuments of the first andsecond centuries, see Feraudi-Gruénais, Inschriften und ‘Selbstdarstelung,’41–42. For the Pompeian stelae (columellae), see Hope, “A Roof over the Dead,”82–84.

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but several of the ollae they identified contained ashes.79 Nor, evi-dently, was much care taken in columbaria to preserve groupings ofclose kin, perhaps of necessity. A detailed study of familial relation-ships represented in the largest of the Vigna Codini catacombs ex-cavated by Pietro Campana in 1840, with some 198 epitaphs in situand another hundred found loose inside, failed to reveal any strongevidence of nuclear families buried together but did find numerous in-stances of families being split up among individual ollae located in dif-ferent parts of the monument.80 Indeed, the grouping of ollae in pairswithin a single niche, the configuration which seems to have suggestedto the Romans the designation columbarium, although it would haveserved well for couples, is singularly ill-suited to the unified comme-moration of nuclear families. Inscriptions sometimes mention multipleollae acquired by a single person in different rows of a columbariumallotted during different rounds of a lottery or selection process, or theresale of ollae acquired on speculation by entrepreneurs.81 Consider-

79 See Caldelli and Ricci, Monumentum familiae Statiliorum, 60–61. Conversely, insome columbaria not all unmarked ollae were unused. In the first of the two col-umbaria discovered on the property of the Villa Doria Pamphilj, for example, allof the ollae contained ashes, but not all were marked with inscribed or (appar-ently) painted inscriptions. In the nearby columbarium of Scribonius Meno-philus, where both inscribed and painted inscriptions are found (the latternormally in the painted tabulae ansatae provided beneath each niche in the uni-form decorative scheme) and both occasionally bear the same name, it seemsthat the painted tituli may have identified the owners of the niches, whereas theinscribed placards recorded the epitaphs of those buried in them.

80 Nielsen, “Physical Context,” 43–44 noting that both of the (only) two certainclose-kin groupings found in the columbarium also reflected ties to patrons out-side the family: cf. CIL 6.4923, 5035, and 5074 (family of M. Valerius Futianus)and 6.5046–5047 (Veturia Helena). This columbarium was evidently built by anentrepreneur who sold spaces in it to any who wanted. For other columbariafound in the Vigna Codini constructed for professional collegia or slave house-holds, see Lucia Parri, “Iscrizioni funerarie, colombari, e liberti: il terzo ipogeodi Vigna Codini ed alcuni dei suoi epitaffi,” Atene e Roma 43 (1998): 54–60,esp. 55–57.

81 Cf. e.g., ILS 7892 (five individual ollae acquired in five consecutive rounds ofa lottery); cf. 7893. For ollae chosen extra sortem or (rarely) contiguous units,cf. ILS 7889 … sine sorte ab socis quas vellet ollae sexs datae sunt; 7900a, ollashabet continentes VI; further Maria Laetizia Caldelli, Simona Crea, and ClaudiaRicci, “Donare, emere, vendere, ius habere, possidere, concedere similia: don-azione e compravendita, proprietà, possesso, diritto sul sepolcro e diritti di se-poltura,” in Libitina e dintorni (Libitina 3; ed. Silvio Panciera; Rome: EdizioniQuasar, 2004), 311 (Ricci), noting that some of the large columbaria evidently


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ation of the bipartite columbarium slabs from Rome – those whichrecord two epitaphs side by side on a single marble tablet – although itreveals a sizeable number of associations that might reflect relation-ships of intimacy in life, equally clearly preserves a number of pairingsthat do not. The overwhelming impression is of fragmentation at an in-itial distribution of burial places within the monument and frequentredistribution of individual ollae or niches by subsequent gift or sale.In this respect, Purcell’s analysis is fully on target in characterizing thenature of such monuments as expressing “neither individuality normembership of a mass society but incorporation in a group a fewhundred or a few thousand strong.”82

But if we wish to pursue the housing analogy, we should observe thatthe most appropriate model for the columbarium is neither the apart-ment block (insula), as Hopkins would have it, nor the domus, as Pur-cell maintains, but rather the divided households with separate larariafor kin and slave familiae, such as in the House of the Vettii at Pom-peii.83 For what is truly novel about the largest of the columbaria isneither their sheer size nor even their essential presentation, which,like the familial tombs, is exclusionary and extroverted, but rather thesegregation of the slave household from the kinship group – a rupturethat shattered the fiction of the paterfamilias treating his householdslaves in loco filiorum (“as if they were his children”) and opened theway for the broader bipartite division of society that would emergemore formally a century later with the segregation of the privileged

did not allow this: already Brizio observed that none of the more than 400 in-scriptions from the columbarium of the Statilii mentions sale, donation, oracquisition. Note also Giuseppe Gatti, “Singolari iscrizioni dell’aedificiumXXXVI sociorum sulla Via Latina,” BCAR 10 (1882): 3–28, esp. 3–8; Schrumpf,Bestattung und Bestattungswesen, above n. 6.

82 Purcell, “Tomb and Suburb,” 39. The claim that the internal configuration ofcolumbaria expresses “hierarchies within the group” and that variations in thesize and décor of individual niches and ollae indicate “minute gradations ofstatus” (38), on the other hand, is difficult to sustain (no examples are cited):certain niches were indeed more lavishly decorated or more advantageously lo-cated than others, but we have no idea what criteria determined who occupiedthem. If, as several indications suggest, distribution by lottery was the norm,hierarchies of status would have been difficult to support, even if desired.

83 For household lararia as markers of separate households of servile familiaeand freeborn proprietors, see John Bodel, “Cicero’s Minerva,” forthcoming inHousehold and Family Religion in Antiquity: Contextual and Comparative Per-spectives (eds. John Bodel and Saul Olyan; Oxford: Blackwell, 2008).

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elite from the more humble free population, or, in Roman terms, withthe discrimination of honestiores and humiliores.84 At another level, themost suitable analogy to the columbarium within the sphere of do-mestic housing is the modern condominium complex, a cooperativeorganization created and designed less to provide a minimum neces-sary service than to cater to those with sufficient resources to expendon amenity and willing to forego individual preference on a smallscale in favor of more lavish accommodation and guaranteed carewithin a collectivity.

It remains to consider briefly the administration of these monu-ments. The earliest of the large columbaria were those constructed forthe household staffs of the senatorial families of Rome. In creating sep-arate tombs for a group that, by definition, had no legally recognizedkinship relations and thus no familial hierarchy to govern the distribu-tion of burial spaces within a collective monument, the aristocraticslave owners who provided (or at least allowed) these structures madepossible the creation of a new system of “tomb management” basedupon other principles than those that governed the administration offamilial monuments.85 In theory slave-owner patrons might have con-trolled admission into these structures and determined the internalarrangement of burials within them, but in practice, it seems, they exer-cised their prerogative only seldom and with discretion. Nor, it seems,did the informal (but nonetheless real) families of slave partners (con-tubernales) and their offspring exert their familial identity sufficientlyto maintain kinship groupings within the collective spaces. Instead, a

84 For the concept of honestiores and humiliores and its implications for the divi-sion of Roman society, see Peter Garnsey, Social Status and Legal Privilege in theRoman Empire (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), 221–33.

85 For slaves as legally kinless, see, e.g., Dig. 38.8.1–2 (Ulpian) and 38.10.10.5(Paul) with William Warwick Buckland, The Roman Law of Slavery (Cam-bridge: The University Press, 1908), 76–79. In addition to the few surviving col-umbaria devoted to the households of senatorial families (above, n. 57),inscriptions dedicated “to the freedmen and familia” of various prominent per-sons (two from Aquileia, the rest from Rome) attest another sixteen examples ofburial places or tombs reserved for particular households: cf. ILS 7848–7860,7862; cf. also ILS 7861 (C.E. 136). We do not know what sort of monuments theinscriptions originally adorned; some of the plots were fairly small: cf. e.g., ILS7850 (15 × 16 Roman feet), 7857 (10.5 × 12 feet), 7862 (12 × 24 feet); but otherswere clearly large enough to have accommodated large columbaria of thesort that occasionally survive: e.g., ILS 7585 (13 × 45 Roman feet), 7854 (35 × 35feet), 7860 (32 × 32 feet, at Aquileia).


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loose corporate structure seems generally to have furnished the organ-izing principle of tomb administration. The flexibility of this model ofself-government lent itself readily to other groups who wished to con-solidate resources in the interest of providing more lavish communalfacilities for the regular commemorative rituals that Roman funerarycustom required than individual members could finance independ-ently, whether the groups were held together by a common interest,such as a shared religion or occupation, or were defined merely by amutual desire to share in the services and amenities that collectivemembership offered.

An inscription set up in 16 C.E. by two freedmen administrators of afamilial columbarium beside the Via Labicana outside Rome illustrateswell the sorts of communal amenity that membership in a columbariummight provide, as well as the subtle blend of autonomous corporateself-government and collective dependence upon a patron that themanagement of such properties seems often to have entailed.

Titus Cocceius Gaa and Titus Cocceius Patiens, quaestors for the third time (ofthe domestic funerary collegium), according to the will of the decurions (of thecollegium) set up the square dining table in the pavilion, the sideboard and base,the sundial, the fountain basin with supports, the marble well, the stucco-workabove the wall of the middle path with the tiled roof, the little travertine columnbeneath the sundial, the projecting roof in front of the portico, the scales andweights. And, thanks to the kindness and generosity of their patron Titus, theyundertook the clearing of a place behind the further perimeter wall and thetransferring of the crematories from the furthest fence to there and the construc-tion of a path there and a doorway. And the same men with public money dec-orated those places which their patron Titus had granted to his decurions withthe seeds of vines and fruits and flowers and all sorts of greenery, in the consul-ship of Sisenna Taurus and L. Scribonius Libo.

The inscription goes on in hexameters to urge readers to recognize inthe expense incurred the just observance of piety and, for peace ofmind, to follow the example of those who created and tended the fu-nerary garden during their lifetimes, so as to be remembered and caredfor by others after their deaths.86 The message it conveys, indirectly but

86 CIL 6.10237 = ILS 7870; for the poem, CLE 371: T. T. Coccei Gaa et Patiensquaest(ores) III mensam quadratam in trichil(a), abacum cum basi, horologium,labrum cum fulmentis, marmor putiale, crustas supra parietem itineris medi cum te-gulis, columellam sub horologio Tiburtina(m?) 7 (sic) protectum ante porticum,trutinam et pondera d(e) d(ecurionum) s(ententia) posuerunt; et locum postmaceriam ulteriorem emendum ustrinasque de consaepto ultimo in eum locum trai-

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no less clearly, is one of exclusivity: the garden appurtenances cata-logued in detail, the reference to worthy expenditure (impensae cau-sam … et iustam … curam), and the appeal to successors to reciprocatethe commemorative care bestowed, are designed not only to encourageimitation among future members of the society but to call attention tothe privileges from which others were excluded.

Catacombs: World without End?

Catacombs, by contrast, were open, ill-defined spaces, infinitely ex-pandable (or at least creating the impression of being so) and offeringlittle or no external public aspect. Upon entering a columbarium, onerecognized the traditional boundaries of place in the Roman world –border stones, a circuit fence or wall marking the perimeter of the plot,the four walls of an enclosed rectilinear space. To be sure, catacombstoo, or rather their central areas, were often marked out at the surfaceby perimeter walls and boundary stones and later, after the time ofConstantine, by large funerary basilicas that provided monumentalfocus on the tombs of martyrs and formed the locus of concentratedburials both above and below ground.87 At certain entrances some hadoutposts for caretakers, who monitored and perhaps restricted visits tothe subterranean galleries. But most eventually could be entered fromany of several different stairwells, many of which seem to have allowedfree access, and the circumscribed surface burials sub divo gave little

ciendas et iter ad eum locum ianuamque beneficio et liberalitate T. patroni faciendacuraverunt; idemque vitium pomorumq(ue) et florum viridiumque omnium generumseminibus ea loca quae T. p(atronus) decurionibus suis adtribuerat ex pecunia pub-lica adornaverunt, Sisenna Tauro L. Scribonio Libone co(n)s(ulibus). See furtherBodel “Roman Tomb Gardens,” forthcoming in Gardens of the Roman Empire(ed. Wilhelmina Jashemski; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

87 For an overview, see Umberto M. Fasola and Vincenzo Fiocchi Nicolai, “Lenecropoli durante la formazione della città cristiana,” in Actes du XIe CongrèsInternational d’Archeologie Chrétienne. Volume II. La Topographie Chrétiennedes Grandes Capitales (Rome, École francaise de Rome, 1989), 1170–79. For ear-lier surface cemeteries overyling the site of catacombs, see also Osiek, below,yy–yy. For funerary basilicas, which often took the shape of a racecourse, seeVincenzo Fiocchi Nicolai, “La nuova basilica circiforme della Via Ardeatina,”RendPontAcc. 68 (1995–1996) [1999]: 69–233, esp., on burials, 145–75 (by MariaPaola Del Moro), with further bibliography.


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hint of the extensive galleries and networked cubicula that openedout below.88

Once inside, moreover, the visitor to a Roman catacomb experienceda sensation of having entered an alien, somewhat disorienting world, inwhich each tunnel and gallery connected with other tunnels or gal-leries, so that there was no sense of center and periphery and no cleardemarcation of finite limits. In some early catacombs, such as the firstfloor of the catacombs of Priscilla, datable to the first decades of thethird century, the galleries meandered unpredictably along the moreeasily excavated seams of the tufa beds, so that anyone attemptingto follow an orderly route would easily loose a sense of direction(Fig. 6.4).89 In others, such as the catacombs of Callistus in their ear-liest phase (around 200 C.E.), the main galleries of a regular plan laidout in correspondence with a clearly demarcated surface plot, origi-nally dug only as far as the boundaries of the area, were designedto allow subsequent extension underground beyond the confines of thesurface cemetery (Fig. 6.5).90 Even where systematic planning pro-duced a regular grid of networked tunnels, as in a second, lower levelof the catacombs of Priscilla dug out beneath the first in a character-istic “fishbone” pattern several decades later, near the beginning ofthe fourth century, one gets the impression of construction by module,

88 At Rome caretakers’ quarters have been identified securely only at the cata-combs of Praetextatus: see Antonio Ferrua, “Un vestibolo della catacomba diPrestestato,” RACrist 40 (1964): 146–65. Other possible examples may haveexisted at the so-called “Villa piccola” of S. Sebastiano and perhaps at the upperlevel of the entrance to the hypogeum of the Flavii at the catacombs of Domitilla(see Fasola and Fiocchi Nicolai, “Le necropolis,” 1179), but most stairwell en-trances have left no evidence of being guarded.

89 See Francesco Tolotti, Il Cimitero di Priscilla: Studio di topografia e architettura(Vatican City: Società amici delle catacombe presso Pontificio Istituto di Arch-eologia Cristiana, 1970), 63–106, 171–89.

90 For the large surface plot (100 × 250 Roman feet, ca. 30 × 75 meters,) circum-scribed by a fence and developed already as a burial area during the first andsecond centuries, see Spera, Paesaggio suburbano, 109–23. For the main sub-terranean galleries of the so-called “Area I” (Regio A), which were entered byseparate staircases at the corners of the surface plot, and the transverse ortho-gonal tunnels planned and subsequenlty dug between them, see Paul Styger,“L’origine del cimitero di S. Callisto sull’Appia,” RendPontAcc. 4 (1925–1926):112–19; Brandenburg, “Ursprung und Entstehung,” 91–92; and Donatella Nuzzo,Tipologia sepolcrale delle catacombe romane: i cimiteri ipogei delle vie Ostiense,Ardeatina, e Appia (British Archaeological Reports, International Series 905)(Oxford: Archeopress, 2000), 90–95.

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av. I

I.

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as if additional units could be added on at will – as indeed they were,according to plan (Fig. 6.6).91 In each of these cases the lack of tradi-tional topographical points of reference and a plan designed from thestart to accommodate expansion created a sense of openness andinclusiveness, in the sense that membership in the collectivity of thosesharing the cemetery was never finite but always potentially available.At the same time, the subterranean setting provided an ambience notonly appropriate to the world of dead, who according to a deep-seatedtradition of Greco-Roman culture were to be returned at death tomother earth, but conducive to the sort of oblique expression of anideal social order divorced from the compromising realities of life thatfunerary architecture in antiquity normally aimed to represent.92 Re-moved from the natural light and freed from the contours of the sur-face topography, the interior space of the catacombs was a world of itsown, without normal parameters. Accordingly, the iconography of thescenes from daily life frequently found on tombstones and in painted

91 For the date, see Tolotti, Cimitero di Priscilla, 322–40.92 For the concept of mother earth as the proper recipient of the dead in Roman

culture, cf., e.g., Cicero, Leg. 2.56 with Xenophon, Cyr. 8.7.25; CIL 12.1932 =CLE 1476; CIL 6.15493 = CLE 1129; cf. Livy 1.56.10–12.

6.5. Plan of the so-called “Area I”(Regio A) of the catacombs of Callistusbeside the Via Appia as developedby the middle of the third century,after Styger, “Cimitero di S. Callisto,”103 fig. 7.

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6.6. Plan of the lower level of the catacombs of Priscilla, afterFiocchi Niccolai, “Origin and Development,” 25 figure 20.

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frescoes decorating the walls, although it superficially resembles thenaturalistic depictions of occupations and leisure activities familiarfrom traditional Roman funerary art, seems always to have been to acertain extent symbolic and over time grew more detached from realityand increasingly ideological and abstract.93

Within the catacombs different regions of the underground cem-eteries were characterized by different configurations of space: in ad-dition to the networked galleries uniformly lined with loculi, certainareas were topographically distinguished by individual rooms and cu-bicula carved out of the tufa and opening at irregular intervals off ofthe tunnels or more systematically arranged in symmetrical groupings.Within the rooms were not only loculi but graves of different forms –arcuated niches for individual burials (arcosolia); niche tombs in-tended to accommodate multiple burials in the floors and walls;“window” tombs, which gave access to small groups of loculi via rec-tangular “windows” in the walls of the galleries; “a mensa” tombs, inwhich trench graves running parallel to the walls were sunk into thefloors of niches and covered with slabs; “a cappuccina” tombs, simpletrench graves covered by gabled roof tiles; and so on.94 Contrary tothe once popular view that the uniform simplicity of catacomb burialsreflected and promoted an egalitarian ideology within the early Chris-tian community, the variety of architectural spaces and the multiplic-ity of grave types, even in the early phases of development of some ofthe first large catacombs, suggest rather a heterogeneous mixture ofpersons of different wealth and status with no distinctively unifyingbeliefs about the representation of privilege in burial. In the earliestphases of development of the catacombs of Praetextatus, Domitilla,and Callistus, for example, one can recognize two distinct modes ofuse, which correspond to topographically distinct types of regionswithin the cemeteries: in certain sections one finds series of “prefabri-cated” graves, with uniform columns and rows of loculi systematicallycarved out for undifferentiated use; other zones, marked by less inten-sive exploitation, are characterized by individual cubicula and graves

93 See Fabrizio Bisconti, Mestieri nelle catacombe Romane: Appunti sul declinodell’iconografia del reale nei cimiteri cristiani di Roma (Vatican City: PontificiaCommissione di Archeologia Sacra, 2000).

94 See Nuzzo, Tipologia sepolcrale, 199–204, for topographically distinct zoneswithin the catacombs, and 163–76 for a typology of the graves found withinthem.

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of different types apparently made to order and exhibiting greatereclecticism and elaboration in their decoration.95 The first correspondin certain respects (uniformity, systematization, economy of space) tothe prefabricated niches for ash urns, many with built-in ollae, found inthe columbaria, where doctrinal unanimity and religious separatismhave never been suspected; the latter, in many others, recall the free-standing hereditary and familial tombs of the visible suburban land-scape. The novelty in the catacombs is that the two forms of burial areintegrated with each other and housed within the same undefinedspace: not only were the galleries lined with loculi able to be extended,but the cubicula set aside for more prestigious burials, even if theyresembled the traditional familial tombs of the surface topography,opened intermittently off of spaces that were themselves the site ofburials and were evidently accessible to any who passed them.

We have few intact catacombs like the monument of the householdof Livia or the Vigna Codini columbarium excavated by Campana,with hundreds of grave markers preserved in place, and even where wedo, the inscriptions provide little hope of identifying familial group-ings among the undifferentiated loculi or, indeed, in the era beforeConstantine, of the religious affiliation of those buried within them.That is partly because the catacombs have been stripped of most oftheir original grave goods and portable appointments, but also becausemost loculi were not marked with epitaphs, and the epitaphs that arefound tend to identify a single individual with a single name, normallya cognomen, the least distinctive element of the nomenclature then inuse; very few provide any hint of religious belief.96 As with the colum-

95 Nuzzo, Tipologia sepolcrale, 203. The development of specific regions devoted toever more elaborate “architectural” cubicula intensified during the reign of Con-stantine and the pontifcates of Julius (337–352 C.E.) and Laberius (352–366C.E.), when élite members of Roman society (notably senators: ICUR 5.14016,14132, 14155, 14445) began to install expensively carved marble sarcophagiwithin their familial cubicula: see Fiocchi Nicolai, “Origin and Development,”37–43.

96 The most serious plundering of the catacombs, by specialists known as corpis-antari during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, was systematic and wasvirtually sanctioned by the Catholic ecclesiastical leaders: see Pasquale Testini,Le catacombe e gli antichi cimiteri cristiani in Roma (Bologna: Licinio Cappelli,1966), 21–26. For early catacomb epigraphy, see Carlo Carletti, “Nascita e svi-luppo del formulario epigraphico cristiano: Prassi e ideologia,” in InscriptionesSanctae Sedis 2. Le iscrizioni dei cristiani in Vaticano (ed. Ivan Di Stefano Man-zella; Vatican City: Monumenti, Musei, e Gallerie Pontificie, 1997), 145–46: in


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baria, little effort seems to have been made in the undifferentiatedareas to accommodate family units in groups. Here it is not the epi-graphy that points to this conclusion but the architecture, in the dis-tribution of the loculi of varying size throughout the galleries, wherenarrow columns of small niches for infant or child burials intermit-tently interrupt the regular series of columns and layers of adult-sizedloculi – all in the interest of maximizing the use of burial space(Fig. 6.7).97 With such schematically imposed imbalances in theconfiguration of niches, few families will have been able to bury youngchildren next to, or even near, their parents in their own spaces. As inthe columbaria, the regimentation of niches in rows imparted uniform-ity, but, unlike in the columbaria, the openness of the architecturalform suggested the possibility of infinite expansion and growth.

the catacombs of Priscilla, which preserves the most coherent and complete col-lection of catacomb inscriptions before Constantine and where some 1500 loculiwere in use before the middle of the third century (see below, yyy), de Rossifound only 303 epitaphs in place: 206 Latin, 93 Greek, 4 anepigraphic. At thecatacombs of of Saints Marcellinus and Peter beside the Via Labicana, the lar-gest of the pre-Constantinian era, fewer than 10 percent of the (ultimately)22,500 burial spaces seem to have had inscriptions: Jean Guyon, “Dal praediumimperiale al santuario dei martiri. Il territorio ‘ad duas lauros,’” in Società ro-mana e impero tardoantico II. Roma. Politica, economia, paesaggio urbano (ed.Andrea Giardina; Rome: Laterza, 1986), 479 n. 63. The Latin single-name sys-tem became common among all Romans after Caracalla’s extension of Romancitizienship to all the free: see Iiro Kajanto, “The Emergence of the Late SingleName System,” in L’onomastique latine. Paris 13–15 octobre 1975 (ed. NoëlDuval; Paris: Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 1977), 421–28. Inthe catacombs of Priscilla in the period before Constantine, 83 percent of theepitaphs provide no hint of religious orientation; of the some 100 epitaphs pre-served in the so-called “Area A” of the catacombs of Callistus, 75 present a singlename and 76 give no indication of religious belief; similar figures obtain for theearliest sections of the catacombs of Praetextatus and Domitilla: see Carletti,“Formulario epigraphico cristiano.”

97 Cf., e.g., rooms 56, 57, 58, and 64 in region Y of the catacombs of Saints Mar-cellinus and Peter (ca. 295–320 C.E.), where the architectural innovation was ac-companied by the development of a new decorative design similar to that foundin the columbarium of C. Scribonius Menophilus (above, Fig. 6.2), in whicha ribbon of floral and geometric motifs uniformly divides the rows of loculi:see Zimmermann, Werkstattgruppen, 188, 197, 233–34 and pls. XXX–XXXI.Some children were no doubt placed in individual loculi with their parents: seebelow n. 119, on bisoma and trisoma.

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Collegia: A Flexible Tool

The grease that oiled the funerary machine throughout the first threecenturies of the common era and enabled the major shifting of gears incollective burial from columbaria to catacombs was the collegium.Once the sheer size of elite familiae outgrew the capacity of traditionalfunerary architecture to reconcile the principles of providing for allmembers of the household and suitably distinguishing the proprietorand his close kin, some other mechanism than familial hierarchy,which began with the paterfamilias and was directionless without hisauthoritative presence at the top of the pyramid, was needed to controland regulate the distribution of burial space. As noted above (yyy), aloose corporate structure emerged in the earliest household columba-ria, occasionally beside acknowledgment of the permission of an aris-tocatic patron, to control access to the monument and the distributionof burial places within it, as can be seen from references in inscriptionsto decuriones, curatores, magistri, quaestores, and, occasionaly, to a col-legium itself.98 Even where a formally incorporated collegium did notexist, however, as must have been the case with those burial associa-tions comprised entirely of slaves, the administrative apparatus of theprofessional collegia that first surfaced formally during the Ciceronian

98 See Hasegawa, “Collegia Domestica,” 252–56, 262–63, with references; cf.Waltzing, Étude historique, 1:380–83. For “permission” of a patron, the monu-ment of the Volusii provides the most abundant evidence: cf. CIL 6.7368, 7375,7380, 22811; for reference to a collegium, cf. CIL 6.6215, 6216, 6218, 6219 (col-umbarium of the Statilii), 6.7282 (columbarium of the Volusii).


6.7. Cross-section showing the distribution of long (adult-sized) and short (childor infant) loculi in gallery D of the so-called “Area I” (Regio A) of the catacombs ofCallistus (see above, Fig. 6.5), after Styger, “Cimitero di S. Callisto,” 118 fig. 17.

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age provided a model for autonomous self-regulation that filled a gapleft by the relinquishing of control by a paterfamilias.99

Collegia thus filled an administrative need and, once implicated in fu-nerary responsibilities, quickly evolved into administrative organismscapable, owing to the virtually ubiquitous human desire to secure arespectable burial, of infiltrating numerous walks of Roman life. Thisis the main reason why the funerary responsibilities of the collegiawere misunderstood for so long as being the distinctive purpose of oneparticular type: when one looks for a common denominator that unifiesthe various disparate organizations grouped together under thegeneral rubric of voluntary associations, provision for burial of themembers is often the most conspicuous feature and, when furthergrounds for characterizing a particular association more precisely arenot apparent, that function can seem to be a defining characteristic. Thevexed question of the date and scope of a so-called senatus consultum decollegiis tenuiorum, a measure of the Augustan or Julio-Claudian periodrelaxing the restrictions imposed by a Caesarian lex Iulia de collegiis(which applied only to Roman citizens) by permitting voluntary associ-ations of humbler persons that served the public interest (propter utili-tatem publicam) and intending specifically, it seems, under that rubric toallow associations that ensured the burial of their members, need notconcern us here. It is clear that the proper burial of dead members of thecommunity (whether or not Roman citizens) was regarded by the juristsas a public good; that voluntary associations of various sorts flourishedduring the empire; and that providing funerals for their members,whether or not their raison d’être, was one of the principal functionsthey served.100 Securing a proper burial – a goal common to humanity

99 Waltzing, Étude historique, 1:42–56 (followed by many) described as private col-legia avant la lettre a number of types of voluntary associations well attestedalready during the Republic, such as religious cells (of Bacchus, e.g.), politicalfactions (called sodalitates, sodalicia or factiones – never collegia: 49), and socialclubs (see above, n. 27). By these standards professional collegia defined by par-ticular trades (cf. Dig. 50.6.5.12) had existed since the regal period, when, ac-cording to legend, Numa divided the people into groups on the basis of theiroccupations: cf. Plut. Numa 17.1–2 with Waltzing, Étude historique, 1:61–69.

100 For the (meager) legal evidence for the senatorial decree, see Dig. 47.22.1 (Mar-cianus). For the (copious) modern discussion, see recently Wendy Cotter, “TheCollegia and Roman Law: State Restrictions on Voluntary Associations,” in Vol-untary Associations in the Graeco-Roman World (eds. John S. Kloppenborg andStephen G. Wilson; New York and London: Routledge, 1996), 74–89; Luuk deLigt, “Governmental Attitudes towards Markets and Collegia,” in Mercati per-

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and socially beyond reproach (and thus effectively immune to interfer-ence from the imperial authority) – enabled the collegium to adapt andsurvive, even after the official conversion of the empire to Christianityeliminated or subverted other Roman social institutions of much longerstanding.101 The funerary role of the collegium, ironically, was bornto meet one social need – the proper burial of groups too large ortoo amorphous and heterogeneous to be accommodated directly by thetraditional familial and patronal mechanisms of support – but grew upto address another, the desire for self-defining communities to expresssolidarity and corporate unity within a recognized and acceptable (if al-ways to a certain extent controversial) institutional framework.102

The flexibility of the form has also enabled scholars to shape theirconception of the purpose and nature of the institution to suit theirown predilections and circumstances. Three of the greatest, whosepioneering studies during the nineteenth century have formed the basis(sometimes unquestioned) of most modern discussions, poured intothe empty container of the collegium very different mixtures of the so-cial and political thought that percolated through their times. ForMommsen collegia were secular organizations devoid of religiousorientation that served mainly social funtions. For de Rossi they fur-nished the mechanism by which the early Christian community organ-ized itself and exerted its property rights over communal cemeteries.For Waltzing they were beneficial labor organizations, the prototypesof the Christian Democratic professional associations that formed thebackbone of a well-run imperial society.103 For our purposes it is onlyde Rossi’s thesis that requires attention.

manenti e mercati periodici nel mondo romano (ed. Elio Lo Cascio; Bari: Edipug-lia, 2000), 242–52; id. “D. 47,22,1,pr.-1 and the Formation of Semi-Public Col-legia,” Latomus 60 (2001): 345–58. For the basic principle that the burial ofcorpses was in the public interest, see Dig. 11.7.43.2a (Papinian) and 11.7.12.3(Ulpian), with Bodel, Graveyards and Groves, 33–34.

101 See the remarks of Carolyn Osiek, below yyy–yyy, on the eventual usur-pation of the private patronage of collegia by Christian bishops during thefourth and fifth centuries.

102 See Francesco Maria De Robertis, “Causa funeris – causa religionis: le commu-nità cristiane tra normativa statale e messaggio evangelico (a proposito di D.47,22,1),” SDHI 54 (1988): 239–49.

103 For the ideological currents of late-nineteenth-century European social thoughtthat informed the divergent theories of Mommsen, de Rossi, Waltzing, andlesser scholars writing on the subject of funerary collegia during the sameperiod, see the interesting discussion of Perry, The Roman Collegia, 23–88.


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According to de Rossi, collegia provided not only a protected andformally recognized medium for Christians to congregate legally butalso a legitimate means for them to own communal property, particu-larly burial grounds, corporately.104 As Carolyn Osiek observes, how-ever (below, yyy), there is a significant difference between regardingearly Christian congregations as adapting the administrative appa-ratus of communal voluntary associations to ensure the burial of theirmembers, as they surely did, and seeing “the Church” as a formallyconstituted legal collegium which in that capacity corporately ownedcollective cemeteries reserved for the burial of Christians. In fact, as iswell known, Roman law did not recognize corporate ownership ofproperty but regarded private communal funds, real estate, and com-modities as belonging collectively but individually to the persons whocame together for the purpose of owning them. Thus, in the case ofcollegia, a person illegally enrolled in two associations and thereforerequired to withdraw from one of them would receive from the col-legium he left the share of the common fund (ratio communis) due him,and those who belonged to collegia judged illegal and therefore dis-solved were permitted to divide among themselves the common funds(pecunias communes) of the association upon its dissolution.105 Theanalogy sometimes drawn by those who argue that corporate owner-ship of property (notably cemeteries) by communities of Christianswas recognized in practice even before Constantine in 321 C.E. for-mally established Christian churches as juridical entities with propertyrights between collegia and collective entities such as cities and col-onies fails to recognize the difference between communal property ofthis sort, which belonged collectively to the several individual owners,and public property owned by public bodies such as cities and colo-

104 In a letter of 19 June 1882 to his friend Louis Duchesne, Director of the Écolefrançaise de Rome, de Rossi referred explicitly to “le droit du corpus christiano-rum, come possesseur de cimetières”: see Patrick Saint-Roch, ed. Correspond-ance de Giovanni Battitsta de Rossi et Louis Duchesne, 1873–1894 (Rome: ÉcoleFrançaise de Rome, 1995), 221 (letter 174) with the analysis of Perry, TheRoman Collegia, 49–58.

105 Dig. 47.22.1.2 (Marcianus), Non licet autem amplius quam unum collegium lici-tum habere … et si quis in duobus fuerit, rescriptum est eligere eum oportere, inquo magis essse velit, accepturum ex eo collegio a quo recedit id quod ei competitex ratione quae communis fuit. Dig. 47.22.3. pr (Marcianus), Collegia si qua fuer-int illicita … disolvuntur: sed permittitur eis, cum dissolvuntur, pecunias communessi quas habent dividere pecuniamque inter se partiri.

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nies, which belonged to no one individual (res nullius) but was set asidefor the common use of all (res publica).106

A second objection concerns the common assimilation by advocatesof de Rossi’s view of the tenuiores identified in the senatus consultumwith the Christian “poor” (egeni ), whose proper burial the ApostolicTradition and Tertullian claim was the general responsibility of thecommunity.107 The supposed equivalency of the two categories rests ona misunderstanding of the Latin terms. Egenus, in classical and ecclesi-astical Latin, means “needy,” “indigent,” “destitute”; as a substantive,it is vox propria for “pauper,” one without means. The adjective tenuis,by contrast, when applied to persons, particularly in legal contexts,refers primarily to social standing rather than to wealth; as used sub-stantively by jurists in its comparative form it acquires almost thestatus of a technical term and in the plural defines a category equiva-lent to that of the humiliores; specificallly it describes those who donot belong to one of the legally recognized higher ordines (senators,knights, and in some contexts municipal magistrates), many of whomcertainly possessed sufficient financial means to pay for their ownburials and those of their families.108 It is evident that those whom theChristian writers refer to as “the poor” in such contexts – Christianpoor, it may be noted: there is no hint that Christians shared thebroader Roman conception of a public interest in the burial of all whodied in Roman territory – were indeed tenuiores, but not all tenuioreswere poor, let alone indigent. Indeed, those who belonged to collegiatended to be more prosperous than the average urban and municipalresident and regularly received portions of higher value than common

106 For the legal concept of public property, especialy real estate, cf. e.g., Dig.43.7–9, especially 43.7.1 (Pomponius), 43.8.2.3, and 43.8.2.5 (Ulpian). For theanalogy, see, e.g., de Visscher, Droit des tombeaux, 265–71, cited by Osiek,below, yyy.

107 See above, nt. 54, especially Tert. Apol. 38–39.108 Egenus: cf., e.g., Plaut. Capt. 2.3.46; Verg. Aen. 6.91; Vulg. Deut. 15.11, Psa.

34.10. For tenuis, as applied to a segment of society, see, e.g., Cicero, Leg.3.10.24, Fin. 2.20.66, Mur. 70, etc. with Guy Achard, Pratique rhétorique etidéologie politique dans les discours “optimates” de Cicéron (MnemosyneSupplement 68; Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1981), 376; Livy 2.3.2. For legal usage, cf.also Dig. 38.28.2, 48.19.28.2, where the term is synonymous with humiliores (seeabove, n. 84); 50.6.6.12, where the category is explicity contrasted with that ofthose capable of undertaking the financial obligations of municipal office(munera civitatium) (Callistratus); note also Garnsey, Social Status, 222–23.


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members of society in the hierarchically scaled distributions of publicand private largesse.109

Collegia were indeed important in the history of the early Christiancommunity at Rome, but not in the way that de Rossi imagined.Rather than forming the administrative apparatus by which a unifiedChristian church exercised its legitimate property rights, they provideda flexible model for urban Christians to organize themselves in groups(sometimes, but by no mean always, congregations) to express a com-mon interest in collective burial. In this they differed in particulars butnot in kind from other collegia that found convenience and solidarityin uniting for a common purpose. So, for example, even after churchesbecame recognized juridical entities capable of owning (and thus ofcontrolling) collective cemeteries, we find particular groups of Chris-tians, such as workmen involved in the public distribution of grain(mensores frumentarii), for whom Christianity may or may not havebeen an important element of identity, organizing themselves into col-legia (in this case a professional association) and providing separateand independent burial accommodation for their members – withinthe large collective catacombs.110 Behind the collegia stand individualproprietors of funerary properties – purpose-built columbaria andcatacombs – private patrons in some cases but also entrepreneurs anddevelopers. Enterprising businessmen in the death trade, it seems, in-spired the major developments in Roman burial architecture over thefirst three centuries of empire. They operated, often, behind the scenes,but their role in the process was fundamental. Investigating their in-volvement in the funerary industry, however, is beyond the scope ofthis essay.

109 See, e.g., Patterson, “Patronage, Collegia, and Burial,” 21; id. “The Collegia andthe Transformation of the Towns of Italy,”, in L’Italie d’Auguste à Dioclétien(Rome: Ecole Française de Rome, 1994), 234; Van Nijf, Civic World, 18–23.

110 For the distinctively decorated cubiculum established by a collegium of mensoresfrumentarii around the middle of the fourth century in a region of specially de-signed architectural cubicula within the catacombs of Domitilla, see PhillipePergola, “Mensores frumentarii christiani et annone à la fin de l’antiquité (relec-ture d’un cycle de peintures),” RACrist 66 (1990): 167–84.

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Conclusion

There is little evidence to suggest that catacombs were invented byChristians or were originally exploited by Christians to serve their pe-culiar socio-religious ends. The form grew naturally out of develop-ments in the design, and probably the economics, of funerary spaceintroduced with the columbarium during the last decades B.C.E. andseems to have been inspired mainly by the irresistible press of a popu-lation that continued growing – and dying – beyond the capacity of thesuburban landscape to house the bodies. An independently inspired(and, for the thesis advanced here, irrelevant) change in preferredmethod of disposal from cremation to inhumation beginning in thelatter first century exacerbated but did not itself create a demand thathad by then been growing for nearly 200 years, when the introductionof columbaria first signaled a problem. Once discovered, however, andput into use by the mixed population of Rome, the catacomb formquickly recommended itself to the Christian community for its opendesign and otherworldly ambience, which made possible a radical re-formulation of the theological order as expressed through the relation-ship between the divinity and the dead.111

The model of the underground cemetery was moreover well suited toenabling the early Christian community to express its conception of anideal society through its burial customs, in the same oblique butculturally specific way that earlier Romans had expressed theirs. Byhonoring their dead communally as brothers and sisters in Christ,Christians expanded their “family” to a size that soon dwarfed eventhe largest of the imperial households.112 The catacombs enabled themto maintain the familial model of traditional Roman funerary com-memoration without incurring the risk of running out of space, as eventhe familia of the empress Livia had done. In that subterranean worldwithout horizons and poles, new centers of gravity naturally formedaround those with the greatest weight in the new world order, which,increasingly, meant those most closely connected with the church andits origins. If the archaeological dating of the early development of thecatacombs is correct, however, the cult of relics and the competitive

111 The analysis of this fundamental change by Peter Brown, The Cult of the Saints:Its Rise and Function in Lin Christianity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,1981) is too well known to require further explication.

112 See the concise but incisive remarks of Harries, “Death and the Dead,” 60–61.


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desire among Christians for burial near their saints (tumulatio ad sanc-tos) merely intensified but did not cause the expansion of the subter-ranean complexes of linked hypogea into large collective cemeteries,which was already well advanced by the middle of the third century.Rather it provided a focus to the accumulation of graves near the new“holy” centers, which often were located, not near the center of thevast complexes, but at their periphery.113 Thus grew up the cult of mar-tyrs, saints, and bishops that first burst to the surface with Constan-tine’s basilica over the grave of Peter and then erupted repeatedlyabove ground later in the fourth and fifth centuries in a series of funer-ary basilicas, chapels, and burial areae that ringed the city in a constel-lation of mega-tombs (the great centers of Christian pilgrimage) – allcommunally shared by the ever-growing Christian familia. The gravesvisited now were no longer those of biological relatives but of the newChristian saints, kin to all in the ecumenical family. The familial modelof Roman funerary commemoration thus endured, even as the conceptof the family grew to encompass all who shared the Christian faith.The traditional family endured also, of course, and continued to assertits cohesiveness in burial through the device of the cubiculum. The dif-ference now was that the family unit (whatever its precise composition)no longer isolated itself in independent structures designed to segre-gate the chosen few from outsiders but rather established itself withinthe broader community, in the communal subterranean spaces sharedby all. Tombs in this new age were no longer final destinations butmere way-stations, places for resting – refrigerium, in the contempor-ary Christian parlance – on the way to salvation and resurrection.

The significant changes in this two-stage process, I have tried toargue, are not in fact found where they have traditionally been located –in the growth in monument-size, from small familial tombs to largecolumbaria, and in the switch from cremation to inhumation – butrather in the separation of the slave household from the biologicalfamily, which opened the way for new, extra-familial expressions of al-legiance and social order, now increasingly articulated through the in-finitely adaptable instrument of the collegium, and in the movementfrom above ground to beneath the surface, which enabled the develop-ment of a burial mode ideally suited to the new theology – all inclusive,

113 In this I disagree with my friend Carolyn Osiek, below XXX, who is certainlycorrect that the cult of the saints provided new focus and impetus to the expan-sion of the vast complexes.

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otherworldly, and capable (seemingly) of universal expansion andgrowth. By the time the Christian cemeteries around Rome returned tothe surface of the land during the later fourth and fifth centuries, andareae replaced catacombs as the preferred loca of commemoration, theideological foundation of the imperium Romanum had fundamentallychanged, and the traditional Roman tendency toward assertions ofprivilege and rank projected itself against a new backdrop of the Chris-tian faith. If the arguments presented in the preceding pages have anymerit, in the momentous shift that this new orientation ultimately ef-fected in the history of European civilization, the developments in col-lective burial practices that took place during the first three centuriesof the new Christian era played a significant part. The transition inburial architecture from columbaria to catacombs, which replaced aclosed, isolating system of commemorative expression with an open,inclusive form suggesting commonality and community, was exploitedto excellent effect by Christians during the century and a half afterConstantine. Whether the extensive underground cemeteries devel-oped already during the third century belonged originally and exclus-ively to that separatist community is considerably less certain.

AppendixKnown Burials at Rome, 25 B.C.E.–325 C.E.

No one knows how many burials from the three and a half centuries ofpre-Christian imperial Rome have been reported, let alone discovered,but by combining the figures derived from some obvious and well-rep-resented sources with plausible estimates of the uncalculated numbersfrom some recognized categories of evidence, one can arrive at an ap-proximate total not likely, perhaps, to be off by more than 20 to 30 per-cent – a margin of error unacceptable for many purposes but usefulenough for ours, as long as the uncertainties on which it is based arekept firmly in mind and the arguments to which it is harnessed remaincandidly tentative and exploratory. The suggested total of 150,000known burials between the time of Augustus and that of Constantine,then, is no more than an educated guess, but not a useless one, perhaps,for suggesting the tiny percentage, by any reckoning, of those for whichwe have any evidence at all.

Calculations that overrepresent the actual numbers known and es-timates that err on the high side will present the case in the strongest


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possible light, since the aim is to suggest that our information con-cerning the likely burials in the vicinity of Rome is exceedinglymeager and not necessarily representative. The estimate of 150,000,which represents just such a figure, is rounded up from a calculatedtotal (149,700) derived from adding to the number of surviving epi-taphs registered in volume six of the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarumdevoted to the city of Rome (some 26,000); the number of funeraryinsciptions destined for the new supplement to be edited by SilvioPanciera (around 10,000); an estimate of the number of unmarkedcremation graves (mainly in columbaria) found in the suburban re-gions of the city (some 11,000); a guess as to the number of simple,often (but not always) unmarked, inhumation burials in shallow in-dividual graves in suburban necropoleis (perhaps 20,000); a veryrough estimate of the number of bodies interred in loculi or inhumedin associated surface cemeteries of the catacombs in use prior to thetime of Constantine (as many as 62,700); and acknowledgment of theexistence – in what quantities we cannot know – of mass graves, somein catacombs and not only for the indigent, that sometimes com-prised as many as 1,000 corpses (possibly 15,000–20,000?). It will beuseful to summarize briefly what little evidence we have for each ofthese categories in turn.

Inscribed epitaphs: the folly of relying on published inscriptions foruseful biometrical information about ancient populations is wellknown, and the sources of bias in our sample need not be rehearsed.114

The numbers that are known, however, can be counted and provide aminimum baseline for individual graves. Many epitaphs, of course, arededicated to more than one person, often to three or four persons byname (to say nothing of the collective forumulae sibi et suis, etc.). Butsince we cannot be certain that those included in an inscribed dedi-cation were in fact buried where the epitaph was posted (in certaincases they demonstrably were not), it seems safer, in order to avoiddouble counting, to reckon their numbers among the anonymousgraves and to count a single epitaph as attesting a single burial. Inmany instances, of course, the epitaph is detached from the grave itselfand provides all we know of the burial it commemorates; but since our

114 See, e.g., the contributions of Jean Marie Lassère, Pierre Salmon, and KeithHopkins, in François Hinard, ed., La mort, les morts, et l’au delà dans le monderomain (Caen: Université de Caen, 1987); Timothy Parkin, Demography andRoman Society (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 5–19.

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aim is to cast the net as widely as possible, counting even an intendedburial (whether or not realized in the manner attested) seems justified.The 26,000 epitaphs recorded in CIL 6 furnish numerous illustrationsof the situations mentioned; the estimate of 10,000 unpublished epi-taphs from the environs of Rome derives from Professor Silvio Pan-ciera and is based upon the archive of schede compiled and preservedat the Department of Latin Epigraphy at the University of Rome, “LaSapienza,” from which he is preparing the new supplement to CIL 6.

Unmarked cremation graves: perhaps as many as three quarters ofthe some 5,500 burials accommodated in the ten largest known colum-baria are anonymous: see above, n. 57 [N = 4,125]. If we allow the samepercentage of unmarked burials in another 45 smaller columbaria un-covered between 1700 and 1920 and registered in CIL 6, each compris-ing no more than 100 ollae (for a total, in other words, of no more than3,375), and also in as many as have been uncovered between 1920 andtoday, then the number of known but unmarked cremation graves inthe environs of the city amounts to, at most, slightly fewer than 11,000(N = 10,875).

Individual surface inhumations: this is the type of burial perhaps leastlikely to have survived the ravages of time, since the suburban topsoilaround Rome over the last two millennia has been so frequently tilled,excavated, and built over that most of the burials originally consignedto it have certainly vanished, but in recent years closer attention tochance discoveries made in the course of construction work in the en-virons of the city has revealed concentrations of simple surface burialssufficient to suggest the scale of their original numbers. Hydraulicworks at Isola Sacra during the late 1980s, for example, uncoveredamong the monumental tombs of the well-known necropolis outsidePortus some 650 a cappuccina graves and simple formae dating to thesecond and third centuries.115 And in 2004 construction work on ahigh-speed rail line beside the Via Collatina outside Rome revealedsome 2,000 unmarked simple inhumation graves in a vast surface cem-etery tentatively dated to the second century.116 There is no telling how

115 See Sergio Angelucci, Ida Baldassarre, Irene Bragantini, Maria GiuseppinaLauro, Vanni Mannucci, Alberto Mazzoleni, Chiara Morselli, and Franca Tag-lietti, “Sepolture e riti nella necropolis dell’Isola Sacra,” Bollettino di Archeolo-gia 5–6 (1990): 49–113.

116 The Via Collatina graves have not yet been published but will form the subjectof a forthcoming article by Stefano Musco and Anna Buccellato.


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many similar finds may yet be unearthed, but it is certain that manysimilar necropoleis, if they existed in large numbers outside Rome,have disappeared without a trace. The figure of some 20,000 suchsimple inhumations therefore represents a generous estimate of thenumber that might one day be discovered, rather than the number thatonce existed, which cannot even be guessed.

Catacombs: The total number of loculi in the excavated catacombs isnot known, let alone the total number of those that might have been inuse before the time of Constantine, but approximate figures for thelarger cemeteries can be hazarded. The most serious attempt to esti-mate the number of burials accommodated in a single large pre-Con-stantinian complex, that of Marcellinus and Peter at the imperial prop-erty ad duas lauros beside the Via Labicana, arrived at a total of 11,000loculi distributed throughout two kilometers of tunnels during the firstfifty years of the use of the site following its opening around 260 C.E.,with perhaps as many as 6,000 surface burials (sub divo) in the plotoverlying the subterranean tunnels.117 Three other large catacombs inuse during the third century – that of Priscilla beside the Via Salaria(c. 200–230 C.E., the largest of this period), “Area A” of the catacombsof Callistus beside the Via Appia (c. 230–240), and the catacombs ofNovatianus beside the Via Tiburtina (c. 260–270) – each housed be-tween 1,200 and 1,500 loculi. Three others in use during the first halfof the third century – those of Domitilla beside the Via Ardeatina(the Area of the Flavii, c. 200–230?), of Praetextatus beside the ViaAppia (c. 200–230), and of Calepodius beside the Via Aurelia Vetus(c. 230–250) – may each have included between 500 and 1,000 subter-ranean burial spaces. During the second half of the third century theexisting cemeteries were expanded and new catacombs were opened: inaddition to that of Marcellinus and Peter, these included the so-calledCoemeterium Maius on the Via Nomentana (c. 250), the nucleus ofAgnese (“Regio 1,” c. 250), the lower levels of the catacombs of Pam-philus (c. 260–300) and Priscilla (c. 300–310), and those of the VillaDoria Pamphilj on the Via Aurelia Vetus. These are said to have con-tained “thousands” of burials, but the actual figures are unknown. Ifwe allow a generous 2,000 to each, add another 2,000 for the totalnumber of loculi in a half dozen much smaller complexes dated to thesecond half of the third century, and imagine every catacomb to have

117 Guyon, “Dal praedium imperiale,” 315; cf. 478 n. 52 “probabilmente stime es-sagerate”; id. Le cimitière aux deux lauriers, 101.

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included burials sub divo in the surface soil overlying the tunnels in thesame (generous) ratio as that estimated for the catacombs of Marcel-linus and Peter (that is, approximately 1:2, or a range of 600–1000for the larger complexes and 250–500 for the smaller ones), the totalnumber of burial spaces in the catacombs in use before Constantinewould amount to some 41,800.118

Multiple burials and ossuaries: That figure (41,800) is impressive(and, one suspects, somewhat exaggerated), but there are reasons tomistrust any such calculation of numbers of loculi as a basis for esti-mating the number of Romans buried in the catacombs during thethird century. Many loculi could, and some in fact did, house morethan a single burial. Not only were infants sometimes interred alongwith (one presumes) a parent or parents in a single niche, but someloculi, when found, contained two or even three adult skeletons,lying side by side next to each other on the tufa shelves. Some of thesedouble and triple burials were explicitly identified in accompanyingepitaphs, but others, apparently, were not, and since no systematic rec-ords of such multi-person loculi seem to have been kept, there is no tell-ing how common the practice was.119 Nor can we guess how often asingle loculus might have been cleaned out and reused for new burialsaltogether, as was certainly the case with the original burial sites ofsome 800 (?) corpses stacked in an old pozzolana quarry convertedinto an ossuary beneath “Area A” of the catacombs of Callistus.120

118 For figures, see Vincenzo Fiocchi Niccolai, “L’organizzazione dello spaziofunerario,” in Christiana Loca. lo spazio cristiano nella Roma del primo millen-nio (ed. Letizia Pani Ermini: Rome: Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali,2000), 45 and Fiocchi Niccolai, “Origin and Development,” 17–36, esp. 30.

119 For double burials indicated in epitaphs by the word “bisomum”, cf., e.g., fromthe catacombs of Commodilla, ICUR 2.6030 (370 C.E.), 6110, 6128, 6183,8680; from the Callistus, ICUR 3.3235, 9076, 9143, 9876, 10146; from theDomitilla, ICUR 3.7354b, 7574, 7709, etc. For triple burials (“trisomum”), cf.,e.g., from the Commodilla, ICUR 2.6310; from the Callistus, ICUR 3.9029,9152; from the Domitilla, ICUR 3.8485, etc. All these examples belong to thefourth and fifth centuries, when the practice flourished, but the lack of explicitepigraphic testimony for double and triple burials during the third century can-not be taken as proof that the practice did not occur.

120 Josef Wilpert, La cripta dei papi e la capella di Santa Cecilia nel cimitero di Callisto(Rome: Desclée & C. Editori Pontefici, 1910), 75–80. The bodies, which had evi-dently been removed from loculi and cubicula near the so-called “Crypt of thePopes,” were laid out in rows and stacks, four meters high, with a thin layer of dirtbetween each layer. After consulting a local physician, Wilpert reported that the


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Medieval itineraries report similar discoveries of ossuaries in the cata-combs “filled with martyrs,” but provide little useful informationabout numbers or precise locations.121

Mass graves: Equally problematic is the recognition that the openspaces of certain catacombs were used for mass burials in ways thatdefy precise calculation of the numbers of bodies buried there. In thecatacombs of S. Thecla beside the Via Ostiense, for example, some ofthe large rooms (“cameroni”) opening off the galleries, each of whichprovided some 70 to 100 burial spaces in narrow loculi lining the wallsfrom floor to ceiling and in formae sunk into the floors, were filled tocapacity with layers of corpses stacked one on top of another, eachlayer separated by roof tiles or large bricks covering a corpse below.122

Similarly, in “Regio A” of the Catacombs of Commodilla, near themartyr’s tomb, some 45 funerary wells, 1 by 1.7–1.9 meters in area and6–7 meters deep, were sunk into the floor, each of which accommo-dated 10–15 loculi cut in two facing columns into the walls; the centersof the wells were filled with a cappuccina tombs laid one on top of an-

bodies had been deposited as skeletons, but a recent reconsideration of the evi-dence (reported by Rafaella Giuliani in an oral communication: see below, n. 125)suggests that the corpses were arranged in stacks before decomposing. Intactskeletons are seldom moved without becoming disarticulated. The number 800seems to be derived from an itinerary compiled from a report by William ofMalmesbury (twelfth century) (Notitia portarum viarum eclesiarum circa urbemRomam e Willelmo Malmesburgensi): DCCC martyres ibidem requiescunt. Fourhundred years earlier the Itinerarium Salisburgense recorded that “eighty martyrsrest there down below (sc. the tomb of S. Cecilia)” (LXXX martyres ibi requiescuntdeorsum). One suspects that perhaps a sribal error or lapsus memoriae accountsfor the expansion tenfold of the number of skeletons reported. The Epitome libriDe locis sanctorum marturum e codicibus Salisburgeni puro, Wirgeburgensi puro, etSalisburgeni interpolato speaks vaguely of “a countless number” (innumerabilismultitudo martyrum): for all these texts, see De Rossi, Roma Sotterranea, 1:180.

121 At the catacombs of Pontianus (fourth–fifteenth century) beside the Via Por-tuense ad ursum pilleatum, for example, according to the Epitome libri De locissanctorum marturum e codicibus Salisburgensi puro, Wirgeburgensi puro, et Salis-burgensi interpolato, “you will find the church of S. Candida, a virgin and martyr,whose body rests there. You descend into a cavern and you will find there a count-less number of martyrs … and that whole cavern is filled with the bones of mar-tyrs” (invenies ecclesiam s. Candidae virginis et martyris, cuius corpus ibi quiescit.Descendis in antrum et invenies ibi innumerabiliem multitudinem martyrum … etomnis illa spelunca impleta est ossibus martyrum): De Rossi, Roma Sotterranea,1.182 no. II.

122 Umberto M. Fasola, “La basilica sotterranea di S. Tecla e le regioni cimiterialivicine,” RACrist 46 (1970): 238–52.

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other, as in the catacombs of S. Thecla; collectively they housed morethan 1,700 inhumations.123 At the so-called Coemeterium Maius on theVia Nomentana nearly a hundred corpses of adults and children werefound in 1956 laid in two layers in the bare soil.124 These mass burialsbelong to the fourth century after Constantine, but in 2003 a series ofrooms and galleries in a network of subterranean burial chambers atthe catacombs of Marcellinus and Peter were found to be filled withsome 1,200 corpses, said to be well dressed and dating (on the basis ofcoins, jewelry, and fabric found with the remains) to between 150 and250 C.E.125 How many similar such finds may yet be made, or wereonce made but not reported, or were reported only vaguely (as in themedieval itineraries) is difficult to say, but there is little reason to thinkthat these discoveries are unique. There is therefore no point in pre-tending that we can estimate with any confidence the numbers of Ro-mans buried in the catacombs before the time of Constantine, but if wetake our generous calculation of the total number of loculi (41,800),guess that no more than half of them could have been used for doubleburials (+ 20,900) and allow for perhaps as many as 15,000–20,000burials in mass graves and loculi used for more than two adults, we maynot seem to underestimate the total.

If we think that we may have a rough idea of how some 150,000 Ro-mans were buried during the three and a half centuries between25 B.C.E. and 325 C.E., we can only guess by what means and wherethe other 98.5 percent of the presumed numbers who died during thatperiod were buried, but it is unlikely that wholly different and unrec-ognized means of disposal could account for any significant number ofthem. Of the methods surveyed above, simple surface burials (whetherof cremations or inhumations) are perhaps the most likely to have left

123 Nuzzo, Tipologia sepolcrale, 25–26.124 Umberto M. Fasola, “Le recenti scoperte agiografiche nel Coemeterium

Majus,” Rend. Pont. Acc. 28 (1955–56): 85–86 (Fig. 7).125 This spectacular find, not yet published in a scientific journal but widely reported

in the popular press (first by J. Thavis, Catholic News Service, 2 May 2006;http://www.catholicnews.com/data/; cf. also the Italian newspapers La Repub-blica, for 22 and 23 May 2006, and Il Giornale for 26 June 2006.), was presentedin preliminary fashion before the Istituto Pontificia di Archeologia Cristiana inRome on 22 June 2006 by Rafaella Giuliani and Dominque Castex, who willpublish the site. Initial excavations focused on a series of rooms in regio X of thecomplex, of which numbers 16, 78, and 80 were reportedly filled with stacks ofbodies up to twelve layers high.


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no trace in the archaeological record, but we must admit that ourignorance is profound and that our best calculations barely scratch thesurface of a significant problem for any study of mortuary practicesdruing the early Empire. The question remains: where were the bodiesburied?126

126 According to one recent estimate, some 30,000 tombs are known from a com-parable period of early Chinese history, during the Qin (221–206 B.C.E.) andHan (206 B.C.E.–220 C.E.) dynasties (Michael Loewe, in lecture, Brown Uni-versity, October 2005).

From Columbaria to Catacombs: Communities of the Dead in Pagan and Christian Rome - 2008

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