E-text prepared by Anne Soulard, Cornell University, Joshua Hutchinson,
and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team
THE CATACOMBS OF ROME.
[Concluded.]
—fessoque SacrandumSupponato capiti lapidem, Curistoque quiescam.PAULINUS OF NOLL
Et factus est in pace locus ejus et halitatio in Sion.
Ps. LXXV. 2
Rome is preëminently the city of monuments and inscriptions, and thelapidary style is the one most familiar to her. The Republic, the Empire,the Papacy, the Heathens, and the Christians have written their recordupon marble. But gravestones are proverbially dull reading, andinscriptions are often as cold as the stone upon which they are engraved.
The long gallery of the Vatican, through which one passes to enter thefamous library, and which leads to the collection of statues, is lined onone side with heathen inscriptions, of miscellaneous character, on theother with Christian inscriptions, derived chiefly from the catacombs, butarranged with little order. The comparison thus exhibited to the eye is animpressive one. The contrast of one class with the other is visible evenin external characteristics. The old Roman lines are cut with precisionand evenness; the letters are well formed, the words are rightly spelt,the construction of the sentences is grammatical. But the Christianinscriptions bear for the most part the marks of ignorance, poverty, andwant of skill. Their lines are uneven, the letters of various sizes, thewords ill-spelt, the syntax often incorrect. Not seldom a mixture of Greekand Latin in the same sentence betrays the corrupt speech of the lowerclasses, and the Latin itself is that of the common people. But defects ofstyle and faults of engraving are insufficient to hide the feeling thatunderlies them.
Besides this great collection of the Vatican, there is another collectionnow being formed in the loggia of the Lateran Palace, in immediateconnection with the Christian Museum. Arranged as the inscriptions willhere be in historic sequence and with careful classification, it will bechiefly to this collection that the student of Christian antiquity willhereafter resort. It in in the charge of the Cavaliere de Rossi, who isengaged in editing the Christian inscriptions of the first six centuries,and whose extraordinary learning and marvellous sagacity in decipheringand determining the slightest remains of ancient stone-cutting give himunexampled fitness for the work. Of these inscriptions, about eleventhousand are now known, and of late some forty or fifty have been addedeach year to the number previously recorded. But a very small proportionof the eleven thousand remain in situ in the catacombs, and besides thegreat collections of the Vatican and the Lateran, there are many smallerones in Rome and in other Italian cities, and many inscriptions originallyfound in the subterranean cemeteries are now scattered in the porticos oron the pavements of churches in Rome, Ravenna, Milan, and elsewhere. Fromthe first period of the desecration of the catacombs, the engraved tabletsthat had closed the graves were almost as much an object of the greed ofpious or superstitious marauders as the more immediate relics of thesaints. Hence came their dispersion through Italy, and hence, too, it hashappened that many very important and interesting inscriptions belongingto Rome are now found scattered through the Continent.
It has been, inde