Description of the Roman Catacombs cannot be more appropriately introduced than by St Jerome’s account of his visits to them in his youth,
which after the lapse of above fifteen centuries presents a most accurate picture of these wonderful subterranean labyrinths.
“When I was a boy,” he writes, “receiving my education in Rome, I and my schoolfellows used, on Sundays, to make the circuit of the
sepulchers of the apostles and martyrs. Many a time did we go down into the catacombs. These are
excavated deep in the earth, and contain, on either hand as you enter, the bodies of the dead buried in the wall. It is all so dark there that the language of the prophet
seems to be fulfilled, ‘Let them go down quick into hell.’ Only occasionally is light let in to mitigate the horror of the gloom, and then not so much through a window as through a hole. You take each
step with caution, as, surrounded by deep night, you recall the words of Virgil:
“Horror ubique
animos, simul ipsa silentia terrent”
In complete agreement with Jerome’s vivid picture the visitor to the Roman Catacombs finds himself in a vast labyrinth of narrow galleries, usually from 3 to 4 ft. in width, interspersed with small chambers, all excavated at successive levels, in the
strata of volcanic rock subjacent to the city and its environs, and constructed originally for the interment of the Christian dead. The galleries are not the way of access to the cemeteries, but are themselves the cemeteries, the dead being buried in long low horizontal recesses, excavated in the vertical walls of the passages, rising tier above tier like the berths in a ship, from a few inches above the floor to the springing of the arched ceiling, to the number of five, six or even sometimes twelve ranges.
These galleries are not arranged on any definite
plan but they intersect one another at different angles, producing an intricate network which it is almost impossible to reduce to any system. They generally run in straight lines, and as a rule preserve the same level. The different
stories of galleries lie one below the other to the number of four or five (in one part of the cemetery of St.
Calixtus they reach seven stories)
and communicate with one another by stairs cut out of the living rock. Light and air are introduced by means of vertical shafts (luminaria) running up to the outer air, and often serving for several
stories.
This drawing gives a very correct idea of these galleries, with the tiers of graves pierced in the walls. The doorways which are seen interrupting the lines of graves are those of the family sepulchral chambers, or
cubicula.