The Roman Empire gave permanent signs of religious tolerance in its five centuries of history. Not only did he allow the inhabitants of the conquered nations to practice their own cults, but he even adopted them in the capital. Some, like the Egyptian cult of Isis or the Persian cult of Mithras, found widespread acceptance among the citizens of Rome, who often conflated these importations with divinities from their own pantheon (after all, Roman religion was an important part, the assimilation of the Greek).
Despite this Roman permissiveness, the Empire periodically outlawed what it considered a fanciful offshoot of Judaism. This aversion for Christianity was influenced by a huge ignorance about its real beliefs and activities, but also powerful reasons of state.
The faithful to Jesus were harassed from the middle of the first century AD. C., when his religion broke publicly in Rome, until the beginning of the IV, date on which the Emperor Constantine authorized and favored Christianity until making it the de facto official. Throughout that long period, the characteristic setting of the early Church was the catacombs. But they were not his only space, nor did they fulfill functions that are still misinterpreted today.
The catacombs, contemporary with the persecutions of Christianity at the hands of the Empire, began to be excavated in Rome with a single practical objective. They were simple cemeteries. For this reason, and for nothing else, they were all built, each one of the 69 discovered to date, outside the city. The location was dictated by the burial habits of Roman civilization, not by the initial secrecy of Christianity. The dead, according to Latin laws, should be separated from the living.
Until the middle of the second century, the Church buried its dead in the same places where the pagan majority did. He used necropolises such as the one located on the Vatican hill or those found next to the consular roads, which were more numerous. This was the fate of, for example, the remains of the apostles Peter and Paul. Those of the first were transferred to the Roman cemetery where its basilica stands today. Those of the second, to an ancient necropolis located next to Via Ostiense. Some early Christians, few, were buried on land donated by individuals to their parish.
The classic catacombs were born from this type of assignment. For example, those of San Calixto or those of San Sebastián, excavated next to the Via Apia. It was not the Roman authorities, but the primitive Christians, who separated their graves from those other than their religion. The explanation lies in a combination of theological and pragmatic questions.
On the one hand, the pagans used to cremate the corpses, while the Christians, in keeping with the Jewish tradition, buried them. They intended to preserve the entire bodies for the resurrection (body and soul) after the Final Judgment, as had happened with that of Christ after the crucifixion. Burying the corpses was a sign of respect for the future reunion of spirit and matter.
On the other hand, the Christians formed a fraternity. They shared everything, from earthly goods and hardships to the longed-for prospect of Paradise in the afterlife. Hence, faced with the circumstance of death, they preferred to wait together for eternal life. They did not call the burial spaces necropolis (“city of the dead”), but used another Greek term: koimeterion (“bedroom”), origin of the word cemetery. The communal sense of original Christianity thus exceeded not only the distinctions of ethnicity, sex or wealth, but also the threshold between the living, passing through on earth, and the dead, asleep until their final awakening.
In practice, these precepts resulted in an unsustainable accumulation of corpses. In order to bury them with dignity, in groups and without having to exhaust the few plots available, the catacombs began to be excavated in the middle of the 2nd century. The subsoil of Rome, composed mainly of tuff, a porous, soft and light stone, was ideal for this. In addition, due to these same characteristics, it muffled the noise caused by the picks and shovels of the fossores, the workers specialized in opening the underground galleries.
At first they were short and shallow, but eventually they reached 12 levels of depth and about 600 kilometers in total. It was precisely the immense piles of tuff extracted from the surroundings of the Via Appia, in the places called ad catacombas (“from the cavities”), which gave their name to these tunnels.
All the dynasties of the High Empire undertook more or less aggressive campaigns against the Christians. In Julio-Claudia, Claudio persecuted them as a result of the disorders caused in the capital by the fights between the Orthodox Jews and those who followed the Apostles. Nero, to get rid of the unpopularity that gave him a huge fire in Rome.
In the first century, the Flavian dynasty had its greatest persecutor in Domitian. The motif he used would be used by several later Caesars: the Christian refusal to acknowledge Caesar’s divinity. Religion was a private matter in Rome, except when worshiping the emperor was refused, a dissent that threatened the civic cohesion of the state.
The Antonines, from Trajan to Marcus Aurelius, resorted to this pretext in the following century. They did not undertake mass executions, but ordered the use of force at the slightest hint of protest, with the consequent trail of victims. The Severos oscillated between benevolence and radical intolerance. In the third century, any hint of religious freedom vanished during the serious crisis that shook Rome due to, among other factors, the pressure of the barbarians.
With the exception of Philip the Arab, who may have been a secret Christian, the other Caesars of this last period, arising from the border legions, bathed the Church in blood. Maximino, Decio, Treboniano Gallo and Valeriano were the most violent.
With the old excuse of rebellion against the imperial cult and the new one of putting general instability back on track (it was convenient for them to create a patriotic cause with which to distract and motivate their subjects), these emperors devoted themselves to systematically eliminating the Christians. The hidden reasons were several: they saw them as factions (they advocated equality in a slave society); they used them as scapegoats in mediocre governments; their properties and resources were seized to feed the state coffers…
It was Diocletian, at the beginning of the fourth century, who ordered the last great persecution, one of the bloodiest. But it took place three years before he was succeeded by Constantine, the Caesar who, with the Edict of Milan and other decrees, legalized Christianity and imposed religious peace on the Roman world. Thus ended almost three hundred years of slaughter.
Christianity had come a painful way. Through an ignorance skilfully manipulated by official propaganda, the Roman people had long believed that the followers of Christ extolled the absence of paternity (the Virgin), celebrated banquets of anthropophagy (the Eucharist) or committed infanticide (the Son sacrificed by the Father). In the eyes of the Latins, all this provoked the wrath of the gods, so Christian deaths were just. The martyrs were mostly buried in the catacombs, which took on a second function: they became places of veneration.
Sanctuaries were built there where the dies natalis of the deceased was celebrated, the date of their death as a transition to eternal life, considered the authentic birth. When the situation of the Church normalized after Constantine, caravans of pilgrims from all corners of the Empire began to approach these relics from the Roman subsoil. Only the Lombard invasions of the 6th century, already in the Middle Ages, moderated the influx of visitors.
This use of the catacombs has helped to spread the idea that they served as a refuge in the years of imperial harassment. It was not so. Like all Latin cemeteries, they were untouchable spaces, inviolable by the civil authorities, although they, of course, knew their situation (it was impossible to hide them, with the amount of rubble extracted on the surface). But, in any case, few Christians would have dared to denigrate their own holy places by camping on them.
In addition, most of the rites in the primitive Church were performed in the so-called tituli, private houses that were the closest thing to a temple during the clandestinity, before the construction of the first basilicas. During the persecutions, the faithful only went down in groups to the catacombs to carry out burials, extraordinary ceremonies such as the dies natalis or, very rarely, to receive Communion when there was no way to do so outside.
The catacombs were not an exclusive manifestation of the early Church or the Roman suburbs. Various Mediterranean religions, including Greco-Latin paganism and Judaism, built their own. On the other hand, there were Christian catacombs in various parts of the Empire besides Rome. For example, in Naples and Syracuse (Italy), in Adrumeta (Tunisia) or in Alexandria (Egypt). In any case, those of Rome are the ones that best reflect the difficult initial years of Christianity against the Empire.
This text is part of an article published in number 462 of the Historia y Vida magazine. Do you have something to contribute? Write to us at redaccionhyv@historiayvida.com.
