Catacombs – General

The word “catacomb” began as a single place name. The Latin ad catacumbas, usually traced to Greek for “near the hollows,” described the depressions and quarries at one site on the Appian Way, where a cemetery lay beneath what is now the Basilica of San Sebastiano. Tradition held that it briefly sheltered the bodies of Saints Peter and Paul in the later third century; only by extension did the word come to cover all the subterranean burial grounds ringing Rome. Their galleries, cut deep into the volcanic rock, are honeycombed with tens of thousands of graves.

Underground burial was nothing new, since the Etruscans, Jews, and Romans had all practised it. But from the late second century AD Rome’s Christian and Jewish communities developed it on a far greater scale, each gathering a whole community in one necropolis, part of a broader move from cremation to inhumation across the empire. Roman law forbade burial within the pomerium, the sacred boundary that set Rome apart from the profane world beyond, so every cemetery lay outside the city along the consular roads. The deep networks were possible because of geology: the soft tuff of the Roman Campagna cut with hand tools yet held firm once hollowed out. Ordinary graves were loculi, plain shelves sealed with a slab or tile, while wealthier families paid for arched arcosolia or private chambers called cubicula.

The most extensive of these networks were the Christian ones, and their origin is unusually well documented. Around the year 200, Pope Zephyrinus placed the community cemetery on the Appian Way under the deacon Callixtus, a future pope, and there several third-century bishops of Rome were buried. The word they used for these places, coemeterium, Greek for “dormitory,” casting death as a temporary sleep before resurrection. By late antiquity around sixty such complexes ringed Rome. Despite a persistent belief, they were never secret hiding places for Christians fleeing persecution: they were known and legally held burial grounds, openly maintained, and in any case too dark and airless to shelter anyone for long.

The galleries also preserve the earliest surviving Christian art, modest work in the shared visual language of the Greco-Roman world. A youth carrying a sheep on his shoulders, a stock pagan image, was read as Christ the Good Shepherd; a fish, an anchor, or a dove carried coded meaning. Scenes from the Old and New Testaments — Jonah and the whale, the raising of Lazarus — were chosen as promises of deliverance, while carved cups and loaves recalled the refrigeria, the funeral meals for the dead.

The martyrs buried in the catacombs, many of them killed in the persecutions under Decius, Valerian, and Diocletian, made these cemeteries places of pilgrimage; the faithful scratched prayers into the plaster around the holiest graves. In the later fourth century Pope Damasus sought out these tombs and marked them with elegant carved verses. Once the relics were moved into churches above ground the catacombs fell into disuse, until quarrymen on the Via Salaria broke into one by accident in 1578, a find that eventually gave rise to the study of Christian archaeology.

FURTHER READING

1. Fiocchi Nicolai, Vincenzo, Fabrizio Bisconti, and Danilo Mazzoleni. “The Christian Catacombs of Rome: history, decoration, inscriptions.” (1999)
2. Borg, Barbara. Crisis and ambition: tombs and burial customs in third-century CE Rome. Oxford University Press, 2013.
3. Rebillard, Éric, et al. “Burial and Religious Identity: Religious Groups and Collective Burial.” The Care of the Dead in Late Antiquity, 1st ed., Cornell University Press, 2009, pp. 13–36. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7591/j.ctt7v8bm.6. Accessed 24 July 2026.
4. Brink, Laurie, and Deborah Green, eds. Commemorating the Dead: Texts and Artifacts in Context. Studies of Roman, Jewish and Christian Burials. Walter de Gruyter, 2008.
5. Yasin, Ann Marie. “Funerary Monuments and Collective Identity: From Roman Family to Christian Community.” The Art Bulletin, vol. 87, no. 3, 2005, pp. 433–57. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/25067190. Accessed 24 July 2026.