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1 Prologue 1. the Servian Wall Was Constructed During the Republic

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1 Prologue 1. the Servian Wall Was Constructed During the Republic Notes 1 Prologue 1. The Servian Wall was constructed during the Republic, mostly during the fourth century BCE. During the time the Callistus Catacomb and other Christian catacombs were in their busiest period of use, the late third century, the Servian Wall was replaced by the massive Aurelian Wall. At the Appian Way, the exit point a traveler to the Callistus Catacomb likely would have used, the two walls were built relatively close to one another; at most other points, the Aurelian Wall greatly expanded the area of the city enclosed by walls. The Porta San Sebastiano is the gate in the current Aurelian Wall that most closely approximates the gate in the Servian Wall that Callistus would have taken. Of the Aurelian Wall, and other great walls of the period, Peter Brown has writ- ten that “walls replaced theaters, baths, and temples as the public building works par excellence. Carefully designed and massively built, they radiated the message of a calculated intention to survive, and to survive with Roman grandeur, even in a world that was felt to be less secure than it had been two centuries earlier.” Peter Brown, Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350–550 AD (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), 11. 2. The catacombs arose and flourished at a time of great change in the funerary habits of Rome, and indeed of the Mediterranean gener- ally. For reasons still debated by scholars, the fashion was shifting from cremation, which had prevailed in the late Republic and early Empire, to inhumation, which came to prevail in the third, fourth, and fifth centuries. Whether the rise of Christianity was a cause of this shift is the subject of disagreement. For further discussion of the varieties of burial in Rome in the period, see chapter 4. For a fuller discussion of Christian funerary activity in Rome during the period of the catacombs, see chapter 7. 3. Estimates of the population of Imperial Rome vary widely, from a low end of about 200,000 to 400,000 to a high approaching 2 million. Here I follow the uneasy consensus view, which holds 126 NOTES a population of about1 million. Glenn R. Storey, “The Population of Ancient Rome,” Antiquity 71, no. 274 (1997). Jérôme Carcopino, Daily Life in Ancient Rome: The People and the City at the Height of the Empire (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2003), 10–21. The figure of 100 corpses per day is based on the work of Valerie Hope and Eireann Marshall, who presuppose popu- lations of 750,000 inhabitants and, from there, determine a daily death toll of 80. I have adjusted their numbers upward to account for my higher estimate of initial population. These figures likely do not account for much of the infant mortality in the city, which was significantly higher than in modern times. Valerie Hope notes that infant mortality was so high that funeral rites were rarely carried out for infants, and those who had not yet teethed were not even cre- mated. Valerie M. Hope and Eireann Marshall, Death and Disease in the Ancient City (London: Routledge, 2000), 128–31. Valerie M. Hope, Death in Ancient Rome: A Sourcebook (London and New York: Routledge, 2007), 180. 4. Green describes the surface above the catacomb entrance. Bernard Green, Christianity in Ancient Rome: The First Three Centuries (London: T. & T. Clark, 2010), 183. 5. The development of all catacombs in Rome halted in the fifth century, when invasions forced a move to burials inside the city. Richard P. McBrien, “Catacombs,” in Encyclopedia of Catholicism, ed. John B. Shopp (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1995), 235. 6. For a discussion of the possibility of the site as the family burial site of the Pomponians, see Graydon Snyder. Snyder points to a passage from Hippolytus which describes the act of Zephyrinus, bishop of Rome from 200 to 217, assigning responsibility for the care of the catacomb to Callistus, then a deacon and later himself a bishop of Rome. This creates a terminus ad quem for the develop- ment of the catacomb as a Christian space in the first two decades of the third century, and it likely had been begun sometime in the last two decades of the second century. Snyder makes much of this moment of Zephyrinus’ appointment of Callistus, noting that (1) by this time Christianity must have been widely known enough and accepted enough that the church owning property would have been unremarkable, and (2) that this event roughly coincides with “the appearance of a distinguishable Christian culture.” Peter Lampe disagrees with Snyder’s assessment of the ability of the church to own property at this point, instead imagining that the land above the catacomb must have remained the property of an individual, who allowed Christians to dig beneath. Whose property the land was is not a concern of mine; for the purposes of this project, what is important is that the church had control over the site and that it is clearly and indisputably Christian. I share Snyder’s conclusion, and that of others, that the earliest identifiable cultural markers of NOTES 127 Christianity (summarized by Snyder as “symbols and language”) emerged sometime around the year 180 and included an already- stable repertoire of symbols and central narratives. I also share the general bias of Snyder’s book, which is that the period between the emergence of this culture in 180 and the rise of Constantine in the early fourth century is the most interesting for Christian mate- rial culture. Graydon Snyder, Ante Pacem: Archaeological Evidence of Church Life before Constantine, 2nd ed. (Macon, GA: Mercer, 2003), 159. Peter Lampe, From Paul to Valentinus: Christians at Rome in the First Two Centuries, trans. Michael Steinhauser (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2003), 25–28. It is worth noting that Snyder and Lampe represent a different lineage of scholarship than that of Daniel Boyarin, who nevertheless reaches broadly similar conclusions about the timing of the emergence of distinctively Christian culture. Daniel Boyarin, Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity, Divinations: Reading Late Ancient Religion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2004). 7. The Callistus Catacomb was the first burial site to be overseen directly by the church. Other early sites, such as the Priscilla Catacomb and the San Sebastiano Catacomb, were privately administered, either by families or associations. Vincenzo Fiocchi Nicolai, Fabrizio Bisconti, and Danilo Mazzoleni, The Christian Catacombs of Rome: History, Decoration, Inscriptions (Regensburg: Schnell & Steiner, 2002), 13–24. This ecclesiastical patronage has several ramifica- tions. The first is that the Callistus Catacomb was in some ways egalitarian; while there are many richly decorated cubicula and sar- cophagi, suggesting burials of wealthier individuals, there are also numerous loculi—the kinds of poor graves that the masses might afford. Perhaps it was the catacomb’s status as belonging to the church that caused it to accept all comers, or at least to be somewhat more accepting to the graves of paupers than other spaces were. For a recent revisionist take on the administration (or lack thereof) of catacombs by the ecclesiastical structure and bishops, see the work of Éric Rebillard. Rebillard questions the former scholarly consen- sus that the church was intimately involved in administering cem- eteries, seeing that work rather as falling to families. His work has prompted a reexamination among scholars of the catacombs. Éric Rebillard, The Care of the Dead in Late Antiquity, trans. Elizabeth Trapnell Rawlings and Jeanine Routier-Pucci (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009). Nevertheless, I hold that the Callistus Catacomb must have had some early ecclesiastical control, given the edict of Zephyrinus (if Hippolytus is to be trusted as a source). Ann Marie Yasin, while finding Rebillard “convincing,” also maintains that “the evidence nevertheless does suggest that separate areas were designated by contemporaries as Christian, distinct from burial zones used by others, and in this sense ‘communal.’ ” Ann Marie 128 NOTES Yasin, Saints and Church Spaces in the Late Antique Mediterranean: Architecture, Cult, and Community, Greek Culture in the Roman World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 59. 8. There is no evidence for dedicated church buildings before the Dura Europos site, the destruction of which dates to 256. In Rome, there is no evidence for dedicated church buildings prior to the time of Constantine. Christian groups, which appear not to have pos- sessed church buildings in the period before Constantine, likely met in the residences of members. The long-dominant model of house churches has begun to give way to a model of insula churches, informed by the work of Peter Lampe, who through various means has demonstrated the unlikelihood of widespread Christian owner- ship of houses in Rome. More likely was the use of spaces in tene- ment houses, by far the dominant form of housing in Rome in the period. This model meant that Christian meetings were subject to more public scrutiny and attention than has been supposed, with neighbors being able to overhear easily the proceedings of any gath- ering. It also meant that there were almost no opportunities for the emergence of a Christian visual culture, since the meeting spaces were residential spaces that were converted as they were needed, and then converted back again. It was only with the establishment of the catacombs in the late second century that a distinctive Christian symbol set emerged. Lampe, From Paul to Valentinus, 366–69. Ramsay MacMullen argues that even following the ambitious building projects of Constantine in the fourth century, “official” and dedicated communal space was still not nearly sufficient for housing all Christians for worship.
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