CHAPTER VI

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PAGAN CEMETERIES.

Various modes of burial in Rome.--Inhumation and cremation.--Gradual predominance of the latter.--Columbaria.--Inscription describing the organization of one of these, on the Via Latina.--The extent of the pagan cemeteries outside of Rome, and the number of graves they contained.--Curiosities of the epitaphs.--The excavations in the garden of La Farnesina.--The Roman house discovered there.--The tomb of Sulpicius Platorinus.--Its interesting contents.--The "divine crows."--The cemetery in the Villa Pamfili.--Tombs on the Via Triumphalis.--That of Helius, the shoemaker.--The tombs of the Via Salaria.--That of the Licinii Calpurnii.--The unhappy history of this family.--The tomb of the precocious boy.--Improvvisatori of later times.--The tomb of Lucilia Polla and her brother.--Its history.--The Valle della Caffarella.--Its associations with Herodes Atticus.--His fortune and its origin.--His monuments to his wife.--The remarkable discovery of the corpse of a young woman, in 1485.--Various contemporary accounts of it.--Its ultimate fate.--Discovery of a similar nature in 1889.

Inhumation seems to have been more common than cremation in prehistoric Rome; hence, certain families, to give material evidence of their ancient lineage, would never submit to cremation. Such were the Cornelii Scipiones, whose sarcophagi were discovered during the last century in the Vigna Sassi. Sulla is the first Cornelius whose body was burned; but this he ordered done to avoid retaliation, that is to say, for fear of its being treated as he had treated the corpse of Marius. Both systems are mentioned in the law of the twelve tables: _hominem mortuum in urbe ne sepelito neve urito_, a statement which shows that each had an equal number of partisans, at the time of the promulgation of the law.

This theory is confirmed by discoveries in the prehistoric cemeteries of the Viminal and Esquiline hills, which contain coffins as well as cineraria, or ash-urns. The discoveries have been published only in a fragmentary way, so that we cannot yet follow their development stage by stage, and determine at what periods and within what limits the influence of more civilized neighbors was felt by the primitive dwellers upon the Seven Hills. One thing is certain; the race that first colonized the Campagna was buried in trunks of trees, hollowed inside and cut to measure, as is the custom among some Indian tribes of the present day. In March, 1889, the engineers who were attending to the drainage of the Lago di Castiglione--the ancient Regillus--discovered a trunk of _quercus robur_, sawn lengthways into two halves, with a human skeleton inside, and fragments of objects in amber and ivory lying by it. The coffin, roughly cut and shaped, was buried at a depth of fourteen feet, in a trench a trifle longer and larger than itself, and the space between the coffin and the sides of the trench was filled with archaic pottery, of the type found in our own Roman necropolis of the Via dello Statuto. There were also specimens of imported pottery, and a bronze cup. The tomb and its contents are now exhibited in the Villa di Papa Giulio, outside the Porta del Popolo.

When Rome was founded, this semi-barbaric fashion of burial was by no means forgotten or abandoned by its inhabitants. We have not yet discovered coffins actually dug out of a tree, but we have found rude imitations of them in clay. These belong to the interval of time between the foundation of the city and the fortifications of Servius Tullius, having been found at the considerable depth of forty-two feet below the embankment of the Servian wall, in the Vigna Spithoever. They are now exhibited in the Capitoline Museum (Palazzo dei Conservatori), together with the skeletons, pottery, and bronze _suppellex_ they contained.

Nearly every type of tomb known in Etruria, Magna Græcia, and the prehistoric Italic stations has a representative in the old cemeteries of the Viminal and the Esquiline. There are caves hewn out of the natural rock, with the entrance sealed by a block of the same material; in these are skeletons lying on the funeral beds on either side of the cave, or even on the floor between them, with the feet turned towards the door, and Italo-Greek pottery, together with objects in bronze, amber, and gold. There are also artificial caves, formed by horizontal courses of stones which project one beyond another, from both sides, till they meet at the top. Then there are bodies protected by a circle of uncut stones; others lying at the bottom of wells, and finally regular sarcophagi in the shape of square huts, and cineraria like those described on page 29 of my "Ancient Rome."

Comparing these data we reach the conclusion that inhumation was abandoned, with a few exceptions, towards the end of the fifth century of Rome, to be resumed only towards the middle of the second century after Christ, under the influence of Eastern doctrines and customs. For the student of Roman archæology these facts have not merely a speculative interest; a knowledge of them is necessary for the chronological classification of the material found in cemeteries and represented so abundantly in public and private collections.

The acceptance of cremation as a national, exclusive system brought as a consequence the institution of the _ustrina_, the sacred enclosures in which pyres were built to convert the corpses into ashes. Several specimens of _ustrina_ have been found near the city, and one of them is still to be seen in good preservation. It is built in the shape of a military camp, on the right of the Appian Way, five and a half miles from the gate. When Fabretti first saw it in 1699, it was intact, save a breach or gap on the north side. He describes it as a rectangle three hundred and forty feet long, and two hundred feet wide, enclosed by a wall thirteen feet high. Its masonry is irregular both in the shape and size of the blocks of stone, and may well be assigned to the fifth century of Rome, when the necessity for popular _ustrina_ was first felt. When Nibby and Gell visited the spot in 1822 they found that the noble owner of the farm had just destroyed the western side and a portion of the eastern, to build with their materials a _maceria_, or dry wall.

The _ustrina_ which were connected with the Mausoleum of Augustus and the ara of the Antonines have already been described in