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291 DEATH AND BURIAL IN SIXTH-CENTURY ROME As every classical historian is aware, Roman law prohibited the burial of the dead within the confines of the city. This principle was established at least as early as the fifth century B. C., in the Law of the Twelve Tables which maintained hominem mortuum in urbe ne sepelito neve urito, 1 and its prescripts were still enforced in the late years of the empire, when they are restated in the Theodosian Code. 2 However, anyone who visits Rome's medieval churches and sees the large number of funerary monuments which they contain, set into the floor and the walls, quickly realizes that the same is not true of the Middle Ages. At some point in the city's history the classical prohibition of burial within the urban perimeter was either forgotten or ignored, and the moment at which this shift in Roman burial practice took place has been fixed with some precision by archaeology. Through most of the period of the late empire, the major cemeteries lay outside the city flanking the principal roads. Due to the constraints of space, many of the cemeteries were extended beneath the ground in the third and fourth centuries, creating the vast networks of subterranean passages which today we call catacombs. 3 The most common form of catacomb burial was in a loculus, shelf carved in the tufa wall and sealed by a plaque of stone or 1. . and B~:~:r~~ ~w~~7~·(L;:~O~~s~9;;),M48.C,Toynbee, Death 2The Theodosian Code, tr. Clyde Pharr (Princeton, 1952), 9.17.6. 3The generic term comes from a particular site, the coemeterium ad catacumbas (now known as the cemetery of St. Sebastian) on the \7Icl""Appla Antica. 292 J. OSBORNE terracotta. These plaaues also served the same purpose as modern tombstones, frequently containing the name of the deceClsed, the day and month of their death, their age, and prayers for their salvation accompanied by rei igious symbols. In some instances the precise year is specified by the inclusion of the names of the two consuls. Thus, while not all catacomb burials are datable, there are enough dated funerary inscriptions to permit some conclusions regarding the chronology of these sites. This evidence suggests that extra-mural burial ceased altogether by the middle of the sixth century. 4 The same conclusion may be obtained by considering the archaeological evidence from within the city, which confirms that burial inside the walls began at approximately this same time. Although the number of early burials discovered thus far is small, at least four sites have been identified as having been put to use for this purpose. The largest of these covered that part of the Esquil ine hill which lies between the Baths of Diocletian and the church of S. Eusebio, where in 1691 a gravestone was discovered from the year 567. This part of the Esquiline was covered with gardens, easily adapted to a new function in a less settled age, and in the nineteenth century Giovanni De Rossi, the pioneer of Christian archaeology, reports that work in the region resulted in the discovery of a number of similar tombstones. 5 The presence of a large cemetery near S. Eusebio may account for the choice of this otherwise obscure church as the station for the Friday after the fourth Sunday in Lent, when the gospel reading is the story of the Raising of Lazarus. 6 Not far 4The last securely-dated burial to have been discovered in the catacombs is one of the year 535 from the cemetery of St. Sebastian, first published by M. Colagrossi, Nuovo Bullettino di Archeologia Cristiana 15 (1909) 58. 5G. B. De Rossi, La Roma Sotterranea Cristiana III (Rome, 1877), 557. 6See H. Grisar, Roma alia fine del mondo antico secondo Ie fonti scritte ed i monumenti I (Rome, 1908L676. DEATH AND BURIAL IN SIXTH-CENTURY ROME 293 away. the abandoned camp of the Praetorian Guard aprears to have been used for a similar purpose i'lt this time. 7 Excavations undertaken in Rome in the late years of the nineteenth century chanced upon a number of other early medieval cemeteries . In 1889 Giuseppe...

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