512 PHILOSOPHICAL TRANSACTIONS. [aNNO 1700, 



into it ; thus most of them are shut, no more being left open than what is 

 necessary to keep up the trade of showing them to strangers. To this opinion 

 it may be justly excepted, that allowing the catacombs to be proper for the end 

 for which they are presumed to be made, and that ihe Christians of that age 

 were in a capacity of making that conveniency for themselves to live and 

 assemble in below ground, at a time when it was so very unsafe to appear above 

 it ; yet to suppose that a work of that vastness and importance could be carried 

 on without the knowledge of the government, is to suppose the government 

 asleep, and that thiit was actually done under its nose, which must necessarily 

 have alarmed it, had it been attempted even on the frontiers of the empire. 



The other sort of authors represent them as a work so immense, that the 

 Christians in the persecuting times had not numbers enough to carry it on ; 

 but they most unadvisedly confound them with the puticuli in Festus Pom- 

 peius ; where, at the same time that the ancient Romans used to burn the 

 bodies of their dead, the custom was, to avoid expence, to throw those of the 

 slaves to rot. The Roman Christians, say they, observing at length the great 

 veneration that certain places gained by the presence of relicks, resolved to pro- 

 vide a stock for themselves ; entering therefore the catacombs, they made in 

 some of them what cyphers, what inscriptions, what painting they thought fit, 

 and then shut them up; intending to open them again upon a dream or some 

 other important incident. The few that were in the secret of this artifice either 

 dying, or as the monks, who were the only men that seem to have had heads 

 adapted to a thought of this quality, were subject to so many removes, being 

 transported to other places, the contrivance became forgot, and those galleries 

 continued shut, till chance opened them at last. Thus tliey conclude, that the 

 remains of the vilest part of mankind are trumped up in the church for the 

 bodies of the most eminent confessors and martyrs. 



But surely either the catacombs are not that great work they are represented 

 to be, nor to be found every where about the city, or it was very improper in 

 Festus Pompeiusto call them by the little name of puticuli, and so confine them 

 to one place only, that I mean unknown now without the Esquiline gate. Indeed 

 the characters of the places are so very unlike, that one would wonder how a 

 common burying place, where bodies were thrown together to rot, came to be 

 confounded with repositories cut in the face of a long gallery, one over another, 

 sometimes to the number of seven, in which bodies were singly laid, and hand- 

 somely closed up again, so that nothing could oft'end the view of those that 

 went in, especially with the little rooms of the fashion of chapels, that have 

 all the appearances of being the sepulchres of people of distinction. Whereas, 

 when the persecutors spilt the blood of so many martyrs, they used to dig holes 



