A Voice from the Catacombs

The pagans of Rome often remarked on the strange living hope which transformed the lives of those from among their number who became converts to Christianity. Nowhere is this contrast between the living faith that is Christianity, and the dark despair that characterised paganism, more marked than in the epitaphs set up by pagan and Christian over their dead.

The Christian sentiments, of which many examples are found in the Catacombs at Rome, breath a spirit of calm and even joyous confidence for the future. The pagan epitaphs reveal utter hopelessness and resentment against a fate which offered them no recompense for the trials and vicissitudes of life. Here are a few examples, from times between the year A.D. 74 and the seventh century.

Petronia, a Deacon's Wife.
The Type of Modesty.
In this place I lay my bones.
Spare your tears, dear Husband and Daughters,
and Believe that it is forbidden To Weep
for One Who Lives in God.
Buried in Peace on the Third Before the Nones of October
in the Consulate of Festus.

Another one, much more brief, but how eloquent—

Victorina,
In Peace,
and in Christ.

Against this, read a pagan epitaph, brief in its tragedy of a pagan father who has lost a well-beloved daughter, without hope of reunion:

I, Procope, Lift Up My Hands
Against God, Who Snatched Me Away Innocent.
She Lived Twenty Years. Proclus Set Up This.

Not so the Christians who set this brief word on the stone of a pilgrim who had reached the end of the way,

The Dormitory of Elpis.

To us a dormitory is a sleeping-place. To the early Christians the grave was but a dormitory. Our own word "cemetery" is the Greek "koimeterion", meaning the same as "dormitory", a place of sleep. Elpis is the Greek for 'hope'. So two loving Christian parents, many centuries ago, laid their child to rest in a grave far below the streets of Rome and inscribed upon her stone—

Here Sleeps Porcella in Peace,
She Lived
3 Years 10 Months 13 Days.

That peace was denied the sorrowing mother who knew nothing but the hopeless creed of paganism, and poured out her heart's anguish in these bitter words—

Caius Julius Maximus
Aged 11 Years 5 Months
O Relentless Fortune
Who Delightest in Cruel Death.
Why is Maximus So Suddenly Snatched From Me?
He Who Used to Lie Joyfully On My Bosom.
This Stone Now Marks His Tomb.
Behold His Mother.

How different is the affectionate remembrance and calm submission of these parents, believers in Christ, who inscribed—

Navarina.
In Peace.
A Sweet Soul,
Who Lived 16 Years and 5 Months.
A Soul As Sweet As Honey.
This Epitaph Was Made by Her Parents.

Peace, peace : that is the constant refrain of these rejoicing believers as they laid their loved ones to rest. This last example is perhaps the record of a Christian matron, well spoken of for good works and labours of love in the service of the brethren.

Constantia,
Buried in Peace
On The Lord's Day The Sixth Before The Kalends of July
In The Fifth Consulate of Honorius Augustus
To The Well-Deserving,
In Peace.

How well these brethren of ours must have learned the truth contained in Paul's triumphant words: "So then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written "O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?" Truly, we who follow in their steps are surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses, men and women, who, in their lives and deaths, manifested the reality of that faith which was in them.