From Columbarium to Catacomb: Communities of the Dead in Pagan and Christian Rome
By John Bodel
Commemorating the Dead: Texts and Artifacts in Contexts, Studies of Jewish, Roman and Christian Burials (Walter de Gruyter, 2008)
Introduction: Students of classical Roman institutions and scholars of early Christianity have not always seen eye to eye, nor do historians and archaeologists invariably agree. More than a century and a half ago, two of the greatest, Theodor Mommsen and Giovanni Battisa De Rossi, found mutual inspiration and took equal pleasure in debating the role of Roman associations in burial at Rome during the first three centuries of the common era; together they set a high standard for productive and amicable disagreement on a subject central to our concerns.
This chapter (to compare small things to great), the product of an equally amicable and stimulating collaboration and debate, hopes to cultivate the more useful elements of that example without wreaking unnecessary havoc in the vineyard.
Burial space in ancient Rome was always limited and frequently contested. This was true from the beginning of the Iron Age in Italy, around 900 B.C.E., when the few cremation graves in what later became the Roman Forum began to be intermingled with inhumation burials of the sort found among the indigenous peoples of the Apennine hills, to the fourth century C.E., when Constantine destroyed an early imperial necropolis along the Via Triumphalis in order to build an imposing funerary basilica above the spot on the Vatican hill believed to mark the tomb of St. Peter.
From Columbarium to Catacomb: Communities of the Dead in Pagan and Christian Rome
By John Bodel
Commemorating the Dead: Texts and Artifacts in Contexts, Studies of Jewish, Roman and Christian Burials (Walter de Gruyter, 2008)
Introduction: Students of classical Roman institutions and scholars of early Christianity have not always seen eye to eye, nor do historians and archaeologists invariably agree. More than a century and a half ago, two of the greatest, Theodor Mommsen and Giovanni Battisa De Rossi, found mutual inspiration and took equal pleasure in debating the role of Roman associations in burial at Rome during the first three centuries of the common era; together they set a high standard for productive and amicable disagreement on a subject central to our concerns.
This chapter (to compare small things to great), the product of an equally amicable and stimulating collaboration and debate, hopes to cultivate the more useful elements of that example without wreaking unnecessary havoc in the vineyard.
Burial space in ancient Rome was always limited and frequently contested. This was true from the beginning of the Iron Age in Italy, around 900 B.C.E., when the few cremation graves in what later became the Roman Forum began to be intermingled with inhumation burials of the sort found among the indigenous peoples of the Apennine hills, to the fourth century C.E., when Constantine destroyed an early imperial necropolis along the Via Triumphalis in order to build an imposing funerary basilica above the spot on the Vatican hill believed to mark the tomb of St. Peter.
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