The Care of the Dead in Late Antiquity

Éric Rebillard, Elizabeth Trapnell Rawlings, Jeanine Routier-Pucci, Elizabeth Trapnell Rawlings, Jeanine Routier-Pucci

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780801446771
• eBook ISBN: 9780801457920
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Roman Ancient History
• Index: History

In this provocative book Éric Rebillard challenges many long-held assumptions about early Christian burial customs. For decades scholars of early Christianity have argued that the Church owned and operated burial grounds for Christians as early as the third century. Through a careful reading of primary sources including legal codes, theological works, epigraphical inscriptions, and sermons, Rebillard shows that there is little evidence to suggest that Christians occupied exclusive or isolated burial grounds in this early period.

In fact, as late as the fourth and fifth centuries the Church did not impose on the faithful specific rituals for laying the dead to rest. In the preparation of Christians for burial, it was usually next of kin and not representatives of the Church who were responsible for what form of rite would be celebrated, and evidence from inscriptions and tombstones shows that for the most part Christians didn't separate themselves from non-Christians when burying their dead. According to Rebillard it would not be until the early Middle Ages that the Church gained control over burial practices and that "Christian cemeteries" became common.

In this translation of Religion et Sépulture: L'église, les vivants et les morts dans l'Antiquité tardive, Rebillard fundamentally changes our understanding of early Christianity. The Care of the Dead in Late Antiquity will force scholars of the period to rethink their assumptions about early Christians as separate from their pagan contemporaries in daily life and ritual practice.

CHAPTER 1

The Problem of the Origins

Christian Burial in Rome and Carthage

Textbooks on church history or Christian archaeology all contain accounts of the organization of cemeteries by the first Christian communities at Rome and Carthage at the end of the second century. As I have stated in the introduction, the question is actually far from being as simple as one might think from reading the textbooks. In this brief chapter I wish to point out that the question of the origins is now facing an impasse, and thus pave the way for an approach that will take a radically different point of view. The basic account for the organization of the Catacombs of Rome was developed by Giovanni Battista De Rossi (1822–94) and has changed very little since; the case of the areae of Carthage has been recently revisited, but also without any significant change. As we shall see, these two aspects of the “dossier of the origins” together present an excellent example of the “philologico-combinatory method” criticized by Arsenio Frugoni in the following terms: “as though dealing with perfect pieces in a mosaic, statements—that is, attested facts—have been connected with utmost confidence to Providence, always so well-disposed to the endeavors of historians.”1 The issue for us is not to reconstruct the biography of a heretic but to examine the organization governing a set of monuments.

Was the Catacomb of Callixtus the First Cemetery of the Roman Church?

De Rossi’s report on the organization of cemeteries of the Roman Church before Constantine is a consummate example of the art of establishing connections. Indeed, De Rossi strove to make the data he drew from texts fit the archaeological monuments. The central piece of his reconstruction was a recently discovered text that he describes as “a revelation on the Roman Church”: the Refutation of All Heresies.2 Attributed to Origen in manuscripts, this pamphlet was actually written by a Roman cleric who refused to recognize the election of Callixtus in 217. It has been identified as a work of Hippolytus.3 While writing the first volume of La Roma sotterranea cristiana, which describes the catacomb of Callixtus, De Rossi gives a thorough archeological commentary on book 9 of the Refutation that contains biographical information on Callixtus.4 In it Hippolytus writes—notably—that Callixtus was called back from exile by Zephyrinus in 199 and appointed eis to koimeterion (Refutatio n 9.12). De Rossi identifies Callixtus’s function as that of an archdeacon whose main responsibility would have been the administration of a cemetery. And that cemetery could only be the one still bearing his name today: the famous catacomb of Callixtus on the Appian Way. De Rossi actually claims that Hippolytus’s statement must be understood by antonomasia, whether referring to the only cemetery administered by the Roman Church at that time or the first one. He favors the second hypothesis by connecting it with the legislation of the Severii dealing with the collegia. The laws deal with different measures liberalizing the creation of funerary or religious associations for the tenuiores.5 These legal texts are connected in turn with a passage in which Tertullian defends Christians accused of forming illegal associations.6 From this comes the hypothesis that Christians legally organized their communities in the empire on the basis of laws on associations, and De Rossi concludes by presenting Callixtus as the head of a legally registered funerary collegium entitled to possess, corporately, a cemetery.

It was, therefore, at the end of the second century that the Roman Church established its first communal cemetery, at the very time when Tertullian, in describing pagans attacking them, would indirectly attest to the existence of such cemeteries in Carthage.7 De Rossi then sketched the development of the institution up to the Peace of Constantine on the basis of two documents. The first is the entry dedicated to Fabian (bishop of Rome from 236 to 250) in the sixth-century Liber Pontificalis. It mentions that the ecclesiastical regions were assigned to deacons and that works were done in the cymeteria without any explicit connection between the two statements (Liber Pontificalis 21.2–3). However, this was all De Rossi needed to find support for his earlier hypothesis: Callixtus was clearly an archdeacon, since, when the number of cemeteries had increased, their administration had become the responsibility of deacons. The entry on Fabian also allowed De Rossi to outline an early system of distribution of cemeteries according to ecclesiastical regions. The second document is a decree of the emperor Gallienus in which he ends, in 260, the persecution begun by Valerian in 257, and allows various bishops to “recover the places containing the so-called cemeteries.”8 The effect of Gallienus’s edict is then confirmed by the passage in the Liber Pontificalis (26.2) concerning Dionysius (bishop of Rome from 259 to 268), who is credited with a system of distributing the cemeteries according to the different parishes.

One might add here and there one or two supplemental pieces to the skillful puzzle put together by De Rossi, but this is the basic material: from the birth of the first cemetery of the Christian community in Rome to the creation of parish cemeteries once the church actually possessed an administration.

The thread that runs through all the elements so skillfully combined by De Rossi is the word cemetery in its Greek or Latin form; hence, this is where we ought to begin.9 The word cemetery comes to us from the Greek through the Latin form coemeterium and numerous variants. The Greek verb from which the noun is derived means “to lie down,” “to sleep,” and the noun itself, from its earliest appearances in the fourth century BCE up to the Rules of Byzantine monasteries, where it designates the monastery dormitory,10 means a place to sleep.

The earliest uses of the word in a funerary context date from the end of the second century of the common era, when Christians appropriated the word with a specific meaning, a usage easily justified by the scriptural imagery of the sleep of death as sleep preceding resurrection.11 In Greek, the first Christian testimony goes back to the mention in the Refutation cited above, but the oldest literary example extant happens to be a Latin one, a text by Tertullian, from the end of the second century. This relates the miracle of a previously buried corpse that made space, in coemeterio, for a second body (On the Soul 5.17). The meaning of the word leaves no room for doubt: coemeterium is used to designate a tomb, and not a common burial ground. The same is true in several early Greek cases: in another text of Hippolytus, the Commentary on Daniel, where among the victims of disasters that will accompany the coming of the Antichrist are mentioned the saints whose koimeteria will be destroyed and the remains removed from the ground and spread on the plain; in a homily of Origen (185–254), in which are described the faithful who will accompany the martyrs to their koimeteria; and in the edict of Gallienus (260), which mentions the restitution of all the places where the so-called koimeteria are located.12 In Greek, moreover, the meaning of tomb or grave is widespread in the epigraphy of many different regions.13

The traditional hypothesis about the evolution of the meaning from an individual tomb into a place of communal burial has been quite rightly dismissed by Antonio Ferrua, who prefers to consider regional variations and therefore the coexistence of the two meanings.14 However, all the texts in which he thinks that koimeterion was used in the sense of a communal burial site are closely related to the specific context of the cult of martyrs. And indeed, with respect to the martyr cult, the word has had a more specific usage designating not so much a place of communal burial as the martyrs’ tombs, and also the place where they were located.

In Latin, coemeterium has thus been used to refer to the churches located in the Roman suburbium. They were erected in honor of the martyrs and might have held burials. In the sixth century, the Liber Pontificalis very clearly attests to this usage in the entry on Julius I (bishop of Rome from 7 to 52) that calls cymeteria buildings designated as basilicae in its source, the Liberian Catalog, compiled under Liberius (bishop of Rome from 52 to 66).15 This usage extends beyond Rome, and a medieval glossary retains as equivalent caementaria and ecclesia.16 The shift in meaning is easy to understand: the church was built to be a tomb, on the one hand a cenotaph for the honored martyr and on the other a place erected to shelter the tombs of a few notables. Coemeteria seems also to have been used in Rome to designate the tituli, those churches that were part of a virtual missionary network around the city and whose titular priests, according to the Liber Pontificalis (32.2), were charged with the care of the martyrs’ tombs, among other responsibilities.17

Corresponding to this well-known, specialized use of the Latin word in relation to martyrs, there is a similar use of the Greek word that has not been studied.18 Because it involves the earliest texts, it merits particular attention. Indeed, the word koimeterion is so often used in connection with martyrium as to amount at times to a hendiadys. One example of this is found in the collection of canons assembled at the end of the fourth century and called the Council of Laodicea, which retained one rule stating that Catholics are forbidden from going into “koimeteria or the so-called martyria of heretics, to pray or to celebrate holy services.”19 This text suggests that the word koimeterion, when it designates the tomb of a martyr, also designates—by extension—the place of the cult linked to the tomb, and may thus be an equivalent of martyrium. This is how, in my view, we should interpret the edict issued by the Emperor Valerian against the Christians in 257: “It is always forbidden for you, or others, to meet in or enter into places known as koimeteria.”20 These had to be the tombs of “the very special dead,” where we know that Christian communities gathered on the anniversary of their death.21 We find the same usage in the edict of Gallienus mentioned above, and in that of Maximinus Daia, who in 311 sought to harass the Christians by forbidding “assemblies in koimeteria.”22 There is never any question in these texts of forbidding burial; the interdiction only referred to the cult gatherings around the tombs of the martyrs. The word koimeterion, in both the singular and plural, does not designate a place of communal burial but a martyr’s tomb, or a group of them and, by extension, the place of the cult that developed around them.

While serving as a priest in Antioch (86–98), John Chrysostom devoted the introduction of a Good Friday sermon to explaining why the place where the church of Antioch celebrates the crucifixion is called the koimeterion:

Why do we gather in this martyrium and not in another? Indeed, by the grace of God, our city is surrounded on all sides by a shield of saintly relics. So why do our Fathers desire us to assemble here, and not in another martyrium? Because it is here t...

Table of contents

• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1. The Problem of the Origins
• 2. Burial and Religious Identity
• 3. Voluntary Associations and Collective Burial
• 4. Violation of Tombs and Impiety
• 5. Christian Piety and Burial Duty
• 6. Christian Funerals and Funerals of Christians
• 7. The Church, Christians, and the Dead
• Conclusion
• Primary Sources
• Secondary Sources