The Earthy Scent Of The Catacomb Will Cling To The Reader's Clothes, And
He Will Have Two Minds About Keeping
For a souvenir the taper which he
carried, and which the guide wraps in a bit of newspaper for him;
He may
prefer the flower which he is allowed to gather from the tiny garden at
the entrance to the catacombs. Yet these Catacombs of Domatilla are
among the cheer-fulest of all the catacombs, and a sense of something
sweet and appealing invests them from the memory of the gentle lady
whose piety consecrated them as the last home of the refugees and
martyrs. They are of the more recent Roman excavations, but I do not
know whether later or earlier than those which have revealed the house
of the two Christian gentlemen, John and Paul, of unknown surname, where
they suffered death for their faith, under the Passionist church named
for them. Twenty-four rooms on the two stories have been opened, and
there are others yet to be opened; when all are laid bare they will
perfectly show what a Roman city dwelling of the better sort was like in
the mid-imperial time. The plan differs from that of the average
Pompeian house as much as the plan of a cross-town New York dwelling
would differ from that of the average Newport cottage. The rooms are
incomparably smaller than those of the mediaeval palaces of the Roman
nobles, and the decoration is sometimes crudely mixed of pagan and
Christian themes and motives; the artists, like the painters of the
Domatilla catacombs, were probably lingering in the old Greek tradition.
The young Passionist father who showed us through the church and the
house under it made us wait half an hour while he finished his lunch,
but he was worth waiting for. He was a charming enthusiast for both,
radiantly yet reverently exulting in their respective treasures, and
justly but not haughtily proud of the newly introduced electricity which
lighted the darkness of the underground rooms and corridors. He told us
he had been twenty years a missionary in Rumania, where he had possibly
acquired the delightful English he spoke. When he would have us follow
him he said, "All persons come this way," and he politely spoke of the
wicked emperor whose bust was somehow there as Mr. Commodus. With all
his gentleness, however, that good father had a certain smiling severity
before which the spirit bowed. He had made us wait half an hour before
he came to let us into the church, and during the hour we were with him
there he kept the door locked against an unlucky lady who arrived just
too late to enter with us. Not only this, but he utterly refused to go
back with her singly and show her the things we had seen. Perhaps it
would not have been decorous; they do not let ladies, either singly or
plurally, into the garden of the convent, which is memorable among many
other facts as being the retreat of Mr. Commodus when he suffered from
sleeplessness, and where he once carelessly left his list of victims
lying about, so that his friend Marcia found it and, reading her name in
it, joined with other friends in his assassination.
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