Some
accounts make these the prisons of the wild beasts destined for the
amphitheatre; some the prisons of the condemned gladiators; some,
both. But the legend most appalling to the fancy is, that in the
upper range (for there are two stories of these caves) the Early
Christians destined to be eaten at the Coliseum Shows, heard the
wild beasts, hungry for them, roaring down below; until, upon the
night and solitude of their captivity, there burst the sudden noon
and life of the vast theatre crowded to the parapet, and of these,
their dreaded neighbours, bounding in!
Below the church of San Sebastiano, two miles beyond the gate of
San Sebastiano, on the Appian Way, is the entrance to the catacombs
of Rome--quarries in the old time, but afterwards the hiding-places
of the Christians. These ghastly passages have been explored for
twenty miles; and form a chain of labyrinths, sixty miles in
circumference.
A gaunt Franciscan friar, with a wild bright eye, was our only
guide, down into this profound and dreadful place. The narrow ways
and openings hither and thither, coupled with the dead and heavy
air, soon blotted out, in all of us, any recollection of the track
by which we had come: and I could not help thinking 'Good Heaven,
if, in a sudden fit of madness, he should dash the torches out, or
if he should be seized with a fit, what would become of us!' On we
wandered, among martyrs' graves: passing great subterranean
vaulted roads, diverging in all directions, and choked up with
heaps of stones, that thieves and murderers may not take refuge
there, and form a population under Rome, even worse than that which
lives between it and the sun.
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