Chapter Eighteen
The Necropolis Uncovered
Margherita Guarducci focused her greatest efforts from 1952 forward on locating Peter and decoding the inscriptions. However, she likewise expended great energy in preserving, studying, and understanding the underground Necropolis. The area was in substantial disrepair when she arrived, and it was part of Guarducci’s genius to recognize the treasures the Necropolis held for archeologists. It contained the ashes, bones, and memorials of more than one thousand Romans from the height of Roman power, dating mostly from A.D. 160 to 250. It was in effect a village of more than twenty-two major family tombs built along a road more than one hundred feet long on the side of Vatican Hill. Before they were covered by the original basilica, the tombs had overlooked a large highway leading into Rome.
Such tombs had been constructed for two principal reasons: to display the importance of the involved family to the world and to provide a meeting place for the family itself to hold parties and remember the dead. On the Feast of Parentalia (similar to the Mexican Day of the Dead) and at other times, families would gather to feast in the tombs, often dining on flat sarcophagus lids set up as dining room tables “to pass the evening with pleasant talk.”196 The excavation team had identified the tombs by letters — “A” built first and then succeeding letters. Most held single families, but some were more like early condominiums, used and owned by several families.
When she was placed in charge of the excavation, Guarducci invited some of the greatest experts of the age to explore and detail the tombs, including Jocelyn Toynbee and a bevy of famous British and German archeologists. The earlier secrecy disappeared, and a large international effort to study the tombs ensued.
A certain haunting tragedy filled the site. Once magnificent structures high on a hill overlooking Eternal Rome in its greatest age now lay long abandoned, fifteen to sixty feet underground. The Roman Empire itself was long gone, but the art and sculpture within the tombs was breathtaking. The famous tomb of the chariot features a magnificent mosaic floor depicting a long-ago rider and chariot. The tomb of the Julii was almost schizophrenic, combining pagan and Christian murals, mixing Jonah and the Good Shepherd with Christ depicted as the pagan god Helios. So-called Tomb “F,” built for freed slaves, was an extraordinary kaleidoscope of bright and vivid murals, ranging from swans swimming forever in an idyllic landscape to flowered candelabras with blue blooms, to a unique early trompe l’oeil mask appearing to hang from a wall. In another mural, Venus reclines on a mussel shell carried by Tritons, anticipating Titian’s Venus of Urbino in Florence, while nearby huntsmen forever pursue lions. Indeed, many of the tomb paintings foreshadow the themes of the Renaissance, and their children may be found in museums from the Louvre to the Uffizi. Two tombs in particular tell stories — one happy and one sad.
This was the massive tomb of a rich and apparently jolly ex-slave named Quintus Marcius Hermes. The Marcii prospered in Rome despite their lowly beginnings. Their impressive tomb is the third largest in the Necropolis and faces south, where it once overlooked the road before its burial beneath Constantine’s basilica. Its reddish brown brick exteriors once proudly proclaimed the wealth of the Marcii, but it is the interior that truly reveals their story.197
In addition to grand scenes of blue skies and rivers with ducks, red fish, and white flamingos, and the sea with dolphins, mythical sea horses, and seals, the tomb contains a set of scenes resembling movie posters in a modern theater.198
To adorn their final resting place, the Marcii picked two extraordinary scenes from Euripides. Euripides could be called the Steven Spielberg of ancient Greece. He authored approximately ninety-two plays, of which perhaps eighteen survive. He was most famous as the first playwright to humanize his characters so that even today an audience can identify with them as people. In the tomb, one scene, from The Bacchae, depicts a king named Pentheus being stabbed and killed by his own mother, driven mad by the gods. The second, from Alcestis, portrays the hero Hercules rescuing the Princess Alcestis from the depths of Hades itself, restoring her to her husband and life. It is obviously a hopeful scene for a tomb, although there is no record that the Marcii were so fortunate. In addition to the Euripides scenes, the Marcii included paintings of the mother of Rome’s founders and a mural of Leda and the Swan.
The tomb is surprisingly cheerful, and the centerpiece is the Sarcophagus of Quintus himself and his wife Marcia — their portraits joined by an inscription proclaiming their eternal love for one another.
The Tomb of the Valerii
There is no sadder place in the Necropolis than the tomb of the Valerii. It is the largest of all the tombs, built around A.D. 160 at the height of the Pax Romana and Roman power.199 It is massively and ornately decorated with images of gods (like Oceanus and Pan) and philosophers. The tomb is commanded by a striking bust of an intensely proud, bearded family founder, Gaius Valerius Hermes. Nearby is the bust of his wife, Flavia, chin in hand, pensively staring into eternity. Likewise, there is a portrait of his daughter and a cheerful-looking bust of his four-year-old grandson, Gaius, contemplating with hope a future that would never come.
Inscriptions within this sad place make clear that Gaius’s daughter, grandson, and wife all died before him, leaving him stripped of his family. Finally, the tomb contained two death masks, each made at the time of death. The first is of young Gaius, no longer the plump, bubbling child of the bust, but instead with a face tortured by illness and eyes forever closed. The second is the death mask of Gaius himself, thin, sad, beaten, wrinkled, and battered by the world.200
These tombs, masterpieces of art and sculpture, stand in dramatic contrast with the very simple and humble graves of early Christians generally encountered closer to Peter’s grave. The contrast may reflect the difference between the early Christian view of a grave as simply a way station, and the view of the Romans, who believed they would live only in the memory of the living and wished an appropriate final stop. It is certain that all of them, Christians and pagans alike, would be quite surprised to find their final resting places, once on a hill overlooking Eternal Rome, now buried fifteen to sixty feet underground, beneath a massive Christian basilica.
Part of Guarducci’s genius was recognizing, preserving, detailing, and opening to experts like Toynbee the Necropolis tombs, so full of history, as well as long-ago hopes and dreams. Yet none of this would save her following Paul VI’s death.