Page:The early Christians in Rome (1911).djvu/362

 God, through pain and agony passed to their rest in the Paradise of God.

Some of the ruined graves were once strikingly adorned; very many of them being made of costly marbles and beautifully decorated, while around these sepulchral memorials of the great and wealthy are found numberless graves roughly though lovingly fashioned.

Of the epitaphs and inscriptions carved and painted on these graves, some are exquisitely worked, evidently by professional artists. Many more, however, were rudely and hurriedly painted or scratched on the plaster or stone tablet which closed in the shelf in the wall in which the dead was laid.

The inscriptions are for the most part in Latin, but in the first and in much of the second century the words are often in Greek. In some instances the two languages are curiously mingled, the epitaph beginning in one tongue and ending in another: occasionally the Latin words are written in Greek characters.

Various corrupt ways of spelling are not unusual, the ordinary rules of grammar are not unfrequently broken. Indeed, as is observable in some of the Latin poetry of the early Christian centuries where the rules of classical prosody are ignored, so here in the prose used by the children of the people a similar disregard of language and spelling is observable. It was the beginning of the popular patois which eventually crystallized into modern Italian.

There is a curious and interesting difference between the epitaphs of the catacombs written when Christianity was a proscribed religion, when those who embraced it were liable to more or less bitter persecution, and the epitaphs of the latter years of the fourth as of the following centuries. Men wrote in those first three Christian centuries in the dark and lonely corridors and chambers where their loved dead were laid, not for any human eye to read, save their own when they visited that sacred God's Acre,—just a name—or an emblem of their dearest hopes, a little picture of the Good Shepherd and His sheep, a word or two of sure hope and joyous confidence in the eternal future—and nothing more.