Esquiline Cemetery
The Esquiline and Caelian hills, the biggest of Rome's seven original hills, also happen to be home to some of the city's greatest chaos. In ancient times, Nero built his decadent Domus Aurea between these hills. In the wake of its destruction, many of Rome's early Christian churches were constructed here. More beautiful than bone-chilling, Campo Verano, Rome's largest public cemetery, features a maze of underground tombs lined with fresh-cut flowers, statuary, and a fetishistic number of photographs of the dead incorporated into tombstones. On November 1 and 2, All Saints' and All Souls' Days, Romans make pilgrimages to the tombs of their relatives, placing chrysanthemums on the stones.
In the days of the Roman Empire the Esquiline cemetery had two divisions, one for the artisans who could afford burial apart in Columbaria, containing cinerary urns; one for slaves, beggars, prisoners, and others, who were thrown in revolting confusion into common pits or fosses. This latter section covered an area 1000 feet long and 300 deep and contained many hundred puticuli or vaults, 12 feet square, thirty deep. In many cases, each vault contained a uniform mass of black, viscid, pestilent matter; in a few cases, the bones separated. Men, beasts, bodies and carcasses and any kind of unmentionable refuse filled the vaults. Fancy what must have been the condition of this hellish district in times of pestilence, when the mouths of the crypts stayed open the whole day.
Even worse, Livy described a stupendous mortality from a time under Republican rule when corpses, as if carrion, filled to the level of the embankment, 100 feet wide and thirty high, the portion of a moat or ditch that skirted the cemetery of the Esquiline and was in front of a lofty battlemented wall of a huge fortification, the Agger or embankment of Servius Tullius, from a king who raised it. The battlement were over a mile long, which protected the city on the east side, which the moat supported and strengthened on the outside.
Seven centuries A.U. C., they tried to stop the practice by regulation: a line of stone cippi, inscribed with sanitary rules appeared around the edge of the pestiferous ground: "C. Sentius, son of Caius, Praeter, by order of the Senate has set up this line of terminal stones to mark the extent of ground which must remain absolutely free of dirt, carcasses and corpses. Here also the burning of corpses is forbidden." Another hand, probably of one who lived within reach of the effluvia of the place, had written in huge red letters at the foot of the official decree: "Do carry the dirt a little farther; otherwise you will be fined." That line of stones, beyond which the authorities permitted refuse to putrefy under the burning sun, lay only 400 feet from the Agger of Servius Tullius.
On the day of discovery of that stone, 25 June 1884, from time to time, Lanciani, the archeologist, had to relieve his gang of excavators, hardened to every kind of hardship, because they couldn't bear the smell from that polluted ground turned up after a putrefaction of twenty centuries. It is impossible to conceive an idea of the horrors of a common carnarium or fossa in the first centuries of Rome. The one described occupied a large district on the Esquiline, between the present-day railway terminus and the Lateran Church. The reform in public hygiene, the suppression of the popular cemetery on the Esquiline, occurred under Augustus at the suggestion of his enlightened prime minister, C. Cilnius Maecenas, who obtained from his sovereign and friend the concession of the whole district, buried it under an embankment of pure earth, 25 feet high and a third of a square mile in area, and laid down his gardens, Horti Maecatiani.
