The better-appointed columbaria even had adjacent kitchens. Many columbarium clubs, in fact, were organized like civil governments in addition to decuriones, they elected 'ministers' in charge of specific tasks, such as arranging and paying for the decoration and maintenance of the mosaic floors, wall frescos, staircases, gardens, arbors, sundials, and wells. The burnt remnants of couch and pyre, however, would be placed in a special terracotta jar and buried under the pavement of the columbarium (The Capitoline Museum possesses such a jar which contained the charred fragments of ivory cupids from a funeral couch).Īs funerary institutions, columbaria demonstrate a marked social equality in that their members-mostly of servile origin-elected officers (called decuriones), who presided over the association's meetings. After the ashes had cooled, the incinerated bones would be carefully collected and placed in a cinerary urn, which would then be set in its designated niche. If the deceased had enough money, his body would be wrapped in an asbestos shroud so that the cremated bones would not become mixed with the burnt wood from the funeral pyre (The Vatican possesses an example of such a shroud.). The cremation itself took place at a nearby ustrina, or funeral pyre (A gigantic ustrina, the size of a football pitch, was located at the 5th milestone of the Via Appia.). Such groups, which met on a regular basis, acted both as social clubs and as commemorative associations, which ensured that a member who died would receive a proper cremation and disposition of ashes in a designated space. Many, however, were sponsored by independent groups of slaves, former slaves, members of the urban cohorts, and persons who had no apparent connection to each other, who nevertheless pooled their resources to form a funerary association: an example of the last is the no-longer-extant columbarium of the Thirty-Six Associates on the Via Latina. Columbaria represent an acceptable economic means of serving the needs of an ever-growing population of slaves and freed slaves.Ĭolumbaria had various sponsors, such as the emperor, members of the imperial family, or senatorial families. The closing down of the Esquiline cemetery with its foetid puticuli, or body dumps (and the subsequent reclamation of that land for public gardens), called for a new method of disposal of the dead. Their mass construction seems associated with Augustus' reforms of Rome's archaic burial laws. The widespread use of columbaria is a phenomenon of the city of Rome, although small columbaria may also be found in Etruria and Campania. Since a columbarium represents a self-contained environment, it is ideal for evaluating the funerary rites and commemorative customs of ancient Romans who banded together for a common purpose: the eventual cremation, preservation, and memorialisation of their earthly remains. Carefully organised, with neatly stuccoed ceilings, frescoed walls, and mosaic floors, columbaria are not to be confused with catacombs-long rambling underground galleries with crude recesses, which have been gouged out of the living tufa rock and used for inhumation. During the 1st and 2nd centuries CE, hundreds of columbaria lined the consular highways leading out of Rome, although now only some two dozen are extant.

A columbarium is an underground chamber, which the Romans used for preserving the ashes of the dead.

Death tomb kingdom of the dead