erred in it, just as in the chantry-chapels
connected with medieval churches. In them was celebrated the
funeral-feast on the day of burial and on its anniversary, as well as
the eucharist, which was the invariable accompaniment of funerals in the
primitive church (Bingham, _Orig. Eccl._ bk. xxiii. c. iii. 12). The
funeral-banquet descended to the Christian church from pagan times, and
was too often profaned by heathen licence. St Augustine, in several
passages, inveighs against those who thus by "gluttony and insobriety
buried themselves over the buried," and "made themselves drunk in the
chapels of the martyrs, placing their excesses to the score of religious
reverence for the dead." (August., _De Mor. Eccl. Cathol._, c. 34,
_Contr. Faust_, lib. xx. c. 21, _Confess._, lib vi. c. 2) Some curious
frescoes representing these funeral-feasts, found in the _cubicula_
which were the scene of them, are reproduced by Bosio (pp. 355, 391)
and others. A romantic air has been thrown over these burial chapels by
the notion that they were the places of worship used by the Christians
in times of persecution. This to a certain extent is doubtless true, as
in the case of the chapel of Santa Priscilla, where the altar or stone
coffin of a martyr remains, with a small platform behind it for the
priest or bishop to stand upon. But that they can have been so used to
any large extent is rendered impossible by their limited dimensions, as
none of them could hold more than fifty or sixty persons. In some of the
catacombs, however, there are larger halls and connected suites of
chapels which may possibly have been constructed for the purpose of
congregational worship during the dark periods when the public exercise
of the Christian religion was made penal. The most remarkable of these
is in the cemetery of Sant' Agnese (see plan, fig. 13). It consists of
five rectangular compartments, three on one side of the corridor and two
on the other, connected by a passage intersecting the gallery at right
angles. Two of the five compartments are supposed to have been assigned
to male, and two to female worshippers, the fifth, at the extremity of
the whole, being reserved for the altar and its ministers. In the centre
of the end-wall stands a stone chair (fig. 14), considered to have been
the episcopal cathedra, with a bench for the clergy on each side. There
is no trace of an altar, which may, Marchi thinks, have been portable.
The walls of the compartme