been ascertained. A third Jewish burying-ground was near the ancient Christian catacombs.
47 Mart. i.41; xii. 57.
48. Described by Bosio, but since unknown. Comp. Friedländer, u. s. vol. iii. pp. 510, 511.
49. Sat. iii.13; vi. 542.
But indeed, the Jewish residents in Rome must have spread over every quarter of the city - even
the best - to judge by the location of their Synagogues. From inscriptions, we have been made
acquainted not only with the existence, but with the names, of not fewer than seven of these
Synagogues. Three of them respectively bear the names of Augustus, Agrippa, and Volumnius,
either as their patrons, or because the worshippers were chiefly their attendants and clients;
while two of them derived their names from the Campus Martius, and the quarter Subura in
which they stood.50 The `Synagoge Elaias' may have been so called from bearing on its front
the device of an olive-tree, a favourite, and in Rome specially significant, emblem of Israel,
whose fruit, crushed beneath heavy weight, would yield the precious oil by which the Divine light
would shed its brightness through the night of heathendom.51 Of course, there must have been
other Synagogues besides those whose names have been discovered.
50. Comp. Friedländer, u. s. vol. iii. p.510.
51. Midr. R. on Ex. 36.
One other mode of tracking the footsteps of Israel's wanderings seems strangely significant. It is
by tracing their records among the dead, reading them on broken tombstones, and in ruined
monuments. They are rude, and the inscriptions - most of them in bad Greek, or still worse
Latin, none in Hebrew - are like the stammering of strangers. Yet what a contrast between the
simple faith and earnest hope which they express, and the grim proclamation of utter disbelief in
any future to the soul, not unmixed with language of coarsest materialism, on the graves of so
many of the polished Romans ! Truly the pen of God in history has, as so often, ratified the
sentence which a nation had pronounced upon itself. That civilisation was doomed which could
inscribe over its dead such words as: `To eternal sleep;' `To perpetual rest;' or more coarsely
express it thus, `I was not, and I became; I was, and am no more. Thus much is true; who says
other, lies; for I shall not be,' adding, as it were by way of moral, `And thou who livest, drink,
play, come.' Not so did God teach His people; and, as we pick our way among these broken
stones, we can understand how a religion, which proclaimed a hope so different, must have
spoken to the hearts of many even at Rome, and much more, how that blessed assurance of life
and immortality, which Christianity afterwards brought, could win its thousands, though it were
at the cost of poverty, shame, torture, and the arena.
Wandering from graveyard to graveyard, and deciphering the records of the dead, we can
almost read the history of Israel in the days of the Cæsars, or when Paul the prisoner set foot on
the soil of Italy. When St. Paul, on the journey of the `Castor and Pollux,' touched at Syracuse,
he would, during his stay of three days, find himself in the midst of a Jewish community, as we
learn from an inscription. When he disembarked at Puteoli, he was in the oldest Jewish