In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Marble Faun, a novel about young artists struggling to learn their craft in 19th century Rome, a group of painters visits the catacomb of Callistus on the old Appian Way. As they wander through the tunnels, their way lit by flickering candles, one of the young women becomes separated from the rest. She was lured away by the Ghost of the Catacombs! The Ghost of the Catacombs, Hawthorne explains, is a “man-demon” who originally “was a [Roman] spy during the persecutions of the early Christians under the Emperor Diocletian” (293–305 A.D.). This man-demon, Memmius, as he […]
