Beyond the church of Sts. Nereus and Achilles, on the opposite side,
where the ground rises thirty or forty feet above the level of the
road, there is a rude inscription above the door of a vineyard,
intimating that the Tomb of the Scipios is here. This is by far the
most interesting of all the monuments on the Appian Way. It was the
mausoleum of a long line of the most illustrious names in Roman
history--patriots and heroes, whose virtues and honours were
hereditary. Originally the sepulchre stood above ground, and the
entrance to it was by a solid arch of peperino, facing a cross-road
leading from the Appian to the Latin Way; but the soil in the course
of ages accumulated over it, and buried it out of sight. It was
accidentally discovered in 1780, in consequence of a peasant digging
in the vineyard to make a cellar, and breaking through a part of the
vaulted roof of the tomb. Then was brought suddenly to light the
celebrated sarcophagus of plain peperino stone, which contained the
remains of the Roman consul, Lucius Scipio Barbatus, after having been
undisturbed for nearly twenty-two centuries. Several other sarcophagi
belonging to members of the family were found at the same time, along
with two busts, one of which is supposed to be that of the poet
Ennius, the friend and companion of Scipio Africanus, whose last
request on his deathbed was that he might be buried by his side. Pliny
remarks that the Scipios had the singular custom of burying instead of
burning their dead; and this is confirmed by the discovery of these
sarcophagi. I found the mausoleum to consist of a series of chambers
and approaches to them, excavated in the solid tufa rock, not unlike
the labyrinthine recesses of the catacombs. The darkness was feebly
dispelled by the light of wax tapers carried by the guide and myself;
and the aspect of the narrow, low-browed passages and chambers was
gloomy in the extreme. Here and there were Latin inscriptions