FOSSORS. - This is the name, used even by the pagans, for the workers employed in digging burial pits. Hippolytus recalls why the fossor is paid the wage and the price of the bricks (Apostolica tradita, 34). The fossores liked to have themselves represented in the cubicula of the underground cemeteries. Six are represented in Callixtus.
The cemetery ad duas lauros has as many as eight cubicula, in each of which two fossores are represented, either at work, or with the sack and the lamp, or with the lamp and the pickaxe; plus two isolated fossores. In Domitilla the cubiculum of the fossor Diogenes is very well known, ruined by Boldetti (Wilpert, Pitture, pl. 180). In the cemetery of the Giordani the pickaxe of the fossor trofimus was copied, shown at work above ground (J. Wilpert, Die Katakombengemälde und ihre alten Kopien, Freiburg im Br. 1891, pl. 4, 2). There are also found depicted in other cemeteries. The oldest dated inscription that mentions a Christian fossor is the one in the cemetery known as that of Sts. Mark and Marcellinus; it concerns a tomb purchased by a fossor Alexander sub Iulio Alutisite, that is, between 336 and 352. The cemetery of St. Lawrence on the Via Tiburtina (al Verano) is the one that has yielded about twenty inscriptions of fossors, followed by that of Commodilla (v.). In the cemetery known as that of Mark and Marcellinus, another inscription of a fossor is from the year 378, and in a third the fossor is scratched in with a lit lamp, a pickaxe and a sack.
In the second half of the 4th century the sale of tombs by fossors was frequent; they charged a high price, not without some abuse, for tombs near the venerated tombs of the martyrs. Not a few inscriptions are true titles of ownership, documented by the names of the fossors who sold the tomb and by the relevant price, sometimes in gold, that had been paid out. One inscription even records the presence of all the fossors (O. Marucchi, Monumenti del Museo Cristiano Pio Lateranense, Milan 1910, pl. 3, no. 26).