POLYANDRION. - From the Greek πολύς = much and ἀνὴρ = man, it is a term used by Fr. G. Marchi to indicate a tomb containing several human bodies (Monumenti delle arti cristiane primitive, Rome 1844, p. 118).
Prudentius relates that he saw in the Christian cemeteries of Rome tombs closed by marbles on which no names were inscribed, but only a number, and that he learned that in one place beneath the same stone were buried the relics of sixty martyrs, whose names only Christ knows (Peristephanon, XI, 9-16). Perhaps this is the tomb of the sixty-two martyrs laid to rest on the Via Salaria, to whom Damasus dedicated a poem (A. Ferrua, Epigrammata Damasiana, Vatican City 1942, pp. 184-86). The itineraries of seventh-century pilgrims mention tombs of 30, 40, 80, 260, 365 and 800 martyrs, whose numbers may have been exaggerated by the mansionarii or by the guides who accompanied visitors to the sanctuaries. In the underground cemeteries there are found tombs for several persons, which were sometimes used as true ossuaries, as occurs, for example, in the cemeteries inter duas lauros, of Ponziano and of Pretestato, and above all in the great ossuary beneath the crypt of the Popes and the chapel of St. Cecilia in Callistus; there, in order to reuse the loculi in the vicinity of those two sanctuaries, the skeletons taken from the original tombs were arranged in several layers, separated from one another by earth, until reaching a height of about 4 meters. G. Marangoni attests that he saw in one cemetery several bodies within individual tombs (Acta s. Victorini, Rome 1740, p. 114). The shaft tombs in Commodilla may also be considered true polyandrums.
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Enrico Josi