POLIANDRO. – From the Greek πολύς = many and ἀνὴρ = man, this is a term employed by Fr. G. Marchi to designate 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 sealed with marble slabs on which no names were engraved, but only a number, and that he learned that in one place beneath the same stone the relics of sixty martyrs were buried, whose names Christ alone knew (Peristephanon, XI, 9–16). Perhaps this was the tomb of the sixty-two martyrs deposited 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; these figures may have been exaggerated by the mansionarii or guides who accompanied visitors to the shrines. In the underground cemeteries there are tombs for several persons, which were sometimes used as genuine ossuaries, as is found, for example, in the cemeteries inter duas lauros, of Pontianus and of Praetextatus, and especially in the large ossuary beneath the crypt of the Popes and the chapel of S. Cecilia in Callistus; there, in order to reuse the loculi near the two aforesaid shrines, the skeletons removed from the original tombs were arranged in several layers, separated from one another by earth, until they reached a height of approximately 4 metres. G. Marangoni attests that he saw several bodies inside individual tombs (Acta s. Victorini, Rome 1740, p. 114). The shaft tombs in Commodilla, too, may be regarded as genuine p.