Latin poem by Pope Damasus, originally inscribed in the baptistery at St Peter's, Rome, commemorating the assistance of *Peter (the Apostle, S00036) in the building's construction or renovation. Written in Rome, 366/384.
Evidence ID
E07149
Type of Evidence
Inscriptions - Formal inscriptions (stone, mosaic, etc.)
Literary - Poems
Major author/Major anonymous work
Damasan and pseudo-Damasan poems
Damasus, Epigrammata 4 (ICVR II, 4096)
Non haec humanis opibus, non arte magistra
[. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ]
sed prestante Petro cui tradita ianua caeli est,
antistes Christi conposuit Damasus.
una Petri sedes, unum verumq(ue) lavacrum; 5
vincula nulla tenent [quem liquor iste lavat].
6. [quem liquor iste lavat] de Rossi
'Not by human effort, not with artifice guiding
[line missing]
but with Peter as surety, to whom heaven’s door was entrusted,
Damasus, bishop of Christ, arranged these things.
There is one see of Peter, and one true baptism;
no chains hold [one whom this water washes].'
Text and translation: Trout 2015, 86, modified.
Cult PlacesPrayer/supplication/invocation
Protagonists in Cult and Narratives
Cult building - dependent (chapel, baptistery, etc.)
Non Liturgical ActivityPrayer/supplication/invocation
Construction of cult buildings
Protagonists in Cult and NarrativesEcclesiastics - Popes
Cult Related ObjectsInscription
Source
The poems of DamasusThe poetry of Damasus is the first substantial corpus of texts devoted specifically to the cult of saints. All but a handful of his surviving poems were written to be inscribed on stone and displayed at the tombs of the martyrs. The installation of these inscriptions formed part of a programme of monumentalisation of the sites of martyr cult, most of which originated as ordinary tombs in the cemeteries and catacombs around the city of Rome, and it was often accompanied by major remodelling and rebuilding of the tombs and their physical surroundings (see Trout 2015, 42-47). The poems were inscribed on marble plaques with distinctive lettering ('Philocalian script') by the calligrapher Furius Dionysius Filocalus (Trout 2015, 47-52). This characteristic script makes it possible to identify fragments of inscribed text as Damasan even when the surviving remains are too small and fragmentary for the content of the inscription to be reconstructed.
Damasus' poems are of great importance for the history of saints' cult at Rome because, aside from what their content tells us, they are securely datable to his papacy (366-384). If a martyr is the subject of a poem by Damasus, it means that their cult was established and formally recognised at Rome no later than the early 380s; the only comparable, but much briefer, material is that in the Chronography of 354 (E01052). By contrast, the surviving Roman saints' lives are of very uncertain date and in most cases much later than Damasus' poems (which they sometimes used as a source: Lapidge 2018, 637-8).
It is certain that most material in the Damasan corpus is by Damasus himself, either because the inscribed text (or fragments of it) survives, or because Damasus refers to himself in the poem (which he does frequently). In other cases his authorship has been assigned on stylistic grounds. Since Damasus' style is quite distinctive (see Trout 2015, 16-26), this can usually be done reasonably securely, but there are a few instances where there is disagreement among editors as to whether poems are genuinely by Damasus (including this poem; see also E01790; E07503)
Survival of the poems
Only two of Damasus' inscriptions on the martyrs have survived more or less intact, those to Eutychius (E07169) and Agnes (E07189); a few others exist in fragments substantial enough to piece together most or all of the text, including the inscription from the crypt of the popes in the catacomb of St Sebastian (E01866), and the poem to Felicissimus and Agapitus (E07170). But most of his poems either do not survive at all in their inscribed form, or do so only in small fragments of a few words or letters. Their survival is the result of their inclusion in syllogae – collections of inscriptions from the martyr shrines and churches of Rome, which were transcribed by pilgrims and then circulated in manuscript. The earliest syllogae seem to have been compiled in the 7th century, at the same time as the earliest pilgrim itineraries, and like the itineraries they were organised geographically, following the routes used by pilgrims around the city and its suburbs. Poems by Damasus therefore appear scattered through the collections according to their location.
No sylloge survives in its original form: those now extant were compiled from earlier manuscript collections (whose traces are sometimes evident in their structure). They were edited by de Rossi in vol. 2.1 of the first edition of ICUR (1888), which remains the only modern edition of the syllogae as such (as opposed to the individual poems they contain). For a descriptive account of the syllogae containing Damasus’ poems, see Trout 2015, 63-65; more briefly, Lapidge 2018, 638.
The most important syllogae for the transmission of Damasus' poems are as follows:
The Sylloge Laureshamensis. A manuscript produced at the monastery of Lorsch in the 9th/10th c., now in the Vatican Library (Vatican, Pal. Lat. 833; digitised: digi.vatlib.it/view/bav_pal_lat_833). De Rossi believed it was a compilation of four existing collections, which he denoted as follows: Laureshamensis I (de Rossi 1888, 144-153), dating from the 9th c. (ibid. 142); Laureshamensis II (de Rossi 1888, 126-130), from the 7th c. (ibid. 124); Laureshamensis III (de Rossi 1888, 161-173), a collection of inscriptions from northern Italy, dating from the late 8th c. (ibid. 160); and Laureshamensis IV (de Rossi 1888, 98-118), dating from the 7th c. (ibid. 97), and the one that contains most of the Damasan material
The Sylloge Centulensis (de Rossi 1888, 78-94). Produced in the monastery of St. Riquier in the 9th/10th century, held for most of its existence in Corbie, and now in the Russian National Library at St. Petersburg (Codex Petropolitanus F XIV 1).
The Sylloge Turonensis (de Rossi 1888, 62-71). Produced at Tours in the 7th century, but surviving only in two manuscripts from 11th/12th-century Austria (Klosterneuburg Stiftsbibliothek Cod. 723; Göttweig Stiftsbibliothek Cod. 64 (78), digitised: manuscripta.at/diglit/AT2000-64).
The Sylloge Virdunensis (de Rossi 1888, 134-141). Produced at Verdun in the 10th century (Bibliothèque de Verdun, ms. 45; digitised: www1.arkhenum.fr/bm_verdun_ms/_app/index.php?type_recherche=cote&choix_secondaire=Ms. 45).
The Sylloge Einsidelnensis (de Rossi 1888, 18-33). Produced at the monastery of Einsiedeln in the 9th century (Einsiedeln, Stiftsbibliothek 326, digitised: www.e-codices.unifr.ch/en/list/one/sbe/0326).
Discussion
Location: Vatican Baptistery (see discussion below).Physical remains: none.
Manuscript transmission: Sylloge Laureshamensis I.
The poem is in elegiac couplets, but the second line of the first couplet is omitted. The first line is a quotation from Virgil (Aeneid 12.427), the only complete line of Virgil quoted in Damasus' extant works (Trout 2015, 86). In line 6, in the manuscript, the words vincula nulla tenent are followed by Acatius votum soluit ('Acatius fulfilled his vow'), which make no sense in context and must have been copied there in error from another inscription (a grafitto?); the words quem liquor iste lavat ('one whom this water washes') are de Rossi's conjecture of the original sense (de Rossi 1888, 147; Ferrua 1942, 94). Damasan authorship has generally been taken as self-evident, given the appearance of his name in the poem, but Ihm raised doubts (Ihm 1895, 9-10) because the word antistes (l. 4) does not otherwise appear in his works and the use of elegiac couplets is rare (but not unparalleled, see E07186, E07210); these were rejected by Ferrua 1942, 94.
Although no physical remains of either the inscription or the building survive, it is generally agreed that this inscription was in a baptistery at St Peter's on the Vatican, probably constructed by Damasus himself. In the sylloge, the poem appears as part of a group of poems from St Peter's, each with a rubric describing its location, in this case 'At the font' ('Ad fontes'). Another inscription of Damasus (Epigrammata 3; see Trout 2015, 84-5; Ferrua 1942, 88-93) describes how he had work carried out to direct a natural spring on the Vatican hill for use providing 'the gifts of salvation' (l. 9 – dona salutis). An inscription also survives (E08592) which records a donation made to a construction project by Damasus at St Peter's (though the part of the text identifying what was being built is lost). These sources together have led to a consensus among scholars that Damasus was responsible for building a baptistery at St Peter's, even though no individual piece of evidence is entirely unambiguous; there are widely differing views, however, as to precisely where it may have been located within the Vatican complex: for a summary, with full references, see Trout 2015, 87.
Bibliography
Editions, translations, and commentaries:de Rossi, G.B., Inscriptiones Christianae Urbis Romae Septimo Saeculo Antiquiores, vol. 2.1 (Rome, 1888: Ex officina libraria Philippi Cuggiani), 147, nos. 10-10a.
Ihm, M., Damasi epigrammata (Anthologiae Latinae Supplementa 1, Leipzig: Teubner, 1895), 9-10, no. 5.
de Rossi, G.B., and Silvagni, A., Inscriptiones Christianae Urbis Romae Septimo Saeculo Antiquiores [ICVR], n.s., vol. 2: Coemeteria in viis Cornelia Aurelia Portuensi et Ostiensi et tabulae Nr. 1-34 (Vatican: Pont. Institutum Archaeologiae Christianae, 1935), no. 4096.
Ferrua, A., Epigrammata damasiana (Rome: Pontificio Istituto di archeologia cristiana, 1942), 93-94, no. 4.
Reutter, U., Damasus, Bischof von Rom (366-384): Leben und Werk (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2009), 72, no. 4.
Aste, A., Gli epigrammi di papa Damaso I (Tricase: Libellula Edizioni, 2014).
Trout, D., Damasus of Rome: The Epigraphic Poetry. Introduction, Texts, Translations, and Commentary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 86-87, no. 4.
Epigraphic Database Bari, EDB14384:
https://www.edb.uniba.it/epigraph/14384
Further reading:
Lapidge, M., The Roman Martyrs: Introduction, Translation and Commentary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).
Record Created By
David Lambert; Katarzyna Wojtalik
Date of Entry
09/12/2018; rev. 16/06/2025
| ID | Name | Name in Source | Identity | S00036 | Peter, the Apostle | Petrus | Certain |
|---|
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