Latin poem by Pope Damasus, for an inscription commemorating the martyrdom of Pope *Xystus/Sixtus II (bishop and martyr of Rome, S00201) at Xystus' tomb in the 'Crypt of the Popes', cemetery of Callixtus, on the via Appia outside Rome. Written in Rome, 366/384
Evidence ID
E07166
Type of Evidence
Inscriptions - Formal inscriptions (stone, mosaic, etc.)
Literary - Poems
Major author/Major anonymous work
Damasan and pseudo-Damasan poems
Damasus, Epigrammata 17 (ICVR IV, 9514)
The text in underlined capitals survives in fragments of the original inscription.
Tempore quo gladius secuit pia viscera matris,
hic positus rector caelestia iussa docebat.
adveniunt subito rapiunt qui forte sedentem.
militibus missis populi tunc colla dedere.
mox ubi cognovit senior quis tollere vellet 5
palmam, seq(ue) suumq(ue) caput prior optulit ipse,
inpatiens feritas posset ne laEDere quemquam.
ostendit Christus, reddit quI Praemia vitae,
pastoris meritum, numerum gREGis ipse tuetur.
'At that time when persecution’s sword cut at our mother’s holy innards,
here in this place the bishop was teaching the heavenly commands.
Suddenly men arrive to seize him whom by chance they find sitting there.
To the soldiers who had been sent the people then offered their necks.
As soon as the older man understood who wanted to take (from him) the victory
palm, he offered himself and his own life first of all,
unwilling that savagery be able to harm anyone.
Christ, who assigns the reward of [eternal] life, displays
the merit of the shepherd; he himself watches over the full number of his flock.'
Text and translation: Trout 2015, 116.
Cult Places
Burial site of a saint - cemetery/catacomb
Non Liturgical ActivityRenovation and embellishment 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 (E01051, 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 (see E07149; E07190; 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).
Edition and formatting
Our entries use the edition of Damasus' epigrams by Dennis Trout (Oxford University Press, 2015). In his Latin text, Trout uses lower case to indicate material transmitted only in manuscript and upper case to indicate letters which survive on stone. We have used standard capitalisation, with material from inscribed fragments in underlined upper case. Apart from this, both text and translation follow Trout unless otherwise indicated.
Discussion
Original location: Crypt of the Popes, catacomb of Callixtus, via Appia, just outside Rome to the south, where the two surviving fragments are preserved.Physical remains: Two small fragments, adjoining each other and separated by a hairline crack, discovered by de Rossi in 1854 in the Crypt of the Popes. They contain a few letters from lines 6-9 (see image), indicated in our text by underlined capitals. Measurements: height – 21 cm; width – 25 cm; thickness – 4.2 cm; height of letters – 4 cm (Ferrua 1942, 123).
Manuscript transmission: Sylloge Laureshamensis IV.
The poem is in hexameters. The name of Xystus (Sixtus II) is not mentioned in the poem but there is no doubt that he is the martyred bishop it commemorates, given its content and location in the Crypt of the Popes. In the original inscription, his name may have appeared above the verses (Trout 2015, 117). The inscription would have been on the rear (west) wall of the crypt (Trout 2015, 117), together with Damasus' other inscription for the Crypt of the Popes (E01866), part of which was found in situ.
Xystus was bishop of Rome for just under a year, from August 257 and to August 258. His martyrdom on 6 August 258 in the cemetery of Callixtus is one of the best documented Roman martyrdoms. It was attested contemporaneously in a letter of Cyprian of Carthage (Letter 80), and is recorded in the Depositio martirum (E01052) and the Liber Pontificalis (E00362). Six deacons are named in the Liber Pontificalis as being martyred alongside him: Felicissimus, Agapitus, Ianuarius, Magnus, Vincentius and Stephanus, some of whom received significant cult of their own (see S00202). Damasus composed a poem celebrating Felicissimus and Agapitus at their tomb in the cemetery of Praetextatus (E07170). The same assault on the church in Rome would claim several other clerics in the days that followed, notably the most celebrated of all clerical martyrs at Rome, Laurence (S00037), on 10 August (for a brief discussion, see Lapidge 2018, 183-4).
Xystus was buried in the cemetery of Callixtus, in the so-called Crypt of the Popes, where eight other 3rd-century popes were also buried. The crypt was reconstructed and monumentalised by Damasus, who set up two verse inscriptions: this one to Xystus, and another commemorating all who were buried there (E01866). The deacons executed alongside Xystus are mentioned by Damasus in the other inscription as 'companions of Xystus' (comites Xysti). For more detailed discussion of the Crypt of the Popes, see Spera 2004; Sághy 2015, 51-53; and the various references given by Trout 2015, 115 and 117.
Bibliography
Editions and translations:de Rossi, G.B., Inscriptiones Christianae Urbis Romae Septimo Saeculo Antiquiores, vol. 2.1 (Rome, 1888), 108, no. 60.
Ihm, M., Damasi epigrammata (Anthologiae Latinae Supplementa 1, Leipzig: Teubner, 1895), 20, no. 13.
Diehl, E., Inscriptiones Latinae Christianae Veteres, vol. 1 (Berlin: Weidmann, 1925), 176, no. 959.
Ferrua, A., Epigrammata damasiana (Rome: Pontificio Istituto di archeologia cristiana, 1942), 123-126, no. 17.
De Rossi, G.B., and Ferrua, A., Inscriptiones Christianae Urbis Romae Septimo Saeculo Antiquiores [ICVR], n.s., vol. 4: Coemeteria inter Vias Appiam et Ardeatinam (Vatican: Pont. Institutum Archaeologiae Christianae, 1964), no. 9514.
Reutter, U., Damasus, Bischof von Rom (366-384): Leben und Werk (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2009), 85-86, no. 17.
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), 116-117, no. 17.
Epigraphic Database Bari, EDB19477
https://www.edb.uniba.it/epigraph/19477
Further reading:
Lapidge, M., The Roman Martyrs: Introduction, Translation and Commentary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).
Sághy, M., "The Bishop of Rome and the Martyrs," in: G. Dunn (ed.), The Bishop of Rome in Late Antiquity (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), 37-55.
Spera, L., "Cal(l)isti Coemeterium (Via Appia)," in: A. La Regina (ed.), Lexicon topographicum urbis Romae – Suburbium, vol. 2 (Rome: Quasar, 2004), 32-44.
Images
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The surviving fragments of the inscription (reproduced from Ferrua 1942, 124)
Record Created By
David Lambert
Date of Entry
New entry 07/07/2025, replacing an earlier entry.
| ID | Name | Name in Source | Identity | S00201 | Xystus/Sixtus II, bishop and martyr of Rome | Certain |
|---|
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