Evidence ID
E07168
Type of Evidence
Literary - Poems
Inscriptions - Formal inscriptions (stone, mosaic, etc.)
Major author/Major anonymous work
Damasan and pseudo-Damasan poems
Damasus, Epigrammata 20 (ICVR V, 13273)
Hic habitasse prius sanctos cognoscere debes
nomina quisq(ue) Petri pariter Pauliq(ue) requiris.
discipulos oriens misit, quod sponte fatemur;
sanguinis ob meritum Christumq(ue) per astra secuti
aetherios petiere sinus regnaque piorum:
Roma suos potius meruit defendere cives.
haec Damasus vestras referat nova sidera laudes.
‘You should know that holy men once dwelt here,
whoever you are who seek at the same time the names of Peter and Paul.
The East sent its apostles, a fact we freely acknowledge.
By virtue of their martyrdom—having followed Christ through the stars
they reached the heavenly asylum and the realms of the righteous—
Rome has earned the right to claim them as her own citizens.
These things Damasus wishes to relate in your praise, O new stars.’
Text and translation: Trout 2015, 121.
Cult Places
Cult building - independent (church)
Non Liturgical ActivitySaint as patron - of a community
Protagonists in Cult and NarrativesEcclesiastics - Popes
Cult Related ObjectsInscription
Theorising on SanctityUsing saints to assert ecclesiastical/political status
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 very 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).
There are two criteria by which poems can reliably be attributed to Damasus' authorship (or, at the very least, to production under his direct aegis): either because the inscribed text (or a fragment of it) survives, with its highly distinctive Philocalian lettering; 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 Callixtus (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 (Centula) 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 c. 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 Einsidlensis (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: Basilica of the Apostles (present-day S. Sebastiano), via Appia antica, just outside Rome to the south.Physical remains: No remains of the original survive today. There is a 13th c. inscription in the basilica of S. Sebastiano which contains the first three lines of Damasus' poem with a blank space beneath them (for a picture, see the EDB entry cited below); this suggests that the opening lines of the original survived when it was carved but not the rest of the inscription (presumably the space was left in the hope that more would be found).
Manuscript transmission: Sylloge Turonensis, Sylloge Centulensis, Sylloge Laureshamensis IV, Sylloge Einsidlensis.
The poem is in hexameters. Unlike most of Damasus' poems, it was not inscribed at the tomb of a martyr, but commemorated the former presence of Peter and Paul at the site of the Basilica of the Apostles, though it remains debated precisely what Damasus meant when he said that they had 'dwelt' (habitasse) there. By the time Damasus wrote, their shrines were permanently established at St Peter's and S. Paolo fuori le mura. There is substantial archaeological evidence, however, that in the 3rd century the location of the basilica, then the cemetery known as Ad catacumbas (the origin of the word 'catacomb'), had been a site of cult to Peter and Paul. Notably, large quantities of graffiti invoking them have been discovered (see E05087). By Damasus' time a church had been built there, probably during the reign of Constantine (Trout 2015, 121-2, with further references), which because of the site's association with Peter and Paul was known as the Basilica of the Apostles (basilica apostolorum). By the 7th century, however, it had come to be known as the basilica of St Sebastian (S00400), whose shrine was in its crypt (Nieddu 2008, 52).
Multiple sources from late antiquity and the early middle ages attest to a belief that Peter and Paul had once been buried at the site, most relevantly the entry for Damasus in the Liber Pontificalis (E01273), which says – evidently referring to this inscription – that he set up a plaque adorned with verses at the spot where they had been buried (see also E00345, E00682, E06992, E07892). The most obvious – but not absolutely certain – interpretation of the first line of the poem is that Damasus was alluding to such a burial. No evidence has ever been discovered to either prove or disprove the tradition, which continues to be the subject of various conjectures: for a summary of the arguments, see Wiśniewski 2019, 14-17. An alternative view is that Damasus is alluding to a tradition that Peter and Paul had lived at the site in their lifetimes: various older references are discussed by Ferrua (1942, 142-3), himself very hostile to the idea; more recently, see Luiselli 1986, 843-8.
The later lines of the poem claim Peter and Paul as patrons of Rome, who came from the East but had become Rome's citizens through their martyrdom there (line 7). Some modern scholars (e.g. Chadwick 1957, 35-6) have suggested that these lines are an assertion of Roman primacy against the churches of the East, claiming Peter and Paul as Rome's patrons because of their martyrdom there, which no other church could lay claim to (unlike foundation by Peter, which was also claimed by the church of Antioch). This has recently been reasserted by Eastman 2011, 100-104, who argues that it represents the entire purpose of the poem, and that Damasus' use of the word habitasse applies to the city of Rome, not specifically to the site of the Basilica of the Apostles.
Bibliography
Editions and translations:De Rossi, G.B., Inscriptiones Christianae Urbis Romae Septimo Saeculo Antiquiores, vol. 2.1 (Rome, 1888), 32, n. 77 (Einsidlenensis); 65-66, n. 20 (Turonensis); 89, no. 45 (Centulensis); 105, no. 44 (Laureshamensis IV).
Buecheler, F., Anthologia Latina, pars posterior. Carmina epigraphica (Leipzig: Teubner 1895), 148-149, no. 306.
Ihm, M., Damasi epigrammata (Anthologiae Latinae Supplementa 1, Leipzig: Teubner, 1895), 31, no. 26.
Diehl, E., Inscriptiones Latinae Christianae Veteres, vol. 1 (Berlin: Weidmann, 1925), 174, no. 951.
Ferrua, A., Epigrammata damasiana (Rome: Pontificio Istituto di archeologia cristiana, 1942), 142, no. 20.
De Rossi, G.B., Ferrua, A. (eds.) Inscriptiones Christianae Urbis Romae Septimo Saeculo Antiquiores, n.s., vol. 5: Coemeteria reliqua Viae Appiae (Vatican: Pont. Institutum Archaeologiae Christianae, 1971), 68-70, no. 13273.
Walser, G., Die einsiedler Inschriftensammlung und der Pilgerführer durch Rom (Codex Einsidlensis 326) (Historia Einzelschriften 53; Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1987), 61, no. 75 (text); 132-133 (German translation; discussion).
Reutter, U., Damasus, Bischof von Rom (366-384): Leben und Werk (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2009), 90-91, no. 20.
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), 121, no. 20.
Epigraphic Database Bari, EDB5397
https://www.edb.uniba.it/epigraph/5397
Further reading:
Chadwick, H., "St. Peter and St. Paul in Rome: The Problem of the Memoria Apostolorum ad Catacumbas," Journal of Theological Studies 8:1 (1957), 31-52.
Eastman, D.L., Paul the Martyr: The Cult of the Apostle in the Latin West (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2011).
Lapidge, M., The Roman Martyrs: Introduction, Translation and Commentary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).
Luiselli, B. "In margine al problema della traslazione delle ossa di Pietro e Paolo," Mélanges de l'École française de Rome. Antiquité 98:2 (1986), 843-854.
Nieddu, A.M., "S. Sebastiani ecclesia, basilica," in: A. La Regina (ed.), Lexicon topographicum urbis Romae – Suburbium, vol. 5 (Rome, Quasar: 2006), 51-57.
Wiśniewski, R., The Beginnings of the Cult of Relics (Oxford: OUP, 2019).
Record Created By
David Lambert
Date of Entry
27/04/2026
| ID | Name | Name in Source | Identity | S00008 | Paul, the Apostle | Paulus | Certain | S00036 | Peter, the Apostle | Petrus | Certain |
|---|
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