Latin poem inscribed for the tomb of *Eutychius (martyr of Rome, buried at S. Sebastiano, S00631), composed by Pope Damasus. Now in the basilica of S. Sebastiano, via Appia, outside Rome; probably originally from the catacomb there. Written in Rome, 366/384.
Evidence ID
E07169
Type of Evidence
Inscriptions - Formal inscriptions (stone, mosaic, etc.)
Literary - Poems
Major author/Major anonymous work
Damasan and pseudo-Damasan poems
Damasus, Epigrammata 21 (ICVR V, 13274)
Eutychius martyr crudelia iussa tyranni
carnificumq(ue) vias pariter tunc mille nocendi
vincere quod potuit monstravit gloria Christi
carceris inluviem sequitur nova poena per artus
testarum fragmenta parant ne somnus adiret
bis seni transiere dies alimenta negantur
mittitur in barathrum sanctus lavat omnia sanguis
vulnera quae intulerat mortis metuenda potestas
nocte soporifera turbant insomnia mentem
ostendit latebra insontis quae membra teneret
quaeritur inventus colitur fovet omnia prestat
expressit Damasus meritum venerare sepulchrum
‘Eutychius the martyr was able in that moment to overcome both the tyrant’s
cruel commands and the executioners’ thousand means of doing harm
because the glory of Christ pointed the way.
A new punishment for every limb is added to the prison’s filth:
They lay out fragments of pottery to forestall sleep;
twice six days passed, food is denied;
he is thrown into a deep dungeon; holy blood bathes every
wound which the dreadful power of death inflicted.
In sleep bringing night a dream stirs the mind.
It reveals the hiding place that contains the guiltless man’s limbs.
He is sought; discovered he is venerated; he offers support; he furnishes all things.
Damasus has highlighted his merit; you venerate his tomb.’
Text and translation: Trout 2015, 122-123.
Cult PlacesBurial site of a saint - tomb/grave
Non Liturgical ActivityVisiting graves and shrines
MiraclesApparition, vision, dream, revelation
Protagonists in Cult and Narratives
Burial site of a saint - tomb/grave
Burial site of a saint - cemetery/catacomb
Non Liturgical ActivityVisiting graves and shrines
Renovation and embellishment of cult buildings
MiraclesApparition, vision, dream, revelation
Finding of lost objects, animals, etc.
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 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: Catacomb of St. Sebastian; moved at a relatively early date (by the 7th century) to the crypt of the church of S. Sebastian, via Appia antica, just outside Rome to the south.Physical remains: The original marble tablet survives intact: the only one of Damasus' inscriptions to survive with no damage at all to the text (see Image). It is currently displayed on the wall of the nave of the basilica of S. Sebastiano (Ferrua 1942, 144-5; Trout 2015, 124). Ferrua (1942, 144) gives its dimensions as 100 cm (height) and 214 cm (width); 'the thickness is hidden in the wall' ('crassitudo latet in muro'). The letters are about 5 cm high. Ferrua described the lettering as 'splendidly filocalian' ('splendide filocalianae') but believed it been subjected to some tampering in the 17th century, such as the addition of dots between words (distinctiones) and of the ‘h’ in sepulchrum (line 12), which goes against Damasus' practice elsewhere (Ferrua 1942, 145, 148).
Manuscript transmission: Sylloge Turonensis, Sylloge Laureshamensis IV, Sylloge Centulensis.
The poem is in hexameters. Its subject, Eutychius, is otherwise almost unattested. His name appears in the Martyrologium Hieronymianum (E04869) and the Monza papyrus (E06788), but there is no literary account of his martyrdom – or even a passing reference to him – except Damasus' poem. To some extent this is explicable by the details given in the poem itself: lines 9-11 imply that his story was unknown until his burial place, and presumably also his martyrdom, were revealed to someone in a dream. The poem tells us nothing about Eutychius or what led to his martyrdom, describing only the tortures he suffered before his death: being deprived of sleep by being forced to lie on shards of poetry, and being starved for twelve days before being thrown into a barathrum (translated by Trout as 'a deep dungeon', but which can mean an abyss or pit of any kind). Damasus does not say that he was the person who experienced the dream revelation, but it was presumably he who was responsible for establishing Eutychius' tomb as a place of cult. Eutychius' cult was thus not one that grew up organically: it was directly established by Damasus. For whatever reason, his story did not feed into the corpus of the Roman martyr acts, as some of Damasus' poems did, nor is his shrine mentioned in any of the early medieval pilgrim itineraries.
The original site of the inscription would have been at Eutychius' tomb. It is only recently that the likely location of this has been established as 'region F of the cemetery ex Vigna Chiaraviglio, a peripheral area of the cemetery of S. Sebastiano' (Trout 2015, 124), following the publication in 1994 by Carlo Carletti of a rough inscription found there, recording the reservation of a burial place (locus) 'at the shrine of Lord Eutychius' (ad limina domni Eutyci) (see $E0####). By the time of the compilation of the syllogae and the Monza papyrus in the 7th century it had been moved to S. Sebastiano, probably to the crypt, where it was described in the 15th century by the antiquarian Petrus Sabinus (Carletti 2002, 51). It was moved to the nave of the church in the 16th century (for several early-modern descriptions of the tablet, see Ferrua 1942, 144-5).
Bibliography
Editions and translations:De Rossi, G.B., Inscriptiones Christianae Urbis Romae Septimo Saeculo Antiquiores, vol. 2.1 (Rome, 1888), 66, no. 12 (Turonensis); 89, no. 46 (Centulensis); 105, no. 45 (Laureshamensis IV).
Buecheler, F., Anthologia Latina, pars posterior. Carmina epigraphica (Leipzig: Teubner 1895), 149, no. 307.
Ihm, M., Damasi epigrammata (Anthologiae Latinae Supplementa 1, Leipzig: Teubner, 1895), 32, no. 27.
Diehl, E., Inscriptiones Latinae Christianae Veteres, vol. 1 (Berlin: Weidmann, 1925), 394, no. 1993.
Ferrua, A., Epigrammata damasiana (Rome: Pontificio Istituto di archeologia cristiana, 1942), 144-148, no. 21.
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), 70-71, no. 13274.
Reutter, U., Damasus, Bischof von Rom (366-384): Leben und Werk (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2009), 80-81, no. 21.
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), 122-123, no. 21.
Epigraphic Database Bari, EDB5398
https://www.edb.uniba.it/epigraph/5398
Further reading:
Carletti, C., "Quod multi cupiunt et rari accipiunt. A proposito di una nuova iscrizione della catacomba dell’ex vigna Chiaraviglio," in: Historiam pictura refert. Miscellanea in onore di Padre Alejandro Recio Veganzones O.F.M. (Vatican City: Pontificio Istituto di archeologia cristiana, 1994), 111-126.
Carletti, C., ""Domine Eutychi". Un culto 'ritrovato' nell’area cimiteriale di s. Sebastiano a Roma," Vetera Christianorum 39 (2002), 35-60.
Lapidge, M., The Roman Martyrs: Introduction, Translation and Commentary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).
Images
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The inscription to Eutychius, now in the basilica of S. Sebastiano (from Ferrua 1942, p. 147).
Record Created By
David Lambert
Date of Entry
30/03/2026
| ID | Name | Name in Source | Identity | S00631 | Eutychius, martyr of Rome, buried at S. Sebastiano | Eutychius | Certain |
|---|
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