Latin poem by Pope Damasus, composed for the tomb of *Tiburtius (martyr of Rome, buried on the via Labicana, S01404) n the cemetery of Marcellinus and Petrus (ad duas lauros), via Labicana, Rome. Written in Rome 366/384.
Evidence ID
E07174
Type of Evidence
Inscriptions - Formal inscriptions (stone, mosaic, etc.)
Literary - Poems
Major author/Major anonymous work
Damasan and pseudo-Damasan poems
Damasus of Rome, Epigrammata 31 (ICVR VI, 16963)
Letters in underlined capitals come from the surviving stone fragment.
Tempore quo gladius secuit pia viscera matris,
egregius martyr, contempto principe mundi,
aetheris alia petit Christo comitante beatus.
hie tibi sanctus honor semper laudesq(ue) manebunt.
care Deo, ut foveas Damasum precor, alme TibURti. 5
‘At that time when persecution’s sword cut at our mother’s holy innards,
a distinguished martyr, despising the prince of the world,
seeks out heaven’s heights, blessed with Christ’s companionship.
Here holy honor and praise will ever be yours.
Dear to god, kindly Tiburtius, I pray you favor Damasus.’
Text and translation: Trout 2015, 135-136.
Cult PlacesBurial site of a saint - tomb/grave
Non Liturgical Activity
Burial site of a saint - tomb/grave
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: cemetery of Marcellinus and Petrus (ad duas lauros), via Labicana, just outside Rome to the east.Physical remains: A marble fragment containing the letters VR in Philocalian characters has been identified as coming from the final line of the inscription. It is displayed at the site, in the exhibition room housed in the mausoleum of Helena.
Manuscript transmission: Sylloge Turonensis, Sylloge Centulensis.
The poem is in hexameters. It is the first surviving text to mention Tiburtius, and its lack of detail suggests that Damasus knew little about him. Tiburtius appears as a character in the Martyrdom of Sebastianus, probably written about a generation after Damasus (see E02512), but there is nothing to suggest that the details given there about his life and martyrdom are anything other than fictional, apart from his place of burial.
Tiburtius was buried in the cemetery ad duas lauros on the via Labicana, but unlike the other martyrs buried there such as Gorgonius (S00576) and Marcellinus and Petrus (S00577), his tomb was not in the catacomb but in the funerary basilica built above ground in the reign of Constantine, which adjoined the still standing mausoleum built for Constantine's mother Helena (Trout 2015, 136; Guyon 1987, 407-9). This is stated most clearly in the Notitia ecclesiarum urbis Romae (E00680): 'In the northern part of Helena's church, there is first the martyr Tiburtius. Then you enter the catacomb.' It also mentioned in the Martyrdom of Marcellinus and Petrus (E02500), where the tomb of the two named martyrs is described as 'near [Tiburtius] in the lower part, in a crypt' (§ 12: iuxta se in inferiori parte in crypta). No remains of the basilica or of Tiburtius' tomb now exist, but it is reasonable to assume that it was monumentalised by Damasus in a manner similar to that of Marcellinus and Petrus (see E07173). Tiburtius is depicted in a surviving fresco in the catacomb, together with Marcellinus, Petrus, and Gorgonius (E05246).
During excavations carried out at the cemetery by Jean Guyon in the 1980s, a small fragment of marble was discovered with the letters VR in Philocalian script (Guyon 1987, 407-8). Since these letters occur only once in the three poems by Damasus known to have been displayed there – in line 5 of the poem to Tiburtius – this is presumed to have been their original location. However (as Guyon acknowledges), the possibility that it comes from an unrecorded inscription cannot be excluded. Photographs of the fragment can be found in the inscription's EDB entry.
Bibliography
Editions and translations:de Rossi, G.B., Inscriptiones Christianae Urbis Romae Septimo Saeculo Antiquiores, vol. 2.1 (Rome, 1888), 64, no. 12; 90, no. 48.
Ihm, M., Damasi epigrammata (Anthologiae Latinae Supplementa 1, Leipzig: Teubner, 1895), 36, no. 30.
Ferrua, A., Epigrammata damasiana (Rome: Pontificio Istituto di archeologia cristiana, 1942), 164-165, no. 31.
de Rossi, G.B., Ferrua, A. (eds.) Inscriptiones Christianae Urbis Romae Septimo Saeculo Antiquiores [ICVR], n.s., vol. 6: Coemeteria in Viis Latina, Lubicana et Praenestina (Vatican: Pont. Institutum Archaeologiae Christianae, 1975), no. 16963.
Reutter, U., Damasus, Bischof von Rom (366-384): Leben und Werk (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2009), 83, no. 31.
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), 135-136, no. 31.
Epigraphic Database Bari, EDB2844
https://www.edb.uniba.it/epigraph/2844.
Further reading:
Guyon, J., "L'oeuvre de Damase dans le cimetière ‘aux deux lauriers’ sur la via Labicana," in: Saecularia Damasiana: Atti del convegno internazionale per il XVI centenario della morte di Papa Damaso I (11-12-384-10/12-12-1984) (Vatican City: Pontificio Istituto di Archeologia Cristiana, 1986), 225-258.
Guyon, J., Le Cimetière aux deux lauriers: Recherches sur les catacombes Romaines, vol. 7: Roma sotterranea cristiana (Vatican City: Pontificio Istituto di Archeologia Cristiana, 1987).
Lapidge, M., The Roman Martyrs: Introduction, Translation and Commentary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).
Record Created By
David Lambert
Date of Entry
12/07/2025
| ID | Name | Name in Source | Identity | S01404 | Tiburtius, son of the prefect Chromatius, martyr of Rome, buried on the via Labicana | Tiburtius | Certain |
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