The martyr, the matrona and the bishop: the matron Lucina and the politics of martyr cult in fifth- and sixth-century Rome

• The martyr, the matrona and the bishop: the matron Lucina and the politics of martyr cult in fifth- and sixth-century Rome KATE COOPER

The present study attempts to build on the achievement of Pietri and Llewellyn in assessing the peculiarities and limitations of the gesta martyrum as a source for late ancient and early medieval Rome, while shifting interpretative stress away ftom the lay-clerical binary which has dominated recent treatments of the cult of the saints, and toward an emphasis on factional conflict among lay-clerical coalitions. Central is an analysis of the literary motif which recurs across the gesta of Lucina, the aristocratic matrona or widow who sees to the burial of the martyr on her own lands. Though the stereotypical figure of Lucina warns us of the limitations of the gesta as a source for the patronage activity of the lay aristocracy, it is argued, her appearance in crucial texts such as the Passio Sebastiani can nonetheless help us to trace the role which the memory of the martyrs played in texts such as the gesta martyrum, the Symmachan Forgeries, or the Liber Pontificalis, as well as the role which martyr shrines such as the Vatican basilica and the memoria apostolorum on the Via Appia played in the contestation and consolidation of Roman episcopal authority. It is a complex and poignant story; but the outcome was plain - the martyr took on a distinctive late-Roman face. He was the patronus, the invisible, heavenly concomitant of the patronage exercised palpably on earth by the bishop. 1 The last quarter of the twentieth century may well be remembered, by future historiographers of late antiquity, as the age of the bishop. The problem of how, across three or four centuries, a new class of men took I

P. Brown, [The] Cult of the Saints: [its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity] (Chicago,

1981),

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power over the institutions of the ancient city, establishing themselves as the legitimate arbiters of political, social and metaphysical reality, has held the attention of a generation of late Roman historians. Beginning from the dense core of Christian communities no larger than a Roman household, the platform of authority of the Christian bishop extended progressively through ever-larger communities, and finally into the civic institutions of what had been pagan society. Equally, the rise of the cult of the saints has enjoyed particular historiographical prominence as a medium through which the transformation of antiquity into the Christian Middle Ages was achieved. 2 The central collision of the post-Constantinian church, it has been argued,3 was not between pagan and Christian per se, but rather between alternate notions of familia, one based on the bonds of kin and dynasty, and the other on a chosen kinship, that of the Christian ecclesia, whose ties were as durable as those of blood. In the fourth and fifth centuries, these two notions of community found their champions in, respectively, a newly Christianized aristocracy on the one hand and a newly aristocratic episcopacy on the other. The cult of the saints, in turn, has been seen as a by-product of the bishops' struggle to retain control of a church now inundated by a rich, articulate, and even imperious, laity. When viewed through the episcopal lens, the martyr as intercessor seems to be a supporter of hierarchy, lending distance and symmetry to the relationship between the faithful and their deity.4 This article, however, will argue that the cult of martyrs at the end of antiquity should be understood in agonistic, not hierarchical terms: the martyr's power was accessible to those in every rank of a contending faction, a point which the third-century bishops had discovered to their discomfort. There is no reason to assume that in the post-Constantinian period the martyr's power should have been any less volatile. If anything, once real power was in the gift of the church, it found itself more, rather than less, riven by factional conflict. This accords well with what we know about how kinship groups in the early Middle Ages would come to use ecclesiastical and monastic patronage, and perhaps especially the cult of relics, to forward dynastic claims.5 But fully to assimilate the idea of the martyr as champion 1 The arguments put forward in E. Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels (New York, (979), especially chaprer 2: '''One God. One Bishop" [:the Politics of Monotheism'] , have influenced much of subsequent English-language scholarship; see also P. Brown. Power and Persuasion in Late Antiquity: Towards a Christian Empire (Madison, WI, (992), and literature cited there. The position outlined here is a central argument of Brown's Cult of the Saints.

This is a view made influential by Pagels. 'One God, One Bishop'. See. for example, F. Prinz, FrUhes Monchtum rim Frankenreich: Kulture und Gesellschaft in Gallien, den Rheinlanden und Bayern am Beispiel der monastischen Entwicklung jabrhundert)] (Munich, (965). Early Medieval

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A century later, the Roman topography of dynasty and allegiance has yet to be established conclusively, though in an important 1989 article Charles Pietri attempted to account for how the seven-fold Roman diaconal structure followed on from the fourteen civil regions of the time of Augustus.9 Both Pietri and the British scholar Peter Llewellyn have sought to develop Dufourcq's approach, mining the gesta martyrum for clues to the social tensions of the fifth and sixth centuries, the period in which the bulk of the gesta are presumed to have been written. 10 Both writers give substantial weight to the lay-clerical binary: each would see the gesta martyrum as reflecting an ever more acute tension between the senatorial aristocracy and the increasingly centralized, and increasingly ambitious, clerical hierarchy of the city of Rome. The present study attempts to build on the achievement of Pietri and Llewellyn in assessing the peculiarities and limitations of the gesta martyrum as a source for late ancient and early medieval Rome, while putting less stress on the lay-clerical binary. Instead, a topographical approach will emphasize competition among rival cult sites sponsored by what may well have been lay-clerical coalitions. Special attention to the literary representation of lay-clerical collaboration is paid, but not with the hope of gaining evidence for actual historical events. Central to our story, rather, is a specific literary motif which recurs across the gesta, that of the aristocratic matrona or widow who sees to the burial of the martyr on her own lands. The matrona Lucina appears in so many passiones, set in such diverse historical periods, that she can only, in her present form, be a pious fiction, whatever the core of truth or tradition standing behind her figure. Attention to the Lucina motif reveals that the gesta are as unreliable as they are evocative when it comes to the question oflay-clerical relations and ecclesiastical patronage. Yet though the stereotypical figure of Lucina warns us of the limitations of the gesta as a source for the patronage activity of the lay aristocracy, her appearance in crucial texts such as the Passio Sebastiani can help us to trace the role which martyr shrines such as the Vatican basilica and the 9

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C. Pieui, 'Regions ecclesiasliques et paroisses romaines', Actes du Xie congres international d'archeologie chretienne. Lyon, Vienne, Grenoble, Geneve et Aoste (2I-28 september I986), vol. II (Vatican City, 1989), pp. 1035-67. Among the more important contributions by Pielri and L1ewellyn are: P.A.B. L1ewellyn, 'The Roman Church [During the Laurentian Schism: Priests and Senators]', Church History 45 (1976), pp. 417-27; P.A.B. L1ewellyn, 'The Roman Clergy during the Laurentian Schism: a preliminary analysis', Ancient Society 8 (1977)' pp. 245-75; C. Pietri, 'Aristocratie et sO,ciete clericale dans I'Italie chretienne au temps d'Odoacre et de Theodoric', Melanges des Ecoles Franraises de Rome et d'Athenes 93 (1981), 1, pp. 417-67; idem, 'Donateurs et pieux etablissements [d'apres le legendier romain (Ye-VIle s.)]', in Hagiographie, cultures et societes, Ive-XIle siecles. Actes du colloque organisee it Nanterre et it Paris (2-5 mai I919). Centre de Recherches sur l'antiquit# Tardive et le Haute Moyen Age, Universite de Paris X (Paris, 1981), pp. 435-53; and idem, 'Evergetisme et richesses ecclesiastiques dans I'Italie du lve a la fin du Ve S.: l'exemple romain', Ktema 3 (1984), pp. 317-37.

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Bishops, laity, and martyr cult in early sixth-century Rome There are certainly good reasons why the turn of the sixth centuty has stood as a particularly important hinge-point in the developing and tense relationship between the Roman aristocracy and their bishops. Best-known is the towering figure of Gelasius, pope from 492 to 496, whose pronouncements on the Two Powers became a bulwark of the medieval papacy, but Gelasius was only one of a constellation of figures contending over the division of authority between lay and clerical spheres. Much of this contention was focused not on the macrocosm of pope and emperor, but on the microcosm of a priest's relation to his more estimable parishioners. Donation of funds by lay grandees carried with it a bothersome expectation of controlling their use: Charles Pietri has shown how from the death of Pope Simplicius in 483 to that of Symmachus in 514, a recurring point of debate was whether the lay donor who provided funds for a church should retain the right to decide their use, or whether the clergy might exercise autonomy in dispensing them.1I A debate carried out by senators and bishops assembled under the chairmanship of the Praetorian Prefect Caecina Decius Maximus Basilius after the death of Simplicius exacerbated this tension by finding in favour of the lay donors. Pope Gelasius openly defied the assembly's finding, a policy carried forward with far less success by his nearsuccessor Symmachus (498-514). The patronage class, in turn, seems to have resisted his attempt to encroach on habits of evergetism far older than Christianity itself. The emergence of a contest over the papacy at the election of Symmachus can only have made matters worse. The schism, known as the Laurentian Schism after Laurentius, the Roman priest who stood against Symmachus, lasted from 498 to 507 or 8; it has been argued with force by Pietri and Llewellyn that one of the central issues in the schism was Symmachus' attempt to wrest control over the Roman tituli, and perhaps other shrines, from the lay aristocracy, with the bishop able to exploit a tension among the laity itself, between upper and lower classes. In 1966, Charles Pietri argued that the coalitions which took form during the Laurentian schism had arisen from a senate-plebs divide based in the green and blue factions of the circus, the Roman agonistic venue par excellence.12 This argument lost much of its power in 1976, II 12

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Idem, 'Donateurs et pieux etablissemenrs', pp. 440-1. Idem, 'Le senat, le peuple [Chretien et les parris du Cifque a Rome sous le Pape Symmaque (498-514)]; Melanges d'Archeologie et d'histoire de l'Ecole Franfaise de Rome 78.1 (1966), pp. 123-39. Blackwell

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when Alan Cameron established that the circus factions in fact played a disarmingly narrow role in Rome as professional audience claquesjl3 one might also remember that the charge carried in the propaganda produced by Symmachus' party, that the senate was united against him, may have been formulaic. An alternate, and perhaps more helpful view of the division among the laity would pay attention to clusters of dynastic allegiance, paying attention to the multi-class pyramids at whose pinnacle would stand a figure such as the senator Festus, patron of Laurentius, or the senator Anicius Probus Faustus Niger, cos. 490, patron of Symmachus. As is well known, the literary manipulation of the holy dead played an important role in the contest: one need only think of the so-called Symmachan forgeries to see that the heroic figures of early Christian Rome were harnessed as apologists for either side.14 The Liber Pontificalis itself reflects this tendency to reach for historical precedent: its manner of characterizing the early popes often reflects the issues in play during the early sixth century, a point particularly noticeable where its characterization of the history of the cult of the martyrs is concerned.15

Suggested here is that the cult of the martyrs, too, must have played an important role as a medium of papal self-assertion. There is no lack of evidence to support this point. One of the standard benchmarks, for example, for the development of martyr cult in Rome is the renovation of St Peter's basilica on the Vatican Hill to the west of the city, commissioned by Pope Symmachus during the first part of his reign. Symmachus did much to establish the Vatican as a centre of papal power, conferring on St Peter's a prominence among the suburban martyr basilicas which it had not enjoyed previously. If the Liber Pontificalis is an accurate reflection, the veneration of the martyrs was for Symmachus a means of projecting a picture of the pope as head of a pan-Italian episcopal coalition. His entry in the Liber Pontificalis is one of the most staggering in terms of the number of buildings commissioned or renovated, the quantity of church plate bestowed. Symmachus' intervention at the Vatican is known particularly for the addition of an oratory complex centred on the cult of Saint Andrew the apostle and brother of Peter, which commemorated and housed the relics of other Roman and non-Roman saints: the roman pair Protus and '3 '4

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A. Cameron, Circus Pactiom (Oxford, 1976). On rhe forgeries, see. W.T. Townsend, 'The So-called Symmachan Forgeries', Journal of Religion 13 (1933),pp. 165-74, and G. Zecchini, 'r "gesra de Xysri purgarione" e le fazioni arisrocrariche a Roma alia mera del V secolo', Rivista della storia della chiesa in ltalia 34 (198o), pp. 60-74On rhe use of rhe Symmachan forgeries by rhe editor of rhe Liber Pontificalis, for example, see Pierri, 'Donareurs er pieux erablissemencs', p. 440.

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Hyacinth, the Campanian martyr Sossus, and the north Italians, Cassian of Imola and Apollinaris of Ravenna.'6 With their complex layering of cult upon cult, this collection of oratories and the related oratory of Thomas, Andrew's apostolic colleague, represent a new stage in the articulation of martyr piety in Rome, and serve, perhaps, to advertise and to strengthen Symmachus' links with the bishops in whose cities the non-Roman martyrs were venerated - bishops who may, indeed, have supplied him with relics. In addition, the Constantinian associations of the place loomed large; there is some evidence that Symmachus intended to establish his own sarcophagus there'? - a quasi-imperial gesture brazen in its defiance of the emperor's support for his opponent Laurentius. ,8 Of course, the enhancement of the Vatican was an inspiration born of necessity. It was Laurentius, not Symmachus, who controlled the traditional papal residence, the Lateran palace in the south-east of the city.'9 Symmachus may have been left with nothing to do but to develop an alternate site, calling down upon it all the powers of heaven. The layering of multiple cults which characterizes Symmachus' programme for the Vatican is perhaps best understood as an attempt to channel both earthly and spiritual powers toward synergy, an embodiment of the human and supernatural resources which undergird his claim to the Roman see. Symmachus' role as impresario of martyr cult on the Vatican was paralleled by textual efforts. Clearly, both parties used hagiographical texts to manipulate the memory of early Christian Rome. Just as the popes of an earlier era played a crucial role in the romans a clef of the Symmachan forgeries, so certain of the martyrs commemorated by the gesta, and, perhaps, certain passages of the Liber Pontificalis itself, seem to have been harnessed to the dramas of early-sixth-century Rome. Giovanni Nino Verrando, for example, has found among the gesta an apologia for the Symmachan party.20 Further work would be welcome on the relationship between the gesta and the other polemical texts of early-sixth-century Rome, such as the divergence between the Passio of 16

Recent and useful discussion is offered by J.D. Alchermes, 'Cura pro mortuis [and cultut Commemoration in Rome from the Second through the Sixth Century]', PhD thesis, New York University, '989, pp. 273ff. Discussion in Alchermes, 'Cura pro mortuis', p. 284. Discussion of imperial support for Laurentius in Pietri, 'Le senat, le peuple', and John Moorhead, 'The Laurentian Schism: East and West in the Roman Church', Church History 47 ('978), pp. 125-36. On Symmachus' construction of two episcopal palaces at the Vatican to compensate for his lack of access to the Lateran, see R. Krautheimer, St. Peters and Medieval Rome (Rome, '985), martyrum:

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Polychronius, the bishop of Jerusalem contemporary with Sixtlls, and the Gesta de Xysti purgatione produced by the Symmachan party among its forgeries. 21 Use of the gesta on the Laurentian side in turn has been the subject of an important article by Peter Llewellyn, who argued that the intertwined vitae of Pudentiana and Praxedis should be read as apologetics for the authority of the senatorial party within the Roman ecclesia,whose power base lay in the independent, and often ancient, traditions of the tituli.22 In the case of Pudentiana and Praxedis, the focus was the Titulus Praxedis on the Esquiline Hill, where Laurentius himself held office as priest before becoming a contender for the episcopacy. For Llewellyn, the references to church finance in the Acta Pudentianae et Praxedis (BHL 6988) - particularly the minutiae of how an aristocrat might establish a legacy which is water-tight against claims after his death - are intended as imparting legitimacy to the concerns of lay donors who resented the attempts of the non-Roman popes, Gelasius and Symmachus, to curtail their treatment of the local titulus as an Eigenkirche.23 This accords well with what the Liber Pontificalis allows us to learn about Symmachus' escalation of papal patronage: if he was seen as annexing to the episcopacy a role which many felt should be exercised by the laity, it is not surprising that when his detractors sought a point on which to condemn him, it was his handling of the papal treasury which they chose.24 Where the present approach differs from that of Llewellyn can be summarized as follows. While accepting that Symmachus undertook to strengthen the pope's ex officio role as an impresario of martyr cult - a point which is in fact difficult to assess, since our main source, the Liber Pontificalis, may well be coloured in its account of earlier periods by the developments of the early sixth century25 - the present study suggests this escalation of the officium of the bishop should not be understood in exclusively lay-clerical terms. Rather, both senators and clerics may have

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Beyond the scope of this atticle but meriting attention is the confused relationship between these two texts. The Sixtus of the Passio Polychronii (BHL 6884), edited by Oelehaye, is distinctly Pope Sixtus II (d. 258): his successor, Oionysius (d. 267), and the emperors Oecius and Valerian, are named within the text. But the Gesta de Xysti purgatione et de Polychronii accusatione clearly intend Polychronius as the contemporary of Sixtus III (d. 440). L1ewellyn,'The Roman Church', pp. 418ff. On the use of ecclesiasticalpatronage to forward dynastic claims, see Prinz, Fruhes Monchtum, pp. 48<)-502. See the Laurentian Fragment of the Liber Pontificalis, in L. Ouchesne (ed.), Le Liber Pontificalis. Texte, introduction et commentaire, 2 vols. (Paris, 1886-92), repr. with a third volume, ed. C. Vogel (Paris, 1955-7) (hereafter cited as LP), I, pp. 43-6 at p. 44. The editorial lens of the LP may be present, for example, in the clerical emphasis which it imputes to lay donations. So, for example, the account of the bequest of the illustrissima Vestina to build a marryr basilica under lnnocentius (pope from 40Ih to 417) portrays lnnocentius, not Vestina, as the basilica's patron: LP, I, p. 220.

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worked together in support of Symmachus, with the shared understanding that the more powerful (in both human and supernatural terms) he was able to make his office, the more likely he was to be able to keep it.

The 'gesta martyrum' and the 'Liber Pontificalis': interdependent visions of early Christian Rome That De Rossi's problem, how to make sense of the gesta martyrum, has gone unsolved is not surprising. The gesta are self-mystifYing as texts the claim to stand as eye-witness accounts which a few of them make is almost certainly false - and since in their present form it cannot be determined whether or not their protagonists actually existed, they are most usefully understood by the historian as edifYing fictions, borrowing narrative outlines and characters from the hellenistic romance in order to hold the attention of a readership whom they are designed both to delight and to instruct. Even their collective title - the gesta martyrum - is a mystification, a term coined by the roughly contemporary Liber Pontificalis, a text which seems to bear a pointed interest in according legitimacy to the - or at least some - Roman marryr narratives. The Liber Pontificalis claims that the popes from Fabian (pope from 236-50) onwards kept files documenting the heroic deeds (gesta) of the city's martyrs.26 From the fourth century to the sixth, Fabian's dossier seems to have expanded, however. While the fourth-century Liberian Catalogue (whose terminus ante quem is 354 because it appears in the Calendar of Philocalus produced in that year) credits Fabian with instituting the city's diaconal structure along with a system of care for the cemeteries,27 the second edition of the Liber Pontificalis (produced after 530 and before 546) credits the same Fabian as 'one who appointed seven sub deacons who directed seven clerks to faithfully gather the deeds of the martyrs (gesta martyrum) in their entirety'.28 Nothing could be farther from the truth, insofar as we know it. On this point, as on many others, the Liber Pontificalis is a peculiarly suspect witness. The 'records' of the Roman martyrs, at least as they are preserved, are by no means official accounts, contemporary with the

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Ibid., r. p. 148. 'Hie regiones divisit diaeonibus et rnultas fabrieas per cyrniteria fieri iussit', ibid, I, pp. 4-5. Ibid .• I, p. 148: 'Hie regiones divisit diaeonibus et fecit VII subdiaeonos qui VII notariis inrninerent, ut gestas rnartyrurn in integro fideliter eolligerent. et rnultas fabrieas per cyrniteria praecipit.' Cited here is the translation of R. Davies, The Book of Pontiffi (Liber Pontificalis) (Liverpool, 1989), p. 8. Blaekwell

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events in question.29 The gesta as we know them are anonymous hagiographical romances, each spun around the death of one or more saints, and by no means constituting an official, or even an integrated, corpus. Each text bears its own complex relationship to a variety of sources and often to other texts in the group. Each has its own independent manuscript tradition. Although various of the gesta can be found together in the medieval liturgical books known as legendarii and passionarii, there seems to have been no convention whatsoever of treating them as a fixed corpus. (Indeed, the gesta usually travel in idiosyncratic clusters, mixed freely with other non-Roman hagiographical narratives, and sometimes with other texts of another kind altogether.) The number of manuscript witnesses to a given passio often run into the hundreds, with a staggering variety of text combinations attested in the surviving manuscripts.30 Given the lateness of our manuscript witnesses and the absence of critical editions for most of the texts in question, the dates assigned to the texts themselves by current scholarship are often the result of nineteenth-century guesswork, and rest on only a very slim evidentiary basis. There was, it is clear, already some anxiety on the part of their authors about the origins of the gesta. This is evident in the passio of Symphorosa (BHL 7971), whose prologue offers an alternative genealogy for the gesta to that afforded by the Liber Pontificalis, asserting that according to Eusebius of Caesarea, a certain Africanus recorded nearly all the gesta not only of the city of Rome but of all Italy. (This Africanus is presumably meant to be taken for the Julius Africanus whose Cbronica, now lost, Eusebius discusses at Ecclesiastical History VI. 31.) It is ironic that it is the passio of Symphorosa which makes this gesture of self-legitimation, for it is one of the passiones among the gesta which is most transparently a bricolage of borrowings rather than a genuine eye-witness account.

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It may be worth emphasizing here the distinction between the so-called gesta martyrum referred to here, whose basis in pre-Constantinian tradition is very much in doubt, and the acta martyrum, texts which are understood as originally pre-Constantinian even if they have undergone subsequent redactions. G. Bisbee, The Pre-Decian Martyr Acts and Comentarii (Philadelphia, 1988), establishes a redaction-critical approach which, he argues, makes it possible to see behind the third- and fourth-century editors of the pre-Decian acta. No similar approach has been developed for the gesta, in part because their post-Constantinian context of production, and their quasi-fictional status, have rendered them of little interest to redaction critics, who tend to focus their interest on texts of greater canonical standing. G. Philippart, 'Martyrologi e leggendari', in G. Cavallo, C. Leonardi and E. Menesto (eds.), Lo spazio letterario del medioevo, I: 11 medioevo latino (Rome, 1992), pp. 605-48. Interested colleagues may contact via website (http//:bhlms.f1tr.ucl.ac.be) a database being prepared under Philippart's direction at the University of Namur, Belgium which gives data for manuscript attestation of all hagiographical texts (listed by BHL number) listed in the Bollandist catalogues of hagiographical manuscripts, allowing the user to compare transmission routes.

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If the gesta martyrum are polemical in origin, this would help to explain why although they are widely circulated throughout the Middle Ages they were already, by the late sixth century, difficult to trace. Pope Gregory the Great, clearly thinking of the Liber Pontificalis entry under Fabian, writes of his surprise at being able to find no official record in the papal archive of the gesta of the martyrs.3I It is unclear whether Gregory means this as a comment on the gesta still in circulation. Sofia Boesch Gajano has argued that Gregory's Dialogues represent, if not precisely a repudiation of the existing gesta, at the very least an attempt to provide an alternative hagiography.32 It is not that Gregory fails to hold the martys in esteem: his preaching includes a number of sermons on the saints of the gesta, including a substantial treatment of Felicitas as the example which proves that not only a bishop, but even a member of the laity and a woman at that, may act as a praedicator on behalf of the faithful,33 It may be that Gregory viewed the gesta, or too many of them for comfort, in the same light as the Symmachan forgeries. We will see below that the attribution of the rise of the gesta to Fabian, rather than some other pope, may not have been a coincidence. It was under Fabian that the schismatic Novatian had established his rival claim as bishop, and the memory of Novatian runs like a charged wire through the annals of the papacy from Damasus to Symmachus. References to N ovatian and the N ovatianists - who may have endured as a group within the Roman polity well into the sixth century - seem to emerge particularly pointedly at moments when the Roman see is contested. A case in point is the Liber Pontificalis' entry under Cornelius, the pope (251-3) directly following Fabian. Cornelius was well-known as the pope who endured exile in Centumcellae during the Schism of Novatian. The text differs significantly from the same martyr-pope's passio recorded among the gesta martyrum. The central difference between the two texts turns on the activities of a curious figure, the quod am matrona who is given the name Lucina by both the Passio Cornelii and the Liber Pontificalis, who sees both to the burial of Pope Cornelius and, during his lifetime, to the translation of the relics of Paul from the Via Appia to the Via Ostiense while Cornelius sees to those of Jl

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Gregory the Great, Letter VIII, 28 July 598, to Eulogius of Alexandria (Corpus Christianorum Series Latina 140A, p. 549). S. Boesch Gajano, 'La proposta agiografica dei Dialoghi di Gregorio Magno', Studi Medievali, ser. 3a, 21 (1980), pp. 623-6+ Baldoin de Gaiffier, 'La lecture des passions des martyrs Rome avanr le Ixe siecle', Analecta Bollandiana 87 (1969), pp. 63-78, argues (at 75 n. 5) for the significance of Gregory's inrerest in the Passio Felicitatis but Franca Ela Consolino has argued that the version of the Passio preserved among the gesta (BHL 2853)was not what Gregory had to hand: 'Modelii di santid femminile nelle piu anriche passioni romane', Augustinianum 24 (1984),pp. 83-II3 at pp. 88-9. 11

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Peter from the Appia to the Vatican. Scholars have tended to take these assertions of the Liber Pontificalis more or less at face value: as Henry Chadwick puts it, 'These statements of the Liber Pontificalis are so unexpected that it is not altogether surprising that a few scholars have been inclined to regard the Life of Cornelius (as distinct from the Passio Comelii) as containing some substratum of truth.'34 But Lucina is a figure worthy of further inquiry. She appears in a halfdozen of the gesta martyrum relating to martyrs of various centuries, from Processus and Martinianus, according to the Passio Processi et Martiniani (BHL 6947) the jailers converted by Peter and Paul during their first-century imprisonment in the custodia Mamertini, to the Passio Sebastiani set in the time of Diocletian - a period far too long for the life-span of a historical individual. The chronological problems associated with Lucina's activities were already attracting attention at the time of the production of the gesta,35 and have not gone entirely unnoticed by modern scholars.36 But Lucina is not only a problematic figure herself: she is also only one of a group of suspiciously similar matronae who play virtually identical roles across nearly thirty of the gesta. The most intriguing of these is Lucina's near-twin Lucilla, whom Pope Damasus (pope from 366 to 384) records in an inscription as having seen to the burial of the martyrs Marcellinus and Peter on the Via Labicana.37 The link between these two figures, and their shared link to Damasus, will prove significant for understanding one of the most intractable source-critical problems of early medieval Roman history, the competition between the Vatican and the Via Appia over the memory of the apostle Peter.

The matron Lucina and the memory of the aposdes The long-standing debate over the location of the bones of Saint Peter has received virtually immeasurable attention in recent decades, in the aftermath of excavations under the Vatican.38 The historical record is confused J4

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of the apostle's original burial, with early

H. Chadwick, 'St. Peter and St. Paul [in Rome: the Problems of the memoria apostolorum ad catacumbas)', Journal of Theological Studies n.s. 8 (1957), pp. 31-52 at p. 40. G.N. Verrando, 'Note sulle tradizioni', notes (at p. 371. n. 8) that one text, the Passio Anthimi (BHL 561), attempts to reconcile the chronological disparity surrounding Lucina by explaining that she lived to be ninety-five years old. though this would not actually cover the period from Paul the Apostle to Diocletian. On a later composite passio, see B. de Gaiffier. 'Le culre de sainte Lucine it Lucques', Analecta Bollandiana 88 (1970), pp. 17-21. To supplement Verrando's account of the existing secondary literature, see also Alchermes. 'Cura pro mortuis', p. 22, n. 34.and Chadwick, 'St. Peter and St. Paul', p. 40, n. 4. See R. Krautheimer, S. Corbett and W. Frankl (eds.), Corpus Basilicarum Christianarum Romae II (Vatican City, 1959). pp. 192-3, for text and discussion. A summaty of the decade of scholarship following the Vatican excavations of 194
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memoriae recorded at both the Vatican and the Via Appia, in the latter case jointly with Paul. What is not clear is whether either site was from early times believed actually to contain the apostle's grave: the term trophaion preserved by Eusebius for the Vatican shrine, for example, is entirely ambiguous. A variety of sources from the time of Eusebius to that of Gregory the Great records a bewildering variety of explanations for why there was more than one shrine. This can be seen clearly in the Liber Pontificalis, which reflects an early-sixth-century argument for the Vatican as the home of the bones of Saint Peter, artfully subordinating the claim of the basilica ad catacumbas on the Via Appia, which had been venerated as a joint shrine of Peter and Paul from the third century. This is entirely in keeping with Pope Symmachus' attempt to enhance the Vatican in architectural terms.39 As we have seen above, the Liber identifies Pope Cornelius as Symmachus' precursor in enhancing the Vatican, by the very important contribution of having brought the body of Peter to rest there. It is an account which differs dramatically from that of the roughly contemporary Passio Cornelii (BHL 1958) preserved among the gesta martyrum, with the difference hinging on the figure of the matrona Lucina. It is worth looking closely at how the Passio Cornelii and the Liber Pontificalis vary in their accounts ofLucina's activity. Written, evidently, before the first edition of the Liber Pontificalis,40 the Passio Cornelii records the beata Lucina as having seen to the martyr-pope's burial. Accompanied by the clergy and her own familia, she buries him 'in agro suo in cripta iuxta cimiterium Callisti', but neither has any involvement with the relics of Peter and PaulY The first edition of the Liber Pontificalis, written soon after 530, expands the story. Now Cornelius and Lucina are collaborators: it is at her initiative ('rogatus a quodam matrona' - though Lucina is named explicitly in the next clause) that Cornelius exhumes the bodies of Peter and Paul. The pope then takes Peter to be interred on the Vatican Hill,42 while the matrona brings Paul to the Via Ostiensis. She buries him in praedio suo and, some time later, goes on to bury Cornelius himselfY

43

H. Tjorp, 'The Varican Excavations and the Cult of Saint Peter', Acta Archaeologica 24 (1953), pp. 27-66, suggests (at p. 65), following G. Belvederi and J. Carcopino, that it was during the sixth-century additions to St Peter's that the relics of Peter were moved from the Via Appia. On dating, see Verrando, 'Note sulle tradizioni', p. 371. Passio Comelii, Mombritius I, p. 373. This accords with the Depositio martyrum preserved in the Calendar of 354,which records commemoration of Peter in catacumbas; for discussion, see LP, I, pp. vi-x; Alchermes, 'Cura pro mortuis', pp. 92-3. The phrase, iuxta locum ubi crucifixus est, seeks to account for the innovation: LP, I, pp. 66-7. Ibid., I, pp. 66-7.

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The interpolated episode furnishes a legitimating history for the presence of the body of Peter at the Vatican,44 illustrating in addition the issue of papal control. It is understandable that the redactor of the Liber Pontificalis, wishing to honour the memory of Symmachus and perhaps drawing on pro-Symmachan sources, would wish to stress Peter's bodily presence at the Vatican, conferring spiritual power on the shrine developed by Symmachus there. But the story is complicated by a third text, the Passio Sebastiani (BHL 7543), a text whose origin has been linked to the fifth-century re-invention of the basilica ad catacumbas on the Appia as the Basilica of St Sebastian, although it could easily have been produced in the early sixth century as well. In the Passio Sebastiani, Lucina acts of her own accord 'ipsa per se cum servis suis' to bury the martyr Sebastian. After his death, the martyr appears to her in a post-mortem vision and asks her to bury him 'ad catacumbas, iuxta vestigia apostolorum' (i.e. of Peter and Paul), which she does, fishing his body out of the Cloaca Maxima.45 Like the author of the Liber Pontificalis, the author or redactor of the Passio Sebastiani intends to acknowledge a claim that the relics of Peter and Paul had once rested on the Appia, although it allows, tacitly, for the claims of the Vatican and the Ostiense - that is, for the possibility that the relics have subsequently been moved. The motive here is to account for Sebastian's presence on the Via Appia through his own desire, expressed in Lucina's vision, to be buried ad sanctos, and for this the author needed only to believe that the relics were on the Appia at the time of Sebastian's death. Some scholars have argued that the Passio is in fact designed precisely to mediate the substitution of Sebastian for the apostles. It can be argued, however, that this reading only really makes sense if one supplements the Passio with the Liber Pontificalis entry for Cornelius, and to do so one must suppress important details. Read independently, the text is evidence that its author either believed that the bodies of the apostles lay on the Via Appia, or at least wished to assert that they had done so at the time of Sebastian's martyrdom. This is where the account in the Passio Sebastiani comes into conflict with the Liber Pontificalis. While the Passio Sebastiani asserts that at the time of Sebastian's martyrdom under Diocletian the bones of Peter and Paul had still lain on the Via Appia, the Liber Pontificalis asserts that they had been moved away a generation earlier, during the reign of Decius (the persecution which occasioned the death of Cornelius). That the same Lucina is represented as having seen to the burial of Cornelius and Sebastian during the two chronologically distant persecutions only 44 41

See also the LP entry for Peter: ibid, I. pp. 50-3. Passio Sebastiani 88 (Jan. n, p. 278). Acta Sanctorum.

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compounds the confusion. Such uncertainties about dating were the occupational hazard of the early medieval writer as we have seen above; in the case of the bodies of Peter and Paul the confused biography of Lucina intersects with what was already, in the early sixth century, a complex historiography. It is a well-known fact that the Depositio martyrum recorded in the Calendar of Filocalus in 354 records 'Petri in catacumbas et Pauli Ostense, T usco et Basso consulibus' - from 258, the year in which, according to the Liber Pontificalis, the martyr-pope Sixtus and his deacon Lawrence were executed.46 By the time of Pope Damasus, it was papal policy to assert that the apostles were no longer on the Via Appia, as Damasus' metrical inscription at the basilica ad catacumbas CHic habitasse prius sanctos cognoscere debes') shows.47 An important dimension of Damasus' strategy for consolidating his papal authority is his interest in the schism of Novatian, an element which recurs again in the time of Symmachus. At one level, this may simply be a historical cipher for the broader issue of papal schism, but the N ovatianists do seem to have been alive and well in Rome at the end of the fourth century, and among the gesta traces of a pro-Novatianist dimension - of the speak. Peter Llewellyn, for example, has argued which he assigns to a pro-Laurentian author in sixth century, should be read as a Novatianist central character the priest Novatus standing

martyum one can find opposing party, so to that the Vita Praxedis, the first decade of the roman a clef with its in for the schismatic

Novatian.48

The memory of Novatian is almost certainly important for understanding the confusion over the burial place of Peter. The thorny question of whether the Depositio martyrum reflects a Novatianist slant, as Duchesne may have suspected and Mohlberg argued in an evocative

46

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Depositio martyrum, in LP, I, p. n. Regrettably, some scholars have wished to homogenize the historical record by emending the text to conform to the later Martyrologium Hieronymianum entry, which reads Petri in Vaticano, Pau/i vero in via Ostensi, utrumque in Catacumbas, see R. Krautheimer, S. Corbett and W. Frankl (eds.), Corpus Basilicarum Christianarum Romae IV (Vatican City, 1970), pp. 102-3 for discussion. Damasus' Epigram 20 (according to Ferrua's numbering) is cited in full in Chadwick, 'St. Peter and St. Paul', p. 34: Hic habitasse prius sanctos cognoscere debes, nomina quisque Petri pariter Pauli requiris. Discipulos Oriens misit, quod sponte fatemur, sanguinis ob meritum, Christum per astta secuti aetherios petiere sinus regnaque piorum: Roma suos potius meruit defendere cives. Haec Damasus vestras referat nova sidera laudes. Argument

in L1ewellyn, 'The Roman Church',

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1952 article,49 is not to be resolved here, but its witness to the cult of

Peter and Paul at the Appia could well reflect Novatianist control of the shrine. Oamasus' hie habitasse inscription, combined with his known interest in bringing the Novatianists back from schism, would seem to support the contention that the shrine on the Appia had Novatianist connotations. Not insignificant, further, is the fact that the Liber Pontifiealis attributes a translation of the relics of Peter and Paul to the time ofCornelius - relegated to exile at Centumcellae during Novatian's ascendancy. If the Liber Pontifiealis goes so far as to retroject the translatio of the bones of Peter to the time of Cornelius and N ovatian, it is likely that this reflects the view of the early sixth-century redactor of the Liber that the trouble over Peter's location had its roots in Cornelius' face-off with Novatian, a view perhaps mirroring the importance of Novatianist claims in his own day. Mohlberg alters the widely accepted idea that the Passio Sebastiani was generated during the papacy of Sixtus III (432-40), when the Liber Pontifiealis records the pope as founding a monastery ad eataeumbas;50 by calling attention to a slightly earlier initiative of Innocent I (401-17) vis-a.-vis the Novatianists.51 He suggests that the monastery was intended as a way of dispelling Novatianist claims on the shrine, and the Passio as subordinating the Appia's claim on the bones of Saint Peter to that of the Vatican, by abetting the substitution of Sebastian for the apostles as the main object of veneration on the Appia. In fact this interpretation of the Passio's origin is not dependent on a Sixtine dating of the text, since the Novatianist presence in Rome continued up to the sixth century at least. In any event, it is possible that the Passio Sebastiani and the Liber Pontifiealis both stem from a clumsily co-ordinated attempt to minimize the claims of a Novatianist shrine of Peter rival to that of the Vatican. Their divergent views of exactly when the relics of the apostles left the Appia could, on this reading, be seen as independent, and thus unsuccessfully co-ordinated, attempts to 'solve' the same historical problem. But the Passio Sebastiani does not in fact argue that the bones of the apostles are no longer on the Appia - Mohlberg's hypothesis rests on the not entirely convincing idea that the ad sanetos burial of Sebastian 'iuxta

5°

L.K. Mohlberg, 'Hisrorisch-kritische Bemerkungen [zum Ursprung der sogennanten "Memoria Apostolorum" an der Appischen StraEe]', in B. Fischer and V. Fiala (eds.), Colligere Fragmenta: Festschrift Alban Do/d zum 70 Geburtstag am 7-7.52 (Beuron: Beuroner Kunstverlag, 1952), pp. 5Z-74. On the foundation of the monasterium in catacumbas, see LP, I, p. 234; G. Ferrari, Early

51

Roman Monasteries: Notes ftr the History of the Monasteries and Convents at Rome .from the V through the X Century (Vatican City, 1957), pp. 163-5; and Krautheimer et at., Corpus Basilicarum IV, pp. 99-105. Mohlberg, 'Hisrorisch-ksitische Bemerkungen', pp. 70-1 and 74.

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VeStigIa apostolorum' would have served to supplant, rather than reinforcing, the memory of the apostles. The opposite possibiliry should not, however, be ruled out. This is that the Passio Sebastiani was in fact intended to support the claim that the apostles' bones still lay on the Appia - as in the case of the seventh-century Roman version of the Life and Miracles of Saint Thecla, where Thecla's travel to find her restingplace next to the bones of Saint Paul on the Via Ostiense presumes that Paul's bones are indeed still in situ. In this case, there seem to be two main possibilities to account for its origin. The first is that the text pre-dates Damasus' claim 'hie babitasse' that the bones have been moved: i.e. that the Passio was written duting the time between the persecution of Diocletian and the death of Damasus in 384. While this goes against a consensus of scholarship that has held for close to a century, there is no absolute reason why it could not be the case. The second possibility is that the text was written in opposition to the Damasan claim that the bones of the apostles were no longer on the Appia. In this case the text might have its origin among the Novatianists, the Ursicinians, the Laurentians, or indeed another as yet unidentified group who opposed the claims of the Vatican and perhaps, by extension, of the papacy. The fact that in burying Sebastian Lucina acts of her own accord 'ipsa per se cum servis suis', rather than in conjunction with the clergy or the pope as in the Passio Cornelii and the Liber Pontificalis, would in this case acquire added significance. There is at present no final answer to the mystery of Lucina and Sebastian, or indeed of the authorship and intended purpose of the Passio Sebastiani. A final, inconclusive clue regarding Lucina's genesis leads back to the Novatianist problem by a roundabout route. It is possible that the name Lucina has its origins in the titulus Lucinae in the Campus Martius, a variant on the system by which the names of the titular churches were revised into saints' names with apposite passiones, such as, for example, the titulus Caeciliae giving rise to St. Caecilia, or the titulus Anastasiae giving rise to St. Anastasia, although since there is no late Roman passio of Lucina, the case here would be somewhat different. The church becomes, not Sancta Lucina, but S. Lorenzo in Damaso: the church in which Damasus was elected. 52 (It must be said that Lucina does not appear with Lawrence in the Passio Polychronii (BHL 6884), although a similar figure, the widow Cyriaca, appears in that text and sees to the burial of the saint.) It is possible, in any event, that the author of the Passio Sebastiani borrowed Lucina's name from the Titulus Lucinae, on the understanding that the titulus was named after a patron of the pre-Constantinian church. Was he aware of the 52

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anti-Novatianist initiatives of the church's late-fourth-century patron, Damasus? Or had Damasus, indeed, attempted to supplant the memory of Lucina in the Campus Martius as part of an anti-Novatianist initiative?53 It is at this point that Lucina's Doppelganger Lucilla, whose burial of Peter and Marcellinus Damasus records, comes to be of particular interest. Damasus would almost certainly have been aware of the parallel between Lucilla and Lucina. If Lucina were already a N ovatianist icon in Damasus' time Canotion at least as plausible as that of Sebastian as a papal tool for directing the memory of the bones of the apostles away from the Via Appia), Damasus' Lucilla may have been a counter-figure 'borrowed' from the opposition. Alternately, if Lucina is to be understood as a papal tool in Damasus' time - a role she certainly played in the time of Symmachus - then Lucina and Lucilla may have been two of any number of now forgotten historical-fictional matronae whose memory Damasus celebrated, a point intriguingly consonant with his nick-name, auriscalpius matronarum.54 Whatever the resolution of the mystery, the Lucina motif bears significance beyond sixth-century Rome. It is attested in other regions, though by no means in so great a concentration as in the case of Rome. Re-evaluation of non-Roman texts bearing the Lucina motif would call into question the authenticity, for example, of as central a text for the study of martyr cult as the Acta Maximiliani, a text which Victor Saxer has proposed as the earliest dated attestation of ad sanctos burial in late antiquity. 55Although it is possible that the authentic Acta of Maximilian served as a pattern for the later and more historically suspect material in the gesta martyrum, it should also be asked whether the Acta Maximiliani should not be 'demoted' to the status of the Passio of Maximilian's contemporary Sebastian - both are recorded as martyred under Diocletian - and thus should no longer be accepted as documentary evidence for the historical events surrounding Maximilian's death. It is certainly the case that in North Mrica around the beginning of the fourth century, the narrative motif of the matrona who wishes to control martyr cult against the wishes of a bishop had already evolved into a stock tale type anticipating the quarrel between the Empress Eudoxia and the bishop of Constantinople, John 53

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The Lucina trope exists, but not Lucina, in the Passio Laurentii. Passio Polychronii 29 tecotds that Lautentius was bUtied 'in ptaedio Cyriacae viduae'. Text in H. Delehaye, 'Recherches sur le legendier romain: la passion de S. Polychronius', Analecta Bollandiana 51 (1933), pp. 34-98 at p. 93. J. Fontaine, 'Un sobriquet perfide de Damase: matronarum auriscalpius', in D. Parte and J.-P. Neraudau, (eds.), Hommage a Henri Le Bonniec: Res Sacrae (Brussels, 1988), pp. 177-92. V. Saxer, Morts, martyrs, reliques en Aftique chrhienne aux premiers siecles: les temoignages de Tertullin, Cyprien, et Augustin a la lumiere de 'archeologie afticaine (Paris, 1980), p. 108. Text of the Acta Maximiliani, with English translation, in H. Musurillo, The Acts of the Christian Martyrs (Oxford, 1972), pp. 244--9.

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Chrysostom;56 it is equally possible that the positive version of the matrona-bishop tale type should also be taken as a sign of quasi-fictional status.57

Two revision woman? Rome -

broader questions remain. Why was Lucina, the instrument of used both by the Passio Sebastiani and the Liber Pontificalis, a And why was martyr cult so crucial a territory for the bishop of or the Novatianists - to control? The answer to each is in some

respects self-evident. Both the biblical and the classical traditions had given prominence to women in matters funerary - as mourners, as preparers of the body for burial, as guardians of the tomb. Similarly, the martyrs had held an important place in the Christian imagination from the Book of Acts onwards, and the Christian community's urgent interest in their bodily remains is well attested. But one would like to be more specific about what made these elements of existing tradition so compelling as carriers of the voice of a schismatic or an aspiring pope.

Conclusion: the martyr and civic agonism Sixth-century Rome, like other early medieval towns, was a beargarden. 58 The Roman bishops aspired to mediate the continual altercations of fractious nobles and the crowds from whom they claimed allegiance;59 it was an aspiration which required unflagging political manoeuvring, and one whose fulfilment was the price of attaining, and staying in, office. That civitas would always be riven by the conflicting interests of those who aspired to stand at its pinnacle was a fact embodied by the martyr's agonistic figure. It was also a fact which an earlier age had understood as not merely unavoidable, but even as a sign of the ancient city's health. Like the Greeks, the Romans had tended to see the love of honour as a force which could be dangerous but which, properly harnessed, could lead its citizens to perform great gestures for the common good. For the Christian polity to endure as a means for ordering the life of the city, it was necessary to develop such a specifically Christian language for harnessing the love of honour, and for mediating the civic conflict which often accompanied it.

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On the altercation between Lucilla of Carthage and the archdeacon Caecilian over martyr relics in her possession, see Optatus of Milevis, Libri VII, 1.16, (SC 412, pp. 206-8). On Chrysostom and Eudoxia, see K Cooper, The Virgin and the Bride: Idealized Womanhood in Late Antiquity (Cambridge, MA, 1996). On how 'negative' and 'positive' versions of the topos of womanly influence reinforce one another, see K Cooper, 'Insinuations of Womanly Influence: an Aspect of the Christianization of the Roman Aristocracy', Journal of Roman Studies 82 (1992), pp. 150-64. P.R.L. Brown, Relics and Social Status in the Age ofGregory of Tours (Reading, 1977), p. 20. A helpful analogy may be drawn to the Saxon kings discussed by KJ. Leyser, Rule and Conflict in an Early Medieval Society: Ottonian Saxony (Bloomingron, IN, 1979), pp. 98ff. Blackwell Publishers Ltd 2000

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To 'de-clericalize' our reading of the Roman church in late antiquity should not be to forget the bishop, but rather to remember that if he raised himself marginally above the tumult of contending parties, and succeeded in proposing himself as the broker of a moment's truce, this was a not inevitable achievement. Clerics were paid-up participants in factional conflict; indeed, their power was often bought through their own expertise in such negotiations. What set the cleric apart from lay dynasts whose claim to power was grounded in such givens as inherited property and birth-order, was an element of liminality. In the pyramid of patronage and allegiance, his position was peculiarly malleable, and peculiarly fragile. What he needed, like his lay counterpart, was a morally legitimate language of self-assertion. This is important for understanding the ever-increasing significance of the cult of the martyrs to a society as profoundly agonistic as Rome at the end of antiquity. As the Roman polity found itself increasingly dependent on the social language accessible within the Christian tradition, the limitations of that tradition became increasingly evident. The Roman aristocrat, schooled as he was in the concerns of dynasty and the habits of competitive display, would have discovered quickly one of the new moral language's most glaring inadequacies, its patent inability to furnish a moral infrastructure for the legitimate assertion of power. As he grappled with a social rhetoric geared finely to the otherworldly gestures of turning the other cheek and shielding the left hand from a view of the right, the Christian statesman - be he bishop or magistrate - might well alight with relief on an image which allowed him to feel that his own position - one that might well be genuinely precarious - was endowed with the moral superiority of the weak. That a woman might serve as an icon of this morally superior weakness should come as no surprise. But no icon could serve this purpose more compellingly than the martyr. The singular Christian exemplar of a virtue unfolding in a fatal act of fidelity to his or her cause, the martyr was a tailor-made champion for the Christian in conflict.6o The ferocity of the martyrs in Christian legend was well-attested, whether in the genuine pre-Constantinian narratives or in the later writers such as Prudentius. This righteous violence, this intrinsically agonistic power, had traditionally been directed against figures outside the Christian community - the Roman authorities, the crowd, the recalcitrant families, the Devil himself. If it could be annexed as a legitimate vehicle for expressing the conflicts of interest which arose within the now vastly expanded Christian polity, it might serve as an 60

See K. Cooper, 'The Voice of the Victim: Gendering Early Christian Martyrdom', Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester 80:3 (1998), pp. 147-57, and literature cited there.

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immeasurably useful channel, escape valve, and weapon. It was precisely the martyr's anti-civic origins which made him or her so powerful a tool for resolving the tensions of Christian civitas. Indeed, the problem with martyrs was, if anything, that their ability to represent aggressive moral superiority could be all too supple: by the fourth century, we find rival communities each producing their own martyr narratives.61 The Roman martyrs, as it happens, were to go on to a brilliant career throughout the Middle Ages, and far beyond Rome, for precisely this reason. The wide circulation of Roman relics, and of the gesta martyrum themselves in manuscript form, was to supply a means by which bishops, abbots and abbesses across Europe could harness the voice of the martyrs while asserting a privileged relationship to the Roman church - a process in which Lucina, Sebastian and Pope Cornelius figured prominently. Tangible evidence, for example, exists of the vitality of the inter-urban networks of relic exchange so important to Pope Symmachus a century later during the reign of Gregory the Great, despite the later Pope's hesitancy, discussed above, regarding the status of the gesta martyrum. Preserved in the cathedral treasury at Monza is a papyrus inventory recording the names of the Roman martyrs from whose shrines a certain John had collected lamp-oil, which he then sent as a gift to the Lombard Queen Theodelinda, 'tenporibus (sic) domni Gregorii papae'.62 The inventory begins with the apostles Peter and Paul and includes a wide variety of Roman martyrs, including Lucina, Cornelius and Sebastian. Read in the comparative flatness of a list, the names lose their drama, becoming neither more nor less than additions to the number of Rome's heavenly advocates. The contested circumstances of their entry into the historical record are long forgotten. This dimension of intermittent anonymity - combined with the broad circulation of liturgical books in which their story was recorded in all-too-vivid, if formulaic, terms would generate a steady livelihood for Lucina and Cornelius, and even more so Sebastian, for centuries to come. Department of Religion and Theology, University of Manchester

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This is particularly striking in the case of the Donatist mattyrs: see now M. Tilley, The Donatist Martyrs (Liverpool, 1997). 'I papiri di Monza', in R. Valentini and G. Zucchetti (eds.), Codice Topografico della citta di Roma II (Rome, 1942), pp. 29-47at p. 47. Blackwell Publishers Ltd 2000

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