Damasus and the Invention of Early Christian Rome

In 1864 Giovanni Battista de Rossi (1822-1894) dedicated the first volume of La Roma sotterranea cristianato Rome's "second Damasus," the Risorgimento pope, Pius IX (1846-1878). ¹ The comparison is still striking. The new Christian archaeology, then so furiously revealing subterranean shrines and ancient tombs originally discovered or lavishly embellished by the "first" Damasus (366-384), owed as much in practical terms to Pius's patronage as to de Rossi's tireless excavations. Twelve years before, in January 1852, Pius had approved the Commissione di Archeologia Sacra, whose mandate included "the systematic and scientific exploration" of the Roman catacombs. Two years after that, on May 11, he joined de Rossi (as he would elsewhere on other occasions) to view San Callisto's papal crypt, where a month earlier de Rossi had recovered the precious fragments of two large marble tablets elegantly inscribed with Damasus' name and verses. ² But most significantly, perhaps, Pius had urged de Rossi to produce the magisterial study that quickly replaced Antonio Bosio's Roma sotterranea, published in 1632. ³ With some justice, then, this pope, so opportunistic and energetic in changing times, assumed the role that in de Rossi's eyes the fourth-century bishop had played in the Roman underground's first age of discovery. ⁴

But Damasus' name was no less magical for de Rossi's disciples who inherited his hunt for "i monumenti più famosi dell'età eroica del cristianesimo," for the pursuit, they could imagine, had truly begun in the days of Damasus. ⁵ Orazio Marucchi's (1852-1931) handbook of Christian archaeology not only proclaimed Damasus the premier "poète des martyrs" but also pronounced him "nearly" the first Christian archaeologist. ⁶ Sévère Charrier, in turn, openly applauded Damasus' entanglement of research and mission. Charrier's "premier archéologue chrétien" may have recovered and adorned the tombs of the saints to honor these "héros de la foi" and preserve their endangered history, but he also enlisted their help in the still pressing struggle against the forces of heresy, schism, and paganism. ⁷ Even so, Charrier supposed, Damasus' most enduring legacy was to be found in the guidance and instruction that his elegantly inscribed elogia, ringing the city, had offered to so many generations of pilgrims to Roma sotterranea cristiana. ⁸

And, indeed, Damasus' elogiadid educate several centuries of late antique and early medieval visitors to Rome's vast network of suburban catacombs. By the mid-fifth century, when the heyday of expansion and new burial was over, these subterranean galleries had become a meandering history exhibit. Thereafter late antique and medieval itinerariaand syllogae attest not only to the continuing allure of these halls of fame but also to the resonant vitality of Damasus' ubiquitous monumental texts. ⁹ Nevertheless, these days it is Damasus the impresario of the saints, not the historical archaeologist, who grips our imagination. There is no longer an unobstructed approach to Rome of the martyrs through catacomb cubicularefurbished and decorated by a fourth-century bishop whose energetic articulation of the cult of Peter and Paul was an unabashed assertion of Roman primacy, or whose hagiographic poetry constructed models of episcopal leadership and church unity deemed apposite for a Christian flock rent by schism and discord. ¹⁰ Moreover, scholars who acknowledge the general will of commemoration to erase as well as preserve portions of the past, or who recognize the complex polysemy of late antique Rome's Christian cityscape, are not likely to collude unwittingly with a polemically adroit churchman's recovery and revival of Rome's early Christian story, especially one operating in an age of acute identity crisis. ¹¹ And yet, Damasus' archaeology draws us in.

Excavating identity

Past and present (as well as visions of the future) collided abruptly in mid-fourth-century Rome. The collision was the collateral...