Page:Catholic Encyclopedia, volume 3.djvu/574

 CEMETERY

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CEMETERY

were not learned men, but pious travellers, anxious to benefit their successors and unconsciously enabling us to form some exact idea of the solemn scenes that they once assisted at. (Shahan, The Beginnings of Christianity, New York, 1905, 410-16.)

The Vatican Cemetery. — The first popes were buriednearthebodyof St. Peter, "inVaticano" "juxta corpus beati Petri". St. Anaeletus, the second suc- cessor of St. Peter raised over the body of the Apostle a memoria, or small chapel (Lib. Pontif., ed. Du- chesne, I, 125). This narrow site was the burial- place of the popes to Zephyrinus (d. 217), with whom began the series of papal burials in the cemetery of St. Callistus (Barnes, The Tomb of St. Peter, London, 1900). Among the epitaphs discovered near the

St. Callistus

tomb of St. Peter are two celebrated ones, dogmatic in content, that of Livia Primitiva, now in the Louvre, and that known as the Ichthys Zonton (Fish of the Living), symbolic of the Eucharist. In the sixteenth century a marble fragment showing the word Linus was found on this site, not improbably from the epitaph of the first successor of St. Peter. The building of two basilicas, the Old St. Peter's in the fourth and the New St. Peter's in the sixteenth century, easily explains the disappearance of the early papal monuments "in Vaticano". The cemetery was probably above ground. From 258 to 260 (de Waal, Marucchi) the bodies of the Apostles reposed in the catacomb of St. Sebastian on the Via Appia, in a cubiculum or chapel (the Platonia), yet extant. whither they were taken from their original resting- places for some not sufficiently clear reason. In the fiftli century members of the imperial family found a resting-place in the vicinity of the Apostle's tomb. It was long a favourite burial-place; in 689 the Saxon king, Cedwalla, was laid to rest there, "ad cujus [sc. apostolorum principis] sacratissimum corpus a finibus tense pio ductus amore venerat ". says Bede (H. E., v. 7), who has preserved the valuable metrical epitaph put up by order of Pope Sergius ending with: "Hie di posvtus est Caedual, qui et Pelrus, rex Saxonum,"

etc. The "Grotte Vecchie" and the "Grotte Nuove", or subterraneous chapels and galleries in the vicinity of the tomb of St. Peter, cover the site of this ancient Christian cemetery; in them he buried also a number of popes; St. Gregory I, Boniface VIII, Nicholas V, Alexander VI. The rich sarcophagus of Junius Bassus, important for early Christian sym- bolism, is in the "Grotte Nuove" [de Waal, Der Sar- kophag des Junius Bassus in den Grotten von St. Petrus, Rome, 1900; Dufresne, Les Cryptes vaticanes. Rome, 1900; Dionisi (edd. Sarti and Settele), Sacrar. Vatican® basilica? cryptarum monumenta, Rome, 1828-40].

I. ViaAurelia, beyond the Porta Cavallegieri. — 1. Cemetery of St. Pancratius, a very youthful martyr, probably of the persecution of Diocletian. His body was never removed to a city church as were so many others, hence the cemetery remained open in the Middle Ages. Its galleries have suffered a complete devastation, last of all during the French Revolution, when the relics of the martyrs were dispersed. 2. Cemetery of Sts. Processus and Martinianus, the jailers of St. Peter in the Mamertine Prison, con- verted by him, and soon after his death beheaded on the Aurelian Way. The pious matron Lucina buried their bodies on her own property. The cem- etery, it is believed, extends beneath the Villa Pamfili, and perhaps beyond under the Vigna Pelle- grini. The accessible galleries exhibit a complete devastation, also very large loculi, an indication of remote Christian antiquity. In the fourth-century overground basilica St. Gregory preached his sermon "Ad. SS. martyrum corpora consistimus, fratres" etc. (P. L. LXXVI, 1237). Paschal I transported the bodies of the two saints to a chapel in the Vatican. After the twelfth century the cemetery was totally forgotten. 3. Cemetery of the "Duo Felices". The origin of the name is obscure, though connected somehow with Felix II (355-58) and Felix I (269-74); the latter, however, was certainly buried in the papal crypt in St. Callistus. 4. Cemetery of Calepodius, a very ruinous catacomb under the Vigna Lamperini, opposite the "Casale di S. Pio V", or about the third milestone. Calepodius was a priest martyred in a popular outbreak, and buried here by Pope St. Callistus. Later the pope's own body was interred in the same cemetery, not in the one that bears his name. St. Julius I (337-52) was buried there, and a little oratory long preserved the memory of St. Cal- listus. His body was eventually transferred to Santa Maria in Trastevere, where it now lies.

II. Via Portuensis, the road leading to "Portus" or Porto, the new "Havre" of Rome. — 5. Cemetery of St. Pontianus, to the right beneath Monte Verde. It is so called, not from Pope Pontianus (230-35) but from a wealthy Christian of the same name mentioned in the Acts of Callistus, and whose house seems to have been the original nucleus of the present Sta Maria in Trastevere, the site once claimed by the cauponarii under Alexander Severus, but ad- judged by that emperor to the Christians. It was discovered by Bosio in 1618. Many famous martyrs were buried there, among them Sts. Abdon and Sennen, noble Persians who suffered martyrdom at Rome, it is thought in 257. In an overground fourth-century basilica were deposited the bodies of two popes, Anastasius I (d. 405) and Innocent I (d. 417). Byzantine frescoes of the sixth century attract attention, also the "historic chapel" of Sts, Abdon and Sennen, whose bodies were removed to the basilica magna above ground about 640, finally in 820 to the city basilica of St. .Mark, when the ceme- tery was abandoned. 6. Cemetery of St. Felix, in- dicated in several "Itineraria" as located on the Via Portuensis, not far from the cemetery of Pontianus, but not yet found; also known as "ad insalsatos" probably a corruption (Marucchi) of "ad infulatos".