Page:Catholic Encyclopedia, volume 3.djvu/577

 CEMETERY

515

CEMETERY

was brought the body of the soldier-martyr. The cemetery was discovered by Fabretti in 1672 and re- opened in 1864, when the railway to Civitavecchia was building, but was again closed because of the ruinous state of the corridors and crypts. 18. Ceme- tery of Sts. Peter and Marcellinus, known also as ad duas lauros, ad Helenam from the neighbouring (ruined) mausoleum of St. Helena (Tor Pignattara), and sub Augusta, in comitatu, from a neighbouring villa of Emperor Constantine. St. Peter and St. Marcellinus suffered under Diocletian. They were honoured with a line Damasan epitaph known to us from the early medieval epigraphic collections. Here also were buried St. Tiburtius, son of the city prefect, Chromatins, and the obscurely known group called the "Quattuor Coronati", four marble-cutters from the Danubian region. The splendid porphyry sar- cophagus at the Vatican came from the mausoleum of St. Helena. In 826 the bodies of Peter and Mar- cellinus were stolen from the crypt and taken to Germany, where they now rest at Seligenstadt ; the story is graphically told by Einhard (Mon. Germ. Hist., Script., XV, 39). Since 1896 excavations have been resumed here, and have yielded important results, among them the historic crypt of Sts. Peter and Mar- cellinus and a small chapel of St. Tiburtius. Wilpert discovered here and illustrated a number of important frescoes: Our Lord amid four saints, the Annuncia- tion, the Adoration of the Magi, the Good Shepherd, Oranti, and some miracles of Christ (Wilpert, Di un ciclo di rappresentanze cristologiche nel ennitero dei SS. Pietro e Marcellino, Rome, 1892). Elsewhere are scenes that represent the agape, or love-feast, of the primitive Christians, symbolic of paradise or of the Eucharist. There is also a noteworthy fresco of the Blessed Virgin with the Infant Jesus between two adoring Magi. This cemetery is said to have been more richly decorated with frescoes than any other except that of Domitilla.

VIII. Via Tiburtina. — 19. Cemetery of St. Cyriaea. According to ancient tradition, represented by the pilgrim-guides (itineraria), she was the widow who buried St. Laurence (martyred 6 Aug., 258) on her property " in agro Verano ". In 1616 Bosiosawin this cemetery an altar, a chair, and an inscription, with a dedication to St. Laurence. The enlargement of the modern cemetery of San Lorenzo damaged consider- ably this venerable catacomb. Many important or interesting epitaphs have been found in this ceme- tery, among them those of a group of Christian vir- gins of the fourth and fifth centuries (De Rossi, Bullettino, 1863). In the fourth century Constan- tine built here a basilica over the tomb (ad corpus) of St. Laurence; here were buried Pope Zosimus I lis). Sixtus III (440), and Hilary (468); in one of t hese three niches, later vacant, lie buried the remains of Pius IX. In 432 Sixtus III added another church (basilica major) facing t lie Via Tiburtina; it was not until L218 that Honorius III united these churches and made the basilica of Constantine the Confessio of the earlier Sixtine basilica, on which occasion the presbyieriwn, or sanctuary, had to be elevated. 20. Cemetery nf St. Hippolytus. On t he left of tin- Vis Tiburtina under the Vigna Gori (nowCaetani). Con- siderable uncertainty reigns as to the identity of this Hippolytus, both in his Acts and in the relative verses of Prudentius; possibly, as Marucchi remarks, this confusion is as old as the time of St. Damasus and is reflected in his metrical epitaph, discovered by De Rossi in a St. Petersburg manuscript. According to this document Hippolytus was at firsta follower ol Novatian, about the middle of t lie third century, but returned to the Catholic Faith and died a martyr. The famous statue of Hippolytus, the Christian writer of the third century, mule in 222, and now in the Lateran Museum, was found in the Vigna Gori in the sixteenth century; our martyr and the Chris-

tian scholar are doubtless identical. In 1882-83 a small subterranean basilica was discovered here with three naves and lighted by an air-shaft. According to the "Itinerary of Salzburg" this cemetery con- tained the body of the actor-martyr Genesius and the bodies of the martyrs Triphonia and Cyrilla, the (alleged) Christian wife and daughter of Emperor Decius, of whom nothing more is known.

IX. Via Nomentana. — 21. Cemetery of St. Nico- medes, near the Porta Pia, in the Villa Patrizi, known to Bosio but rediscovered only in 1864. Nicomedes is said to have suffered martyrdom under Domitian and to have been buried by one of his disciples "in horto juxta muros". Very ancient masonry, Greek epitaphs, and other signs, indicate the great age of tins small cemetery, that may reach back to Apostolic times. 22. Cemetery of St. Agnes. The body of St. Agnes, who suffered martyrdom probably under Valerian (253-60), w r as buried by her parents "in prsediolo suo", i. e. on a small property they owned along the Nomentan Way. There was already in this place a private cemetery, which grew rapidly in size after the interment of the youthful martyr. The excavations carried on since 1901, at the expense of Cardinal Kopp, have revealed a great many fourth- to sixth-century graves (forma') beneath the sanctuary of t tie basilica. The cemetery (three stories deep) is divided by archaeologists into three regions, the aforesaid primitive nucleus (third century), a neigh- bouring third-century area, and two fourth-century groups of corridors that connect the basilica of St. Agnes with the ancient round basilica of St. Con- stantia. It is not certain that the actual basilica of St. Agnes, built on a level with the second story of the catacomb, is identical with that built by Con- stantine; there is reason to suspect a reconstruction of the edifice towards the end of the fifth century. St. Damasus composed for the tomb of Agnes one of his finest epitaphs. Symmachus (498-514), and Honorius I (625-38), restored the basilica, if the former did not reconstruct it; to the latter we owe the fresco of St. Agnes between these two popes. In the sixteenth century, and also in the nineteenth (Pius IX, 1855), it was again restored; in 1901 (25 Nov.) new excavations laid bare the heavy silver sarcophagus in which St. Pius V had deposited the bodies of St. Agnes and St. Emerentiana. In the neighbouring Cocmeterium majus (accessible from the cemetery of St . Agnes through an arenaria, or sand-pit) is the famous crypt or chapel of St. Emerentiana, opened up in 1875, at the expense of Monsignore CroBtarosa, and identified by De Rossi with the Ccemeterium Ostrianum, the site of very archaic Roman memories of St. Peter, a position now strongly disputed by liis disciple Marucchi (see below, Ceme- tery of Priscilla). In the vicinity of the crypt of St. Emerentiana is an important arcosolium-fresco repre- senting t he Blessed Virgin as an Orante, with the Infant Jesus before her. It belongs to the first half of the fourth century, and is said by Marucchi (II, 343) to be almost the latest catacomb fresco of Our Lady, a kind of hyphen between the primitive fres- coes and the early Byzantine Madonnas; it seems at t In' same time a very early evidence of theadorational use of paintings in public worship (Le Bourgeois, Sainte Emercntienne. vierge ct martyre, Paris, 1895). 23. Cemetery of St. Alexander, between four and five miles from Rome, and within the limits of an early Diocese of Pieulea. It is the burial-place of two martyrs, known as Alexander and Eventius. Whether

this Alexander is the second-century pope and mar- tyr (c. 105-15), as his legendary Acts indicate, is quite doubtful; possibly he is a local martyr of

Piculea. The matron Severina buried here the bodies

of the two saints in one tomb, and near to them the body of Saint Theodulus; early in (lie ninth century they were all transferred to the city, after which the