Epigrams 1

The printing being now finished, certain annotations and observations were communicated to me by the zeal and kindness of the illustrious man Lord Abbot Terribilini, which I judged should be added to the work in this place, lest I deprive readers of the benefit of them. This learned man therefore considers, in the first place, that Damasus was born at Rome, and uses to confirm this opinion the very reasons which I touched upon. He observes also that there are several ancient writers, mentioned by Sarazani and Coustant, who treat of that pontiff and praise him:

but among them not even one who called him a Spaniard before the Catalogue of the Roman Pontiffs, which they say was composed under Felix IV, or Anastasius, by whom they suppose that Catalogue to have been copied; yet he judges the authority of each of these writers to be not great. He then brings forward more recent authors from that illustrious nation, and says that they rest on no solid foundation, and moreover wrangle among themselves about the place; finally, from the Breviary of Évora, printed in the year 1548, he transcribes the prayer and the lessons accommodated to the Feast of St. Damasus. Behold here, then, all gathered together. And from the Breviary of the Church of Évora in Lusitania, printed in type in the year 1548, page 837. OF THE POPE AND CONFESSOR.

The Prayer. — Mercifully bestow upon us thy mercy, O Lord, we beseech thee, through the intercession of thy blessed confessor and pontiff Damasus; and be propitious to our sins through his suffrages. Lesson I. — Blessed Damasus, the first of this name, by nation a Spaniard, of the homeland of Guimarães, from the province of Braga, his father being Antony, succeeded Liberius—according to Jerome in the Ecclesiastical History—but, according to others, Felix II in the pontificate, in the year of the Lord 369, under the emperors Valentinian and Valens. He sat eighteen years, two months, and ten days. Lesson

II. — But Ursicinus, or, as others read, Ursinus, a deacon of the Roman Church, not enduring that Damasus should be preferred above himself, broke out into such fury that, having persuaded a certain ignorant and rustic bishop, and gathered a band of turbulent and seditious men, in the basilica which is called Sicininum he extorted that he should be made bishop—the laws, the order, and the tradition being overthrown. And so, when the matter was being conducted not only by votes but also by force and arms, many fell on both sides. Ammianus Marcellinus, a historian of those times, reports that one hundred and thirty-seven corpses of the slain were found in a single day in the basilica of Sicininum. At length, by the consent of the priests and the people, Damasus was confirmed;

and Ursicinus was cast out of the City and removed to the Church of Naples. Lesson III. — But Damasus, accused of adultery out of envy, cleared himself before a synod in the presence of forty-four bishops; by whom he was acquitted as innocent, and his accusers, the deacons Concordius and Callistus, were condemned and cast out from the Church. Certainly blessed Jerome, in his letter to Pammachius, calls him not only an excellent man and learned in the Scriptures, but even a virgin and a doctor of the virgin Church. Lesson IV. — At last, the Church being at peace, Damasus, delighting in literary leisure, wrote the Lives of all the Pontiffs who were before him, and sent them to Jerome:

And when by diligent searching he had found many bodies of the Saints, he adorned their tombs with verses; for he had an elegant gift for composing poetry. He composed many short works in heroic verse, and likewise many Letters. Fifth Lesson.—He greatly increased the churches and divine worship. For he built two basilicas: one near the theatre, and the other he dedicated on the Via Ardeatina, at the catacombs; and the Platonia, where the bodies of the apostles Peter and Paul had once lain, together with the bodies of the saints buried in that place, he embellished with verses, for the memory of posterity. Sixth Lesson.—Moreover, the basilica which he had founded in honour of Saint Lawrence not far from the Theatre of Pompey, he adorned with the greatest gifts:

a silver dish weighing twenty pounds, a silver bucket of fifteen pounds, an embossed silver cup of ten pounds; five silver chalices, five silver crowns. He also gave as a gift the houses set around the basilica, the Papyrian estate of the Ferentine territory, the Antonian estate, and the baths situated not far from the church. Seventh Lesson.—This man, having held a council at Rome, condemned for heresy Apollinaris of Laodicea and his disciple Timothy, as we read in the Letter sent by him to the Bishops of the East. We read also his other synodal letters: such as that to the bishops throughout Illyricum, and that to Paulinus bishop of Thessalonica, against various heresies.

This man ordained that the psalms should be sung in the Church day and night in alternating turns, the choir divided into two parts, and that at the end of the psalms there should be sung, 'Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit.' He also commanded that at the beginning of the celebration of the Masses the confession should be said. Eighth Lesson.—At his urging too, Jerome corrected the psalter according to the Seventy translators and divided it for the night-offices; and Damasus was the first to give authority to his writings. For it was then that Jerome's Bible began to be read, whereas before only the writings of the Seventy translators were held in esteem. (Lesson.)

Ninth (Lesson).—He held ordinations five times, in which he created thirty-one presbyters, eleven deacons, and sixty-two bishops in various places. He died at eighty years of age, on the third day before the Ides of December, in the second year of Arcadius Augustus. He was buried in his own basilica on the Via Ardeatina, beside his mother and his sister, and the pontificate stood vacant thirty-one days. (Lesson.) The Breviary of the divine offices, according to the rite of the holy Church of Évora, once again emended, corrected, revised, and now made far more orderly and elegant, by the command and authority of the most reverend Father in Christ and most illustrious prince and lord, Dom Henrique of the Holy Roman Church,

Cardinal of the title of the Four Holy Crowned Martyrs, Infante of Portugal, and first archbishop of that same Church. At Lisbon, in the shop of Luís Rodrigues, bookseller and royal printer, in the year from the birth of Christ one thousand five hundred and forty-eight, in the month of April. Lucio Marineo Siculo, in his work On the Affairs of Spain, Book II, page 309 (the Frankfurt edition of 1603—the second edition, for the first appeared in the year 1552), has this concerning the town of Madrid: that by some it is called Madritum, by others Majoritum. Round about it we counted a hundred and twenty-eight towers. It is moreover most blessed in the merits of Saint Damasus the Supreme Pontiff, who is held by many to have been a native of Majoritum (Madrid).

It also has even now a most holy native son named Isidore, who was a farmer. From the Chronicle of Spain by Johannes Vasaeus of Bruges, which was printed together with Marineo by the same Frankfurt press, I have copied this from page 653: 'Saint Damasus is ordained Roman pontiff,' etc. 'He was born in the town of Guimarães in Portugal, between the Douro and the Minho, three leagues from Braga Augusta, as the Church of Braga sings.' See the Breviary of Évora restored to its splendour by Resende. In the same work, page 656: 'Damasus the pope,' etc. Pedro Antonio Beuter says he was a native of Tarragona; Marineo Siculo enrolls him as a citizen of Madrid. But many Churches of Spain, as we have said, affirm that he was of Guimarães.

In the second volume of Spain Illustrated (the cited Frankfurt edition of 1603) there is an apologetic account of the Universities and learned men of Spain, by Alfonso García Matamoro of Seville, who first published this little work in the year 1553; and there, on page 809, one reads: 'There went before them in age Osius of Córdoba; and that singular light of Jerome, Damasus of Madrid—if, that is, any credit may be given without shame to Lucio Siculo, who calls him a Carpetanian from Mantua.' In the same second volume of Spain Illustrated stands the First Response of Andreas Resende (he is the author of the Lessons of the Breviary of Évora) to Bartholomew Quevedo, priest of the Church of Toledo, in which I read thus, on page 1004:

The river Viscella, called Vizela in Portuguese, flows into the Ave—a river of greater renown—a little below the monument of Nerva Trajan Caesar, which still survives on the very bank of the Ave. Within the confluence of these rivers stands the city of Guimarães, once the homeland of the holy pontiff Damasus—if your authorities would permit it. Yet it is not yet ten years since there appeared the book On the Roman Pontiffs by Onofrio of Verona, that most diligent man, most accurately composed after all the churches, archives, and libraries of the City had been searched through. He makes him thoroughly a Lusitanian and a man of Idanha. 'Saint Damasus,' he says, 'son of Antonius, of Egitania, a Lusitanian Spaniard.'

But I have followed the ancient Codex of the Church of Évora, when I inserted his life into the Breviary. Pedro Antonio Beuter, a Valencian by birth, published a Chronicle of Spain, composed in the Valencian tongue, which I have not hitherto seen; but in the year 1604 he again reissued his Chronicle, translated from Valencian into the Castilian speech, with this title: 'First part of the General Chronicle of all Spain and especially of the kingdom of Valencia,' etc. Printed at Valencia, 1604. There, in chapter 25, Book I, page 146, one reads: 'Afterwards Julian the Apostate was the thirty-sixth emperor, in the year three hundred and sixty-five, and he stirred up persecution against the Church; but when he died, it soon ceased. The Pope was Damasus, a native of Tarragona.'

'There followed Valentinian and Valens, then Gratian and Valens. And there followed the great Theodosius, born and reared in Spain.' Enrique Flórez, a Spaniard, alumnus and master of the Augustinian family, in the fourth volume of the work entitled España Sagrada, treatise 6, the last chapter, folio 508 (the Madrid edition of the year 1751), treating of the Saints of Toledo, has this: 'XII. St Damasus, whom some make a native of Madrid, and therefore of the diocese of Toledo; but we reserve him for another place which we judge most fitting, so as not to depend on any particular opinion; and then it will be seen whether he was a Spaniard.' From the Life of Blessed Gonçalo of Amarante of the Order of Preachers, written by Friar Diogo do Rosário, by the command of Friar

Bartholomew of the Martyrs, archbishop of Braga; found in the Bollandists, at the tenth of January, no. 3, page 641, Venice edition: 'In the district, then, of this metropolitan see (of Braga)... in which long ago the holy Damasus too arose from the town of Guimarães,' etc. ANALYSIS OF THE OPINIONS. On Poem IX, concerning the Catacombs of the holy Apostles, he does not doubt that the blessed Apostles once dwelt there, as Damasus says—that is, that they were placed there; but he conjectures that they were brought there immediately after their very martyrdom and there laid to rest, contrary to what others hold who write that blessed Peter was buried at the foot of the Vatican, and blessed Paul on the Ostian Way.

But he thinks that they were translated from the Catacombs to the place of their passion long before the pontificate of Cornelius and Xystus, because Gaius, a Roman presbyter, while the second century had not yet elapsed, writes that the trophies of the Apostles confronted the Christian religion on the Vatican and on the Ostian Way. For my part, I shall not touch this question, which men by far the most learned have scarcely up to now unravelled. I will add only this: that I can perceive no reason why that little verse of Damasus, of which I gave notice in the notes, ought not to express that wonderful deed which Gregory the Great relates. If, then, there is anyone who does not think so, let him assign to that same passage another meaning, I beg, equally fitting. Let him also declare to what purpose Damasus admonished us thus in the other, preceding verse:

'The East sent the disciples,' which we freely confess. Or could this perhaps ever have been unknown? But if the Easterns did not strive to snatch to themselves and to claim the trophies of the blessed Apostles, let him bring forward some reason why Rome rather deserved to defend its own citizens; and let him show also what other force the same word 'defend' may have. I know that Pearson, on the year 258, no. 2, rashly wrote that the story which Gregory relates is worthy of no credit. But let this be permitted to him alone, and to such as he. On Poem X. The poem which I have placed in that location from the Palatine-Gruterian codex, and which I judged could be fitted to St Stephen, Pope and Martyr—a learned man also reckons it to be an offspring of Damasus, but in it he thinks Xystus, Pope and Martyr,

is being praised—he whom we know from Cyprian to have been arrested in the cemetery. But this conjecture is contradicted by the poem itself, from which it is clear that at that time only one, Stephen, fell as a martyr, all the others who were seized with him in the same cemetery being let go unharmed. With Xystus, on the contrary, four deacons were slain, and perhaps others, as the learned man himself observes on Poem XXXIII. This poem, then, which is here in question, suits the former martyr rather than the other—both most holy and a pontiff. Poem XIII, on Saint Mark the pope, he supplies thus from his own ingenuity:

'Innocent was the life of Mark, as we all know; / gentle in the love of God, he could despise the world; / by his example he prayed that all the people might learn; / small was his regard for life, great his contempt for possessing; / and a skilled virtue held the inmost chambers of his heart; / guardian of justice, the perfect friend of Christ. / Damasus too adorned the tomb, when he renders honour,' etc. So too in the epitaph of Sisinnius the presbyter, which he reckons—not without probable reason—to have been written by the same Damasus (in Gruter, page 1173, no. 9): 'Here the presbyter Sisinnius wished to lay his limbs, / acceptable to all peoples, and a worthy priest, / who knew how to keep the covenants of holy Mother Church; / gentle in the love of God, who knew ever to live, / and content with his own, knew not the hall of the rich.' On Poem XX, concerning St

Saturninus. At the beginning of this poem the Palatine codex in Gruter (page 1171) has thus: 'Damasus the bishop, servant of God, worshipper of these martyrs... NOW WAS... ASH...' (the text being corrupt). So likewise in Sarazani—see column 394 of this edition, note 2, note 20. Then from the same codex, page 1176, he brings forward this: he therefore supplies and reads: 'A worshipper of these martyrs, Damasus; you were now an inhabitant of Christ, formerly of Carthage.' So the same Damasus, in Poem XX: 'By your blood you changed your homeland,' etc.: 'now an inhabitant of the Lord.' A probable conjecture and reading, which if it be retained, the Saturninus dealt with in this poem will be the same one who had been held at Rome under Decius, praised in Cyprian, letters 20 and 21, and afterwards a martyr.

He observes besides that in the Martyrology of Jerome and in the Gelasian Sacramentary, on the third day before the Kalends of December, there is read 'At Rome, in the cemetery of Thraso,' namely: Saturninus, Chrysanthus and Daria, Maurus, and another seventy-two. Since, then, Damasus had praised all of them as blessed martyrs, would he have passed over those seventy-two unpraised? But since a slip is easy in copying numbers, the distinguished man rightly conjectures that to them belong the little verses which I have set down at no. 2 in the Appendix, and that Damasus himself is their author. For the same reason, on St

He thinks that Poem XXII, concerning an unnamed Greek martyr, pertains to St Hermes—the martyr who is known to have been laid to rest in the cemetery of Basilla, also called the cemetery of Hermes, and, as it appears, in almost the same place as Protus and Hyacinth. For so the Anonymous of Mabillon has, on the Via Pinciana: Pamphilus, Basilla, Protus, Hyacinth, Hermes; and so the Gelasian Sacramentary at the fifth day before the Kalends of September. On Poem XXXIII, concerning his own sepulchre: Cyprian had written, in letter 82 of the Verona edition, that Xystus was arrested in the cemetery, and with him four deacons. So Baluze and Vignoli, from the manuscript codices. Fell, on the contrary, reads 'and with him Quartus';

and he sets his seal upon the Martyrologies, which attach more companions to the same Xystus—namely Felix, or Felicissimus, Agapitus, Donatianus, Faustina, Praetextatus, and others; and this reading pleased Ruinart and Castellano as well. The careful man therefore observes that the former reading is confirmed by the testimony of Damasus, who attributes several companions to Xystus—an argument which the Bollandists too, after Baronius, employed at the sixth of August. To this opinion indeed still greater force accrues from the fact that Florentinius and Sollerius observed that no mention is made of this Quartus before Ado and Usuard.

Whatever, then, may be the case about him, what can be asserted for certain is this: that that blessed pontiff cannot, without injustice, be despoiled of the long-standing possession of his companions—whom, as the so-called Leonine Sacramentary says in his Mass, he incited, as the sons of his teaching, to merit the same glory; although, together with that same most distinguished man, I would exclude from their number Praetextatus, who—when the other Martyrologies and Sacramentaries are examined—is mentioned in the Martyrology of Florentinius not so as to denote any martyr, but the famous cemetery named after him, in which the memory of those Martyrs was kept.

But who, and how many, were Xystus's companions in martyrdom, the Bollandist colleagues diligently inquire; and whoever consults them will have spent his effort to good purpose. The most distinguished man also labours to attain by conjecture the rest, whom Damasus says were buried in the same place, but, as it seems, in vain. For my part, if anyone should wish to know the same thing from me, I would answer with Prudentius, Hymn XI of the Crowns: '...do you ask each single name? It is hard for me to be able to recount them: such great throngs of the just did impious fury swallow up!' On Poem XXXII, the Epitaph of Projecta. Why Sarazani in his notes called Florus, the father of Projecta, a consul, he gave no reason: perhaps from the 'Fl.', which stands for Flavius on that stone, he made 'Florus,' as the learned man says.

He suspects, moreover, that this Florus is the one whose poem survives at the Sepulchre of St Liberalis the martyr, in Gruter, page 1171, no. 9, which he brings forward: 'Here rest the limbs of the holy martyr Liberalis, / who once on earth was a consul in dignity. / Florus offered these things to the Lord, building the courts, / that, venerating the saints, he might bear away just rewards.'