•

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),
P·38.

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298 Kale Cooper

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 trans-
formation 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 (4. bis 8.
jabrhundert)] (Munich, (965).

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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 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.
10 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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 The martyr, the matrona and the bishop 301

memoria apostolorum on the Via Appia played in the consolidation of

Roman episcopal authority.

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 near-
successor 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 Idem, 'Donateurs et pieux etablissemenrs', pp. 440-1.
12 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.

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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 A. Cameron, Circus Pactiom (Oxford, 1976).
'4 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. 60-74-
'5 On 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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 The martyr, the matrona and the bishop 303

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 associ-
ations 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
martyrum: Commemoration in Rome from the Second through the Sixth Century]', PhD
thesis, New York University, '989, pp. 273ff.
17 Discussion in Alchermes, 'Cura pro mortuis', p. 284.
18 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.
19 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),
pp. 20-1.
20 G.N. Verrando, 'Note sulle tradizioni [agiografiche su Processo, Martiniano, e Lucina]',
Vetera Christianorum 24 ('987), pp. 353-73 at p. 354.

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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

II 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).
II L1ewellyn,'The Roman Church', pp. 418ff.
II On the use of ecclesiasticalpatronage to forward dynastic claims, see Prinz, Fruhes Monchtum,
pp. 48<)-502.
14 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.
l5 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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 The martyr, the matrona and the bishop 305

worked together in support of Symmachus, with the shared under-

standing 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

26 Ibid., r. p. 148.
27 'Hie regiones divisit diaeonibus et rnultas fabrieas per cyrniteria fieri iussit', ibid, I, pp. 4-5.
28 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.

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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.

29 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.
)0 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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 The martyr, the matrona and the bishop 307

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 Gregory the Great, Letter VIII, 28 July 598, to Eulogius of Alexandria (Corpus Christianorum
Series Latina 140A, p. 549).
J2 S. Boesch Gajano, 'La proposta agiografica dei Dialoghi di Gregorio Magno', Studi Medievali,
ser. 3a, 21 (1980), pp. 623-6+
JJ Baldoin de Gaiffier, 'La lecture des passions des martyrs Rome avanr le Ixe siecle', Analecta
11

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.

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308 Kale Cooper

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 half-
dozen 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 on the point of the apostle's original burial, with early
J4 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.
3~ 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.
36 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.
37 See R. Krautheimer, S. Corbett and W. Frankl (eds.), Corpus Basilicarum Christianarum
Romae II (Vatican City, 1959). pp. 192-3, for text and discussion.
38 A summaty of the decade of scholarship following the Vatican excavations of 194<r9 is given
in the notes of Chadwick, 'St. Peter and St. Paul', pp. 33-8.

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 The martyr, the matrona and the bishop 309

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 con-
temporary 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

39 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.
4° On dating, see Verrando, 'Note sulle tradizioni', p. 371.
4' 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.
42 The phrase, iuxta locum ubi crucifixus est, seeks to account for the innovation: LP, I, pp. 66-7.
43 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 See also the LP entry for Peter: ibid, I. pp. 50-3.

41 Passio Sebastiani 88 (Jan. n, p. 278). Acta Sanctorum.

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 The martyr, the matrona and the bishop 311

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 martyum one can find
traces of a pro-Novatianist dimension - of the opposing party, so to
speak. Peter Llewellyn, for example, has argued that the Vita Praxedis,
which he assigns to a pro-Laurentian author in the first decade of the
sixth century, should be read as a Novatianist roman a clef with its
central character the priest Novatus standing in for the schismatic
Novatian.48
The memory of Novatian is almost certainly important for under-
standing 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 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.
47 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.
4ll Argument in L1ewellyn, 'The Roman Church', pp. 419-20.

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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

49 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.
5° On the foundation of the monasterium in catacumbas, see LP, I, p. 234; G. Ferrari, Early
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.
51 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 resting-
place 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 Krautheimer et aL, Corpus Basilicarum n. p. 160.

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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 surround-
ing 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 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.
54 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.
55 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 broader questions remain. Why was Lucina, the instrument of
revision used both by the Passio Sebastiani and the Liber Pontificalis, a
woman? And why was martyr cult so crucial a territory for the bishop of
Rome - 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 bear-
garden. 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.

56 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).
57 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 Christian-
ization of the Roman Aristocracy', Journal of Roman Studies 82 (1992), pp. 150-64.
58 P.R.L. Brown, Relics and Social Status in the Age ofGregory of Tours (Reading, 1977), p. 20.
59 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.

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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

61 This is particularly striking in the case of the Donatist mattyrs: see now M. Tilley, The
Donatist Martyrs (Liverpool, 1997).
62 '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 Early Medieval Europe 1999 8 (3)