Christians in Caesar's Household: The Emperors' Slaves in the Makings of Christianity by Michael Flexsenhar Iii

Author:Michael Flexsenhar, Iii [Michael Flexsenhar, Iii]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780271082332
Google: ZRjbugEACAAJ
Publisher: PennStateUP
Published: 2019-09-15T20:39:54+00:00

Currents in Catacomb Study

It was once standard to view the miles of catacomb galleries beneath the streets of Rome as the exclusive burial ground for ancient Christians. This view, which predated but intensified in the “rediscovery” of the catacombs in the sixteenth century, continued during the nineteenth century with the veritable explosion of interest in the catacombs. The reasons for understanding Rome’s underground hollows as exclusively Christian sites are nearly as old and as complex as the catacombs themselves.6 But apart from an overt apologetic approach, textual sources such as the medieval Liber Pontificalis and especially a single sentence from Hippolytus’s Refutation of All Heresies were foundational to understanding the catacombs. According to the traditional interpretation of Hippolytus’s text, at the beginning of the third century Pope Zephyrinus put Callistus, the slave of a Christian from Caesar’s household, in charge of “the cemetery” of the Christian community (Haer. 9.12). De Rossi, for his part, identified this cemetery as the Catacomb of Callixtus on the Via Appia, even though Callistus himself was evidently buried elsewhere (see appendix 2). De Rossi’s reading of the text from the Refutation of All Heresies then bolstered the view that Rome’s other catacombs were also collective and exclusive Christian burial spaces that the ecclesiastical authorities oversaw.7

Within this framework, the epigraphic, iconographic, and artistic material unearthed from the catacombs was presumed a priori to be Christian. Exceptions could be noted, though they were often purposefully ignored. The burden of proof was to show that an inscription was not a Christian one.8

A classic example of this is Orazio Marucchi’s analysis of an inscription that records an imperial freedman. The inscription was found “in the cemetery of Priscilla” on the Via Salaria Nova in northern Rome. The marble, which was broken in three places, was a plaque (titulus) for a family tomb. The owner and dedicator was the imperial freedman—the name is lost to the lacuna—who was also president of a tent-makers association (Aug(usti) lib(ertus) praepositus tabernaculo[rum---]).9 The plaque was found only a short distance from another inscription that enclosed a burial niche (loculus) and commemorated a wife named Bibia Corinthia. The cognomen Corinthia suggested to Marucchi that the wife was probably from Corinth originally. Marucchi could not “help but run with the thought” that Aquila and Priscilla (or Prisca), the companions whom the apostle Paul met in Corinth, were also buried in the same cemetery. On De Rossi’s hypothesis, based on Romans 16:3–5, it was thought that the couple had returned to Rome, where they founded a house church on the Aventine Hill. The church was later known as La Chiesa di Santa Prisca, and was connected to the large cemetery on the Via Salaria named after Priscilla. The inscription for an imperial freedman in charge of tent-makers, combined with an inscription for a woman from Corinth, both of which were discovered in a cemetery that was ostensibly connected to Priscilla and Aquila, who like Paul were tent-makers, led Marucchi to exclaim: “Who would deny some probability that

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