of the Imperial Government and the 'objective' attitude of the earlier canonical writings, which is best accounted for by a recent attempt to enforce conformity at the point of the sword. There can be no mistake as to the meaning of Satan's throne,' as applied to Pergamum, the earliest and most important site of the Imperial worship in Asia, where Antipas my witness, my faithful one,' was slain.

This is not the place to pursue the later history of the relations between the Empire and the Christian communities. It is deeply to be regretted that we do not possess in its entirety the seventh book of Ulpian's treatise On the Duties of a Proconsul,'* which contained, amongst other things, the instructions issued by various Emperors to their representatives in the provinces for dealing with Christianity and other cults which, it was feared, might lead to disturbance and be subversive of the social order so rigidly maintained in an over-policed Empire. We should probably not have found in it the famous reply of Trajan to Pliny, his High Commissioner in Bithynia-Pontus, prescribing an opportunist policy and giving the governor every excuse for leniency; for Trajan expressly says that this was a case in which 'no general rule could be laid down'; but we should have had a welcome light thrown upon the rescript of Hadrian to Minicius Fundanus, governor of Asia, to which Prof. Merrill devotes a chapter, and the letter of Antoninus Pius to the assembly of the same province (of which he had himself been proconsul) which Harnack has shown to contain a genuine nucleus.† Both these documents exhibit the Emperors in a favourable light, and it is evident that, like Trajan, they regarded the danger to public order from the new faith as negligible, and did their best to discourage popular clamour against

It is worth while to recall that we derive from this work the famous principle expressed by Trajan in the words 'it is better that the crime of the guilty should go unpunished than that the innocent should be condemned.'

†These were naturally passed over by the compilers of Justinian's 'Digest,' who were instructed to omit such of the classical law texts as were obsolete. The general principle upon which governors were required to act is given in the Sententiæ' of Julius Paulus (v, 20. 2): Qui novas sectas vel ratione incognitas religiones inducunt, ex quibus animi hominum moveantur, honestiores deportantur, humiliores capite puniuntur.'

the Christians. It is to be noted that the principal outbursts of fanaticism which led to the execution of Christians in this period took place in the centres where the worship of the Emperors was most fervently--or shall we say most pompously-practised, as at Carthage and Lyons and in the Province of Asia, where governors, anxious to pacify an ignorant mob (partly moved, no doubt, by economic self-interest), were ready to make use of their almost unlimited powers of exercising 'administrative justice' in order that their provinces might not gain a bad name for turbulence. We may, therefore, agree with Prof. Merrill that there was no systematic or continuous persecution of the Christians in the second century, without subscribing to his arguments in detail. He infers, for example, from the fact that Nero and Domitian are alone mentioned as persecuting Emperors by the Christian apologist, Melito, who was Bishop of Sardis in the early part of the reign of Marcus Aurelius and addressed his plea for the toleration of Christianity to that ruler, that he wrote in ignorance of the executions carried out by Pliny's orders in Bithynia under Trajan. Surely the names of Nero and Domitian were tactfully chosen by Melito-as also by his admirer Tertullian after him-because both those Emperors had suffered damnatio memoriæ, and might safely incur the charge of tyranny.

It has been shown that there are no adequate grounds for supposing that the tradition of the Christian community in Rome, which traced its foundation to the Apostles Peter and Paul, was a pure fabrication; and this is as much as we can safely say. That St Peter was the first bishop of Rome, or even that he established a 'monarchical' episcopate in that city, the critical historian is not permitted to affirm.

Let us now consider the evidence which archæological discoveries have brought to light with regard to the traditional burial-places of the two Apostles. This has been set forth in a closely-reasoned essay by Dr Lietzmann, who has dealt with more recent finds in the Harvard Theological Review'; and we now have, in the 'Notizie degli Scavi' for 1923, an official account of the supplementary excavations carried on at S. Sebastiano by the Department of Antiquities.

The great basilicas of S. Peter in Vaticano and S. Paul without the walls stand on the site of earlier shrines built by Constantine the Great after the Peace of the Church. It is fortunate that we possess certain records which throw light on the position and surroundings of the tombs over which they were built. When excavations were being made in 1626 of the four columns which sustain Bernini's baldacchino over the High Altar of S. Peter's, it was found that the tomb believed to be that of the Apostle lay in the midst of a burialground which the inscriptions, etc., showed to have been used, not by Christians, but by pagans. A similar state of affairs was revealed at S. Paolo by excavations which took place in 1834 and 1850 (the basilica itself was restored after its partial destruction by fire in 1823). The old church built by Constantine was much smaller than the great basilica begun, as a famous inscription tells us, by Theodosius the Great and completed by Honorius, for the builders were cramped by the necessity of respecting an ancient road, traces of which were found in the 19th century together with the remains of an unmistakably pagan burial-ground in the midst of which St Paul, as was believed, was laid to rest. It is clear that in the time of Constantine the sites must have been the object of an ancient and traditional veneration; and in fact we learn that about A.D. 200 Gaius the presbyter' (who is perhaps to be identified with Hippolytus), replying to a Montanist who spoke of the grave of Philip of Hierapolis and his daughters as the holy place of his sect, triumphantly countered his opponent's claim by pointing to the trophies of the Apostles' on the Vatican and Ostian Ways. But there was a third site which was likewise hallowed in Christian tradition. The 'Calendar of Philocalus,' which in its final form dates from A.D. 354, and incorporates together with other material a list of celebrations connected with the burials of Roman bishops and martyrs beginning in the middle of the third century, has the following remarkable entry under the date June 29: Petri in Catacumbas, et Pauli Ostense. Tusco et Basso consulibus' (i.e. A.D. 258); and there is a somewhat fuller, but even more confused notice in a later document, the 'Martyrologium Hieronymianum,' under the same date: Romæ Via Aurelia

6

natale Sanctorum Apostolorum Petri et Pauli: Petri in
Vaticano, Pauli vero in via Ostiensi, utrumque in
Catacumbas, passi sub Nerone, Basso et Tusco Consulibus.'
Now, there can be no doubt as to the meaning of in
Catacumbas, a name given to the cemetery surrounding
the church of S. Sebastiano on the right of the Appian
Way. But what are we to say of the date A.D. 258? All
that we are entitled to affirm with confidence is that a
liturgical celebration in honour of the Apostles on the
Appian Way goes back to that date; but it is natural to
go further and to assume that for some reason or another
the bodies of SS. Peter and Paul were temporarily laid
in the spot known as ad Catacumbas in the middle of the
third century. Now, the church of S. Sebastiano occupies
the site of an earlier building which even as late as the
eighth century was known as the ecclesia apostolorum and
is called basilica apostolorum in the Acts of St. Quirinus,
the martyred Bishop of Siscia (Sissek in Croatia), whose
remains were transferred thither when the barbarian in-
vaders overran Pannonia towards the end of the fourth
century A.D. This Basilica of the Apostles must be identi-
fied with the third of the three basilica built (according to
the most probable reconstruction of the ungrammatical
text of the Liber Pontificalis ') by St Damasus (Pope in
A.D. 366-384), namely, that which he set up 'in Catacumbis,
ubi iacuerunt corpora beatorum Apostolorum Petri et
Pauli, in quo loco Platomam ipsam versibus exornavit.' The
Platoma was a marble slab, and we are fortunate enough
to possess a copy of St Damasus' verses, and, we may add,
a small fragment of the original inscription, carved in
the bold characters which Philocalus, the compiler of the
'Calendar of 354,' used in engraving the numerous verse-
epitaphs set up by his patron in the Christian cemeteries.
The lines run as follows:

'Hic habitasse prius sanctos cognoscere debes,
Nomina quisque Petri pariter Paulique requiris.
Discipulos Oriens misit, quod sponte fatemur,
Sanguinis ob meritum Christum qui per astra secuti
Etherios petiere sinus regnaque piorum:

Roma suos potius meruit defendere cives.

Hæc Damasus vestras referat, nova sydera, laudes.'

It cannot be said that clarity is the most conspicuous

merit of the poetry of St. Damasus; but the sense of the lines may be given as follows: Here dwelt the Saints aforetime, as thou must know, whosoever thou art that seekest the names of Peter and Paul. It was the Eastwe gladly admit it-that sent forth these disciples, who by the merit of their blood followed Christ to the stars and sought the depths of heaven and the realms of the pious but Rome earned the right to claim them as her citizens by a higher title. Let Damasus recount your glories, ye new stars.

The poem is coloured by the great debate between East and West in which Damasus played a leading rôle as the protagonist of Papal claims; but we may dismiss at once the naïve legend, best known from a letter of St. Gregory the Great to the Empress Constantina, that Jewish Christians endeavoured to carry off the bodies of the Apostles to Palestine at the time of their martyrdom and were defeated in open fight! It clearly arose from a quaint misunderstanding of St Damasus' text. It is not so easy to be sure of the meaning of habitasse, and it has been much disputed whether it refers to the abode of the Apostles when alive or to their restingplace in death, a use which can be paralleled from St Damasus' own poems. Here we must seek light from

the excavations carried on in recent years.

Behind the apse of the basilica of S. Sebastiano is a roughly semicircular crypt, to which the name Platonia (which arises from a misspelling and misunderstanding of the platoma of the 'Liber Pontificalis ') has been given. It is surrounded by arched niches adorned with paintings of which but faint traces remain, perhaps of the fourth century, and decorative stucco work which may be considerably earlier. In the centres, beneath the altar, is a structure in the form of a bisomus or double grave with a barrel vault, the sides of which are decorated in fresco with figures of the Apostles, while on one of the lunettes is represented the so-called traditio legis, in which Our Lord hands the Roll of the Law to a youthful figure, while a bearded figure stands by-a remarkable variant of the familiar scene in which St Peter-the New Moses-receives the roll in the presence of St Paul. Excavations undertaken in 1892-93 brought to light the fragments of a monumental inscription in honour of St