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confusion may have arisen in the mind of Dio or more probably in that of the writer from whom he drew his account; and even Prof. Merrill admits that the inscriptions discovered in what was in later times known as the cœmeterium Domitillæ prove that land for a Christian cemetery was granted by her on her estate beside the Via Ardeatina. Dio names the grand seigneur M'. Acilius Glabrio, who had been the colleague of the future Emperor Trajan as consul for the year A.D. 91, among Domitian's victims, and it is surely more than a coincidence that one of the earliest of the Christian cemeteries, the "Catacomb of Priscilla,' has been proved to be situated on the property of the Acilii Glabriones, and to contain a crypt in which Christian members of that house were buried in the second century.* We may take it, therefore, that Christianity was making converts in the court circles of Domitian in the last decade of the first century; and that a community which drew its members from all ranks of society should possess, if not 'archives,' at any rate a lively recollection of its founders and their successors in office, if hard to prove, is surely still harder to disbelieve. The two-volume work on the origin and spread of Christianity which we know as the Gospel according to St Luke' and the Acts of the Apostles seems to have been written with a special eye to the members of the governing class, though the suggestion recently made by Canon Streeter (The Four Gospels,' p. 535) that Theophilus' may have been Flavius Clemens, must remain a pure conjecture.

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There can also be small doubt that it was Domitian who initiated the repressive measures employed against the Christians by provincial governors, especially in the more important centres of the Imperial cult. Irenæus is quoted by Eusebius as saying that the Apocalypse was written at the close of the reign of Domitian; and there is a world of difference between its bitter denunciations

It is unnecessary to criticise the tradition preserved by Eusebius with regard to the exile of another Domitilla by Domitian. Prof. Merrill pours scorn on the otherwise unknown historian Bruttius' whom Eusebius cited, and on those who conjecturally identify him with Præsens (who may have been one of the Bruttii Præsentes), a friend of the younger Pliny. But the whole question is best left open. Eduard Meyer (vol. III, p. 553) is disposed to accept Bruttius as a genuine writer.

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.

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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.

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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: 'Roma Via Aurelia

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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. Sebastjano 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 invaders overran Pannonia towards the end of the fourth century A.D. This Basilica of the Apostles must be identified with the third of the three basilicæ 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 verseepitaphs set up by his patron in the Christian cemeteries. The lines run as follows:

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'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

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