MAJUS COEMETERIUM (CIMITERO MAGGIORE)

MAJUS COEMETERIUM (GREATER CEMETERY). - So called because it is the largest Christian cemetery along the Via Nomentana. The present entrance is located on Via Asmara.

The name is attested in the 5th century: an inscription found near the Ponte Rotto, preserved in the Capitoline Museum, and various manuscripts of the Martyrologium Hieronymianum, Emerenziana (v.), Victor, Felix, Alexander, and Papias were venerated “in cimiteru maiore,” whose tombs were visited by pilgrims of the 7th century at this site. The most precise of the itineraries, the Notitia ecclesiarum, specifies the tomb of Emerenziana in an above-ground basilica and those of Victor and Alexander “in spelunca deorsum.”

Confused from the 16th century onward with the nearby cemetery of St. Agnes and called by that name, the cemetery was identified by G. B. De Rossi, who also attributed to it the notices of an apostolic ministry of St. Peter in this region, mentioned in three later documents: the Gesta Liberii of 501, which refers to an Ostrian cemetery “where the Apostle Peter baptized”; the Passio Sisinnii of the 5th century, inserted in the Gesta Marcelli, which recounts the burial of the two soldier martyrs Papias and Maurus “on the Via Nomentana... ad nymphas b. Petri, where he baptized”; and finally “the notula” and a “pittacium” of the oils collected by the priest John of Monza at the time of St. Gregory the Great “from the seat where St. Peter first sat.”

The identification of the Ostrian cemetery with the M. C., initially accepted, later provoked a lively controversy among scholars, as Marucchi wished to transfer the memory of St. Peter to the nearby Priscilla cemetery on the Salaria Nuova, based on a forced interpretation of the topographical texts, which do not allow the identification of the Ostrian cemetery.

The M. C., like the others, had an above-ground area, traces of which were seen in excavations of 1873, and in which stood the small basilica of St. Emerenziana (v.). The underground necropolis, quite extensive and with two levels, is of particular interest for the architectural arrangement of its crypt, studied very carefully by Fr. Marchi, who also published an exact plan of the cemetery. The oldest region of the part now accessible is that to the right of the entrance staircase; but it is not earlier than the 3rd century. Also at the beginning of the 3rd century must be dated a series of inscriptions carved in very fine and characteristic letters, with a simple and concise text, the work of the same workshop; some are still in the cemetery, others in the Epigraphic Gallery of the Lateran.

In the region to the left of the entrance, excavations conducted by Mons. P. Crostarosa in 1873 uncovered a large crypt with a skylight and an apse already decorated with stucco foliage, with a chair and an “mensa oleorum” opposite. M. Armellini mistakenly believed he recognized in them the primitive tomb of St. Emerenziana, on account of the name of the saint deciphered in the faded red-lettered inscription already noted by Bosio in the apse; while he connected the chair and some graffiti with the memory of St. Peter mentioned above. Instead, this chair and the other ten scattered throughout the cemetery (though not exclusively, as similar ones exist at Panfilo, Inter duas lauros, and St. Lawrence) must be related to the rite of the refrigerium, which also served the tufa benches set against the walls found beside some of them. Their abundance at the M. C. may be due to the greater skill of the fossor workers there in carving tufa, a skill also seen in elegant brackets, cornices, niches, which adorn various cubicles, and in the architectural precision of the vaults and tribunes. A crypt not far from the one described was excavated in two different phases, with such care and elegance as to resemble a tiny basilica.

Among the frescoes adorning the crypts and arcosolia of the cemetery, depicting the usual scenes from the Old and New Testaments, there is a rare representation of the parable of the five wise virgins admitted to the celestial banquet; a bust of an orant woman with very pronounced features, holding a child on her lap, between two facing Constantinian monograms, which must be seen as an image of the Madonna from the mid-4th century; and finally a scene discovered and illustrated by E. Josi in 1933, in which, in a manner unique in the catacombs, two deceased persons are seen prostrate in an act of veneration toward a saint, most likely