Epigraphic Syllogisms

EPIGRAPHIC SYLLOGISMS. - In the Roman world the East preceded the West in the collection of inscriptions; in Greece, in fact, sylloges were formed as early as the 3rd century B.C., from which the Palatine Anthology is shown to have drawn through the work of Cephalas in the 10th century and the Planudean Anthology in the 14th. In the West the first example is given by a fragment of an ancient Roman sylloge, which a monk of Einsiedeln in the 9th century transcribed together with other Christian inscriptions; only with the 15th century do the numerous sylloges begin, with which the great Corpus inscriptionum latinarum was gradually prepared.

Christian epigraphy after the Peace of Constantine took on such a broad development that in the early Middle Ages it gave rise in various regions of the West to numerous sylloges, to which the East can counterpose only monumental inscriptions of the 5th-7th centuries with additions of the 9th-10th centuries, drawn from sylloges of Constantinople and nearby places, gathered in a special chapter of the Palatine Anthology, and sepulchral tituli of uncertain origin mixed in the chapter τῶν ἐπιτυμβῶν with pagan tituli (G. B. De Rossi, Inscr. christ., II, n. 29). This epigraphic activity, in which Rome always remains at the center, slowed in the last centuries of the Middle Ages, resuming with a different character and ever-growing vigor from the 16th century onward.

1. Christian sylloges earlier than the 15th century

Some observations must be premised regarding this period. Various sylloges exist in many regions but of limited proportions; the larger ones reserved for the greatest cities are extremely rare, and these are shown to have been made with the special purpose of serving as illustration or accompaniment to itineraries or descriptions of sacred buildings. The multiplicity of sylloges in the early Middle Ages is explained by the literary taste of the time, an exclusive reason for the small collections and not a secondary one for the larger ones. Poetry in Christian epigraphy did not remain, as in classical epigraphy, limited to tombs, but already in the 4th century with Damasus and even more with Ambrose and Prudentius it extended to the decoration of churches; from the 5th century parenetic, exegetical and dogmatic carmina adorned basilicas, baptisteries and even monasteries, especially through the work of Paulinus of Nola, Paulinus of Périgueux, Sidonius, and Ennodius, with a fervor that continued, following the example of Alcuin, throughout the Carolingian age, in which the sylloges, by providing material for exercises to the monastic schools, were there subjected to manifold divisions and manipulations, to partial intrusions into poetic anthologies, and reduced to the state in which they have come down to us.

To a 7th-century sylloge of Latin Africa the verses that decorated a baptistery and a basilica, reported in the Anthologia Salmasiana of cod. Paris. 10318 (De Rossi, op. cit., n. 20), easily trace back; from a similar anthology come (id., op. cit., p. 460) two carmina contained in cod. Sessor. 55, one of which was composed by St. Augustine for the tomb of a deacon who was a victim of the Donatists.

For Spain, notable is the sylloge formed by two small groups of epigrams inserted in the 8th-century anthology of Spanish poets of cod. Paris. 8093 (id. op. cit., n. 30), of which the first reports epitaphs of bishops and abbots of Valencia and Tarragona, the second basilical carmina of Seville; they are certainly partial apographs of a larger

Spanish sylloge, or perhaps of two not later than the 7th and 8th centuries. From the anthology of Christian poets of the 9th century in cod. Paris. 2832, De Rossi (op. cit., no. 25 app.) extracted three poems inscribed in the basilica and monastery of St. Martin in Galicia, dictated by the founder Martin of Braga, which easily derive from an epigraphic collection of the region; in various codices of the Etymologiae of Isidore of Seville (id., op. cit., no. 22) are reported the distichs with which he had decorated his Library.

Gaul presents, in the collection of inscriptions of the basilica and monastery of St. Martin of Tours, the only sylloge of this time that has come down in its original state together with its descriptio; contained in many codices, from the Turon. of the year 820 to the Veron. of the 15th century, it is in several instances united with the description; it is not certain, as De Rossi maintained (op. cit., no. 18), that it goes back to the 6th century. Two epigraphs of the 7th century, intruded into the great Roman sylloge Turon. (id. op. cit., no. 6), may suggest a second local sylloge. The cited anthology of cod. Paris. 2832 contains a good group of inscriptions of the 6th century, which, with the exception of some from Spain, belong to various cities of Gaul, to Vienne, Lyons, Orléans and Arles; they appear to be extracted from one or more original sylloges. Indeed for Vienne there is from another source (id., op. cit., no. 25) sure evidence of a special sylloge in verse and prose; for Lyons De Rossi (op. cit., no. 24) is led to admit a sylloge sufficiently ancient on the basis of four poems of cod. Valent. 393; moreover its epigraphic importance is confirmed by the eight epigraphs of bishops of the 5th-6th centuries found in the reconnaissance of 1308 (id., op. cit., no. 33) in the church of St. Nicetas. A sylloge of the 8th century in Aquitaine suggests the four poems (id., op. cit., no. 260) inserted in cod. Paris. 4841. Traces of a collection for Trier (id., op. cit., no. 1) remain in the two Christian epigraphs transcribed in the vetus membrana of Scaliger.

In Italy during the early Middle Ages the composition of sylloges is to be connected with the movement of pilgrimages, which becomes intense in the 7th century with the Anglo-Saxons driven by the ardor of neophytes to visit the tomb of St. Peter and of so many other Roman martyrs, and continues uninterrupted in the 7th century and following with less ardent religious spirit but with greater literary fervor; this movement gave occasion directly to the first sylloges of Rome and indirectly to those of the Italian cities that were situated near or along the route trodden by the northern pilgrims.

In Rome the wealth of sacred memories soon made necessary itineraries to guide the devout pilgrims through the numerous cemeteries and the great basilicas; four complete ones are preserved, critically illustrated by De Rossi (Roma sott., I, Rome 1864, p. 135 ff.), the Salisburgense 140 compiled under the pontificate of Honorius I (625-38), the Salisburgense 209 identical with the Wirceburgense 49 contemporary with or slightly later than Honorius, the Malmesburriense composed between 648 and 682.

For Rome there remain numerous sylloges of the 9th and 10th centuries with metrical inscriptions of cemeteries and basilicas, which De Rossi learnedly illustrated, and no less numerous groups of similar inscriptions that he extracted from poetic anthologies of the same centuries; from this mass of apographs of the Carolingian school it can be demonstrated that one should go back to only two original sylloges. For the extensive treatment, which is here schematically summarized, reference is made to A. Silvagni, Inscriptiones christianae Urbis Romae, nova series, I, Rome 1922, v. Conipectus auctorum; no. 1 with the relevant synoptic table of the sylloge, and Dissert. della Pont. Accad. rom. di arch., 15 (1921), p. 181 ff.

The many Roman sylloges can be gathered into two distinct groups. a) Sylloges with inscriptions of cemeteries and of cemetery basilicas united with titles of some urban basilicas; Turonense (De Rossi, Inscr. chr., II, no. 6), Centulense (id., op. cit., no. 7), Einsiedlense II (id., op. cit., no. 2), Harleiana (id., op. cit., no. 9), Laureshamense IV (id., op. cit., nos. 3, 8), Virdunense I (id., op. cit., no. 12). The common characteristics of the sylloges of the group are these: no inscription is later than the pontificate of Honorius I; the overall epigraphic material of some three hundred inscriptions is found for almost two thirds repeated in the various sylloges, and appears rather as a common mass variously reworked; in almost all the sylloges the inscriptions appear gathered in fragmentary topographical groups more or less extensive, only the Turonense offers 37 cemetery inscriptions in regular topographical order from the Via Salaria to the Ostiense in full correspondence with the itinerary Salisburgense 140, as De Rossi pointed out; no sylloge contains cemetery inscriptions of the Via Flaminia, Cornelia, Aurelia and Portuense. In conclusion, since it cannot be critically maintained that various complete and partial sylloges, as De Rossi seems to think, were made in one and the same span of time for the same cemeteries, one should admit the compilation in the 7th century of a single great sylloge contemporary with the ancient itineraries with the suburban and urban order of one of them, to which it was joined as its illustration for learned pilgrims, from which, soon detached, it ended up passing under the manifold reworkings of the copyists and monastic schools. b) Sylloges with inscriptions of basilicas only: Vaticana (id., op. cit., no. 5), Lauresh. I and II (id., op. cit., no. 13, 11), Cantabrigense (Silvagni, op. cit., no. 1); Virdunense II (De Rossi, op. cit., no. 5), Wirceburgense (id., op. cit., no. 14) and sylloges in anthologies codd. Paris. 8041 and 2773, 2832, 4841, 9347 (id., op. cit., nos. 21, 23, 25, 26), cod. Bruxell. 10615 (id., op. cit., no. 27 F), Lugdun. Q. 69 (id. op. cit., no. 26 B). The sylloges with an asterisk have exclusively inscriptions of the Vatican Basilica, in the remaining ones such inscriptions are united with a few others from different basilicas. The Vatican sylloge, lacking inscriptions later than Honorius and provided with a lemma that shows it linked to another collection, must be united with the great sylloge of the 7th century, of which it easily formed part with a special distinction. The synoptic table of all the other sylloges brings to light a collection of 124 inscriptions of the basilica of St. Peter and of adjacent buildings, of which eight are dated from 707 to 795; it therefore constitutes a second great sylloge of the 8th century, which escaped De Rossi's attention, and which agrees with a description of the Basilica itself of the 8th century (id., op. cit., p. 224), transcribed in the appendix to the itinerary Salisburgense 140, and must easily in origin have been attached to it.

Another sylloge the Vatican Basilica had in the 12th century, composed of epigraphs of popes inserted in the description of the Basilica of cod. Vat. 3627, which the priest Petrus Mallii offered to Alexander III (1159-81), made with a polemical purpose (id., op. cit., no. 19) in the dispute of the time over the preeminence between the Vatican and Lateran Basilicas.

The route followed by pilgrims descending from the Great St. Bernard through the Val d'Aosta opened out into the Po plain; of some nearby cities, that is, of Milan,

Pavia, Vercelli, Piacenza and Ivrea, the s. Lauresh. III reports inscriptions, which De Rossi judged to have been extracted in the 8th century from one or more s. Milan (id., op. cit. n. 16) certainly had a distinct s., and far more extensive than the ten carmina of the codex, as the fragment of a Milanese itinerary transcribed after the Roman one, Salisburgense 140, suggests. A second collection of epitaphs of Milanese bishops of the 6th-8th centuries (id., op. cit., n. 18) was discovered in the 16th century by Alciato and by him not faithfully transcribed in cod. Dresd. F 82; De Rossi in his treatment maintained that it had been formed in the 11th century in connection with the Vitae pontificum Mediolan. But a more detailed examination with the aid of new information (A. Silvagni, Studio critico sopra le due s. medievali di iscrizioni cristiane milanesi, in Riv. di arch. crit., 15 [1938], pp. 107-22, 249-79) makes it possible to trace it back to an earlier origin, probably to the 8th century, and therefore to regard it as a fragment of the preceding s. Pavia, as capital of the Lombard Kingdom, must easily have had a special s. of its own as well, of which the present one would be a notable fragment; to this must be added the Greek inscription of S. Pietro in coelo aureo reported in the s. Einsiedlense. On the Via Flaminia at Spoleto, in the 7th century, five carmina of Bishop Achilles were transcribed, which are found inserted in the s. Lauresh. IV and in other codices of the Roman s. of the 7th century; to these are to be added the tituli of Bishop Spes and of a deceased person of 384 written in the 9th century in a pittacio (De Rossi, op. cit., p. 43) found in 1878 at Aachen. From the sanctuary of S. Felice at Nola, exalted by Bishop St. Paulinus, come seven carmina, among them the votive one of Damasus, inserted in cod. Paris. 1443 and partially in other codices. Ravenna, topographically distant from the movement of pilgrims, did not offer a s. of its own to the activity of the Carolingian school; indications of a s. or isolated transcriptions are the carmen of Droctulf, inserted in three codices of the Roman s. of the 7th century, and three inscriptions (id., op. cit., n. 1) of the membrana Scaligeri.

2. S. of the 15th century and of later centuries

In the preceding age Rome was at the center of Christian epigraphic activity diffused throughout almost the whole West; in this period such activity is almost exclusively gathered in Rome, where alone it is possible to follow its development. It is well known that the first humanists devoted themselves to the search for ancient literary codices and at the same time to the transcription of epitaphs; from them was born that contempt for crude Christian inscriptions, which passed into all the epigraphists of that century and the next in the north, while in Rome in the 16th century it was much attenuated until it disappeared with the flourishing of the studies of Christian archaeology.

Right at the beginning of the century there appears in cod. Vat. Barb. 1952 a famous s. of classical inscriptions, with only twelve Christian ones, which bears the date 1409; a second recension framed in a Descriptio urbis Romae eiusque excellentiae is contained in codd. Vat. 10687 and Chis. I. VI. 204, both miscellaneous; a third recension is found in cod. Vat. 3851 attributed to Nicola Signorili. De Rossi (op. cit., n. 37, p. 316 ff.) not taking due account of the date of cod. Barb. attributed the second recension to the year 1347 and assured its author in the person of Cola di Rienzo; this conclusion was accepted by all scholars. A critical examination of the procedure followed (Silvagni, op. cit., n. 8; Archivum latinitatis medii aevi, Paris 1924), invalidating the dating of that recension, restores to its full value the date 1409 of the first recension. The author, however, remains uncertain, who must certainly have been a humanist and easily Poggio Bracciolini, who from 1402 was transcribing inscriptions in Rome. Poggio Bracciolini is to be remembered here solely for a parvus quaternio of the Roman s. of Einsiedl. found by him in Switzerland around 1417, which together with the preceding s. furnished the only Christian inscriptions to all the great collections for more than a century (De Rossi, op. cit., n. 42). A small collection of epitaphs of S. Pietro is derived from the 4 ll. De Basilica Vaticana contained in cod. Vat. 3750 and in other codices (id., op. cit., n. 44), which around 1450 Maffeo Vegio composed, as a good humanist anything but an admirer of Christian inscriptions. Pietro Sabino was the first humanist who expressly protested for sif-

contempt, and separating from the classical ones the Christian inscriptions, ancient, medieval and recent, which he had collected in the churches and in other parts of Rome, he formed from them a rich s. which in 1494 he offered to King Charles VIII (a copy was recognized by De Rossi, op. cit., n. 66, in cod. Marc. lat. X. 195). Of a similar s. of solely, for the most part medieval, inscriptions of Roman churches, Cancellieri and others give notice, which, formed in 1498 by Giovanni Capocci, was afterwards lost (Silvagni, op. cit., n. 27); one must descend to the early years of the 17th century to find another example in the collection of Carlo de Serva in cod. Voll. G. 28 (id., op. cit., n. 62) and finally to 1703 with that of Epifanio Davanzati in cod. Vat. 10164 (id., op. cit., n. 95).

With the advance of the 16th century the humanistic prejudices fell away in Rome and numerous classical inscriptions are found in certain s. mixed with Christian inscriptions, ancient, medieval and recent, which belonged exclusively to the respective churches; such is the s. of the anonymous Spaniard (id., op. cit., n. 57), collected, under the pontificate of Pius V, in cod. Chis. I. V. 167. This author and the preceding ones, in transcribing the Christian inscriptions in the Roman churches, had entirely neglected the numerous ones which in the medieval age had been transported there from the cemetery galleries to pave their floors; to these, not excluding the others of the churches and the classical ones, the attention of certain contemporary epigraphists turned. Aldo Manuzio (id., op. cit., n. 59) reported a great number of them in his epigraphic apparatus, especially in cod. Vat. 5241, not later than 1588; Filippo di Winghe (id., op. cit., n. 60) in his s. earlier than 1592 contained in cod. Bruxell. 7872-73 followed his example, as likewise did Giacomo Sirmond (id., op. cit., n. 62) at the end of the century in his collectanea preserved in cod. Paris. 9695. The same system was followed during the 17th century by Francesco

Suárez (id., op. cit., n. 84), whose rich collection earlier than 1667 is gathered in codd. Vatt. 9140 and Barb. 3084, by Francesco Tolomei (id., op. cit., n. 88), who left 2 vols. of Iscrittiuni copiate dallì suoi originali in varii luoghi di Roma l'an. 1666, preserved in codd. K. VIII. 1-2 of the Library of Siena, as previously G. B. Doni (id., op. cit., n. 74) had done, who with his collection of Christian and classical inscriptions, from which the s. of cod. Maruc. A. 293 was extracted, proposed in 1632 to form a Corpus, a design which not even the patronage of card. Barberini succeeded afterwards in bringing to completion.

None of the authors cited reported inscriptions from the ancient cemeteries, rediscovered many years earlier; A. Bosio made them known for the first time with the Roma sotterranea, published posthumously in 1632, followed much later by Fabretti, Boldetti and Marangoni. The custodians, preceding and subsequent, appointed by the Church for the excavation of the catacombs concerned themselves only with searching for relics of martyrs, while as a rule they stripped the galleries of all the tombstones which came to light in great number. Those of the so-called "holy bodies" passed to the Lipsanotheca of the pontifical Sacristan or to that of the cardinal vicar, those of the ordinary faithful were dispersed throughout Rome to pave churches, to enrich the existing museums, more often collections at private individuals and cardinalitial houses (these gathered by Marini in the Vatican Gallery) and outside Rome to form important lapidary collections. From the two lipsanothecae, whose manuscripts (Regesta Sacristi pontiff. and Acta custodiae card. Vicarii) provide two ample collections of cemetery inscriptions, and from the various lapidary collections, Venuti (id., op. cit., n. 102), Lupi (id., op. cit., n. 103), Seguler (id., op. cit., n. 118), Oderici (id., op. cit., n. 124) and Reggio (id., op. cit., n. 133) drew for their s. in the 18th century, and Amati (id., op. cit., n. 141), Sarti (id., op. cit., n. 144) and Settele (id., op. cit., n. 145) in the 19th century.

In the mid-18th century A. F. Gori (id., op. cit., n. 106) prepared only a plan for the publication of a Corpus of Christian inscriptions; but a few years later Gaetano Marini, with far different preparation, set about collecting from every part of the Roman world Christian inscriptions earlier than the 12th century, which he transcribed, divided into various chapters, in four great volumes preserved in codd. Vatt. 9071-74. His entire epigraphic apparatus was reordered by G. B. De Rossi while he was publishing the 1st vol. of the Inscriptiones, for the continuation of which he left a grandiose collection of 19,000 manuscript slips.

Angelo Silvagni