EPIGRAPHIC COLLECTIONS
In the Roman world, the East preceded the West in the collection of inscriptions; in Greece, in fact, collections were formed as early as the 3rd century BC, from which the Palatine Anthology, compiled by Cephalas in the 10th century, and the Planudean Anthology in the 14th century, drew their material. In the West, the first example is provided by a fragment of an ancient Roman collection, which a monk of Einsiedeln transcribed in the 9th century together with other Christian inscriptions; it was only in the 15th century that numerous collections began to appear, which paved the way for the great Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum.
Christian epigraphy, after the Peace of Constantine, developed so extensively that in the early Middle Ages it gave rise to numerous collections in various regions of the West, to which the East can only oppose monumental inscriptions from the 5th–7th centuries with later additions from the 9th–10th centuries, drawn from collections in Constantinople and nearby places, gathered in a special chapter of the Palatine Anthology, and sepulchral inscriptions of uncertain origin mixed into the 15th chapter, interspersed with pagan titles (G. B. De Rossi, Inscr. christ., II, no. 29). This epigraphic activity, in which Rome always remained at the center, slowed in the last centuries of the Middle Ages, only to resume with a different character and ever-growing vigor from the 16th century onward.
1. Christian collections prior to the 15th century
Some preliminary observations are necessary regarding this period. Various collections exist in many regions, but they are of limited scope; very few are major ones, reserved for the largest cities, and these were compiled with the specific purpose of serving as illustrations or accompaniments to itineraries or descriptions of sacred buildings. The multiplicity of collections in the early Middle Ages is explained by the literary taste of the time, the exclusive reason for small collections and not secondary for the major ones. In Christian epigraphy, poetry did not remain, as in classical epigraphy, confined to sepulchral inscriptions; 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, parenthetic, exegetical, and dogmatic poems 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 under the influence of Alcuin throughout the Carolingian age. In this period, the collections were subjected to multiple fragmentations and manipulations, partial insertions into poetic anthologies, and reductions to the state in which they have come down to us.A 7th-century collection from Latin Africa may easily be the source of the verses that adorned a baptistery and a basilica, recorded in the Salmasian Anthology of Paris, cod. 1938 (De Rossi, op. cit., no. 20); from a similar anthology come (ibid., p. 460) two poems contained in cod. Sess. 55, one of which was composed by St. Augustine for the tomb of a deacon who was a victim of the Donatists.
For Spain, noteworthy is the collection formed by two small groups of epigrams inserted into the 8th-century anthology of Spanish poets in Paris, cod. 8093 (ibid., no. 30), the first of which contains epitaphs of bishops and abbots of Valencia and Tarragona, and the second basilical poems from Seville; these are certainly partial copies of a broader original.
For Rome, numerous collections survive from the 9th and 10th centuries, containing metrical inscriptions from cemeteries and basilicas, which De Rossi studied thoroughly, as well as numerous other groups of similar inscriptions extracted from poetic anthologies of the same centuries. From this mass of Carolingian-era copies, it can be demonstrated that only two original collections need to be posited. For the extensive treatment, which is here summarized schematically, see A. Silvagni, *Inscriptiones christianae Urbis Romae*, nova series, I, Rome 1922, V. Conspectus auctorum; no. 1 with the accompanying synoptic table of the collections, and *Dissertazioni della Pontificia Accademia Romana di Archeologia*, 15 (1921), pp. 181 ff.
The manifold Roman collections can be grouped into two distinct categories. a) Collections containing inscriptions from cemeteries and cemetery basilicas, along with titles from some urban basilicas: Tuornense (De Rossi, *Inscr. chr.*, II, no. 6), Centulense (ibid., no. 7), Einsiedlense II (ibid., no. 2), Harleiana (ibid., no. 9), Lauerhansense IV (ibid., nos. 3, 8), Virdunense I (ibid., no. 12). Common characteristics of these collections are: no inscription is later than the pontificate of Honorius I; the total epigraphic material of about three hundred inscriptions is repeated in almost two-thirds of the different collections and appears rather as a common mass variously reworked; in almost all collections, the inscriptions are presented in fragmentary topographical groups of varying extent, with the Tuornense alone offering 37 cemetery inscriptions in regular topographical order from the Via Salaria to the Via Ostiense, in full correspondence with the Salisburg Itinerary 140, as De Rossi pointed out; no collection contains cemetery inscriptions from the Via Flaminia, Cornelia, Aurelia, or Portuense. In conclusion, since it cannot be critically sustained that complete and partial collections, as De Rossi seems to believe, were made at the same time for the same cemeteries, it must be admitted that a single great collection was compiled in the 7th century, contemporary with the ancient itineraries and with the urban and suburban order of one of them, to which it was attached as an illustration for learned pilgrims; soon detached from it, it underwent the multiple reworkings of scribes and monastic schools. b) Collections containing inscriptions from basilicas only: Vaticana (ibid., no. 5), Lauerh. I and II (ibid., nos. 13, 11), Cantabrigense (Silvagni, op. cit., no. 1); Virdunense II (De Rossi, op. cit., no. 5); Virburburgense (ibid., no. 14) and collections in anthologies: Paris, codd. 8041 and 2773, 2832, 4841, 9347 (ibid., nos. 21, 23, 25, 26), Brussels, cod. 10615 (ibid., no. 27 F), Lyon, Q. 69 (ibid., no. 26 B). The collections marked with an asterisk contain exclusively inscriptions from St. Peter’s Basilica; in the others, such inscriptions are joined by a few from other basilicas. The Vatican collection, lacking inscriptions later than Honorius and provided with a lemma showing its connection to another compilation, should be linked to the great 7th-century collection, of which it easily formed a special section. The synoptic table of all the other collections reveals a compilation of 124 inscriptions from the basilica of St. Peter and adjacent buildings, eight of which are dated between 707 and 795; this constitutes a second great 8th-century collection, overlooked by De Rossi, which agrees with an 8th-century description of the Basilica itself (ibid., p. 224), transcribed in an appendix to the Salisburg Itinerary 140, and was originally likely attached to II.
Another collection of the Vatican Basilica dates to the 12th century and consists of epitaphs of popes inserted into the description of the Basilica in Vatican, cod. 3627, which the priest Petrus Mallii offered to Alexander III (1159–81), compiled with a polemical purpose (ibid., no. 19) in the contemporary dispute over the preeminence between the Vatican Basilica and the Lateran.
The route taken by pilgrims descending from the Great St. Bernard through the Aosta Valley led into the Po Valley; of some nearby cities, namely Milan,
Pavia, Vercelli, Piacenza and Ivrea contain inscriptions in the *S. Laureth. III*, which De Rossi judged to have been extracted in the 8th century from one or more codices of Milan (ibid., op. cit. n. 16). It certainly had a distinct and much more extensive collection than the ten poems of the codex, as is suggested by the fragment of a Milanese itinerary transcribed after the Roman one in the Salisburgensis codex 140. A second collection of epitaphs of Milanese bishops from the 6th–8th centuries (ibid., op. cit., n. 18) was discovered in the 17th century by Alciato, who transcribed it inaccurately. Present: F 82; in his treatment, De Rossi maintained that it had been compiled in the 11th century in connection with the *Vitae pontificum Mediolanenses*. A more detailed examination, aided by new evidence (A. Silvagni, *Studio critico sopra le due sillogi medievali di iscrizioni cristiane milanesi*, in *Riv. di arch. crit.*, 15 [1938], pp. 107–22, 249–79), allows us to trace it to a more ancient origin, probably the 8th century, and thus to regard it as a fragment of the previous collection. Pavia, as the capital of the Lombard kingdom, must likewise have had a special collection, of which the present one is a notable fragment; we may add the Greek inscription from S. Pietro in coelo aureo, which returned to the Einsiedeln collection.
On the Via Flaminia at Spoleto, five poems of Bishop Achille were transcribed in the 7th century; these are found inserted in the *S. Laureth. IV* and in other codices of the Roman collection of the 7th century. To these must be added the inscriptions of Bishop Spes and of a deceased person from 384, written in the 9th century on a palimpsest (De Rossi, op. cit., p. 43) discovered in 1878 at Aachen. From the sanctuary of S. Felice at Nola, celebrated by Bishop St Paulinus, come seven poems, including the votive one by Damasus, inserted in the Paris codex 1443 and partially in other codices. Ravenna, geographically remote from the pilgrim routes, did not produce its own collection for the Carolingian school; evidence of collections or isolated transcriptions are the poem of Droctulf, inserted in three codices of the Roman collection of the 7th century, and three inscriptions (ibid., op. cit., n. 1) from the Scaliger membrane.
2. Collections of the 15th century and later
In the preceding age, Rome stood at the center of Christian epigraphic activity spread throughout almost the entire West; in this period such activity is almost exclusively concentrated in Rome, where alone its development can be traced. It is well known that the first humanists devoted themselves to the search for ancient literary codices and, together with transcriptions of inscriptions, there arose that contempt for the rough Christian inscriptions which passed to all epigraphists of that century and the next in the North, while in Rome in the 16th century it persisted until it disappeared with the rise of Christian archaeology.Right at the beginning of the century, the famous collection of classical inscriptions with only Christian ones appears in the codex Vat. Barb. 1952, which bears the date 1409; a second recension framed within a *Descriptio urbis Romae eiusque excellentiae* is found in the codices Vat. 10687 and Chis. I. VI. 204, both miscellanies; a third recension is in the codex Vat. 3851 attributed to Nicola Signorili. De Rossi (op. cit., n. 37, pp. 316 ff.), not giving due weight to the date of the Barb. codex, attributed the second recension to the year 1347 and identified its author in the person of Cola di Rienzo; this conclusion was accepted by all scholars. A critical examination of the method employed (Silvagni, op. cit., n. 8; *Archivum latinitatis medii aevi*, Paris 1924) overturns the dating of this recension and restores full validity to the date 1409 of the first. The author, however, remains uncertain; he must certainly have been a humanist and easily Poggio Bracciolini, who from 1402 onward was transcribing inscriptions in Rome. Poggio Bracciolini is to be recalled here solely for a quire of the Roman collection from Einsiedeln that he discovered in Switzerland around 1417, which, together with the preceding collection, supplied the only Christian inscriptions to all the great compilations for more than a century (De Rossi, op. cit., n. 42). A small collection of inscriptions from St Peter’s is drawn from the *Lib. II. De Basilica Vaticana* contained in the codex Vat. 375 of 1410, which around 1450 was composed by Maffeo Vegio, a good humanist but by no means an admirer of Christian inscriptions. Pietro Sabino was the first humanist to protest explicitly against this contempt and, separating Christian inscriptions—ancient, medieval, and recent—from the classical ones, which he had collected in churches and other parts of Rome, formed a rich collection that in 1494 he offered to King Charles VIII (a copy of which was recognized by De Rossi, op. cit., n. 66, in the codex Marc. lat. X. 195). Cancellieri and others report a similar collection of mainly medieval inscriptions from Roman churches, compiled in 1498 by Giovanni Cancelli and dedicated to St John (op. cit., n. 27); one must go down to the early 17th century to find another example in the collection of Carlo de Serva in the codex Vat. G. 28 (ibid., op. cit., n. 62), and finally to 1703 with that of Epifanio Davanzati in the codex Vat. 10164 (ibid., op. cit., n. 95).
With the intolerance of the 16th century, humanistic prejudices fell away in Rome, and numerous classical inscriptions are found in certain collections mixed with ancient, medieval, and recent Christian inscriptions that belonged exclusively to their respective churches; such is the collection of the anonymous Spaniard (ibid., op. cit., n. 57), compiled during the pontificate of Pius V in the codex Chis. I. V. 167. These and the preceding authors, in transcribing Christian inscriptions in Roman churches, had entirely neglected the numerous ones that in the medieval age had been transferred from the catacomb galleries to pave their floors; it was to these, not excluding others from churches and classical ones, that the attention of contemporary epigraphists turned. Aldo Manuzio (ibid., op. cit., n. 59) recorded a great many in his epigraphic apparatus, especially in the codex Vat. 5241 not later than 1588; Filippo de Winghe (ibid., op. cit., n. 60) in his collection before 1592 contained in the codices Bruxell. 7872–73 followed his example, as did Giacomo Sirmond (ibid., op. cit., n. 62) at the end of the century in his *collectanea* preserved in the codex Paris. 9695. The same method was followed in the 17th century by Francesco Suárez (ibid., op. cit., n. 84), whose rich collection before 1667 is gathered in the codices Vat. 9140 and Barb. 3084; Francesco Tolomei (ibid., op. cit., n. 88), who left two volumes of *Iscritioni copiate dalli suoi originali in varii luoghi di Roma* in the year 1666, preserved in the codices K. VIII. 1–2 of the Biblioteca di Siena, as had earlier been done by G. B. Doni (ibid., op. cit., n. 74), whose collection of Christian and classical inscriptions, from which the collection in the codex Maruc. A. 293 was extracted, was intended in 1632 to form a *Corpus*—a design that even the patronage of Cardinal Barberini failed to bring to fruition.
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**EPIGRAPHIC COLLECTIONS**
**EPIGRAPHIC COLLECTIONS — S. of Cambridge: inscriptions from the basilica of SS. Protus and Hyacinth, the oratory of the Holy Cross, and the basilica of SS. John and Paul, intercalated in the text of a copy of the *Liber Pontificalis* — Cambridge, University Library, Kh. IV. 6 (alias 2021), f. 238v (12th c.).**
None of the authors cited recorded inscriptions from the ancient cemeteries, which had been rediscovered many years earlier; A. Bosio was the first to make them known with *Roma sotterranea*, published posthumously in 1632, followed much later by Fabretti, Boldetti, and Marangoni. The custodians, both those appointed before and after by the Church to oversee the excavation of the catacombs, concerned themselves solely with seeking relics of martyrs, while ordinarily stripping the galleries of all the numerous inscriptions that came to light. Those of the so-called “holy bodies” were transferred to the Lipsanotheca of the Papal Sacristy or to that of the Cardinal Vicar, while those of ordinary faithful were scattered throughout Rome to pave churches, to enrich existing museums, more often collections belonging to private individuals and cardinals’ households (later gathered by Marini in the *Galleria Vaticana*), and outside Rome to form important lapidary collections. From the two Lipsanothecas, whose manuscripts (*Regesta Sacrarii pontificii* and *Acta custodiae cardinalis Vicarii*) provide two extensive collections of cemetery inscriptions, and from the various lapidary collections, scholars such as Venuti (loc. cit., no. 102), Lupi (loc. cit., no. 103), Seguier (loc. cit., no. 118), Oderici (loc. cit., no. 124), and Reggio (loc. cit., no. 133) in the 18th century, and Amati (loc. cit., no. 141), Sarti (loc. cit., no. 144), and Settele (loc. cit., no. 145) in the 19th century, drew material for their works.
In the mid-18th century, A. F. Gori (loc. cit., no. 106) prepared only a plan for the publication of a *Corpus* of Christian inscriptions; but a few years later, Gaetano Marini, with far greater preparation, undertook the collection of Christian inscriptions from all parts of the Roman world dating before the 12th century, which he transcribed and divided into various chapters in four large volumes preserved in the codices Vat. 9071–74. G. B. De Rossi later reorganized the entire epigraphic apparatus while publishing the 10th volume of *Inscriptiones christianae*, for which he left a monumental collection of 19,000 manuscript index cards.