Valentine, Saint, Martyr

VALENTINE, Saint, Martyr. - The Hieronymian Martyrology under 14 February gives only «Interamnes via Flaminia miliario ab urbe LXIII natale Valentini». A basilica dedicated to St. V. at Terni appears only in the biography of Pope Zachary (Lib. Pont., I, p. 437).

Some hagiographers held that there were a V. bishop of Terni and a V. Roman presbyter, both martyrs on 14 February (BHL, 8460); others instead that the V. was only one, the bishop of Terni; others finally that there was only one, namely the Roman martyr buried at Rome on the Flaminia. The hagiographers mention a V. Roman priest in the Passio of Sts. Marius and Martha (BHL, 8463); Marucchi distinguished the two V.s; Lanzoni (pp. 406-13) and J. P. Kirsch (Der stadtrömische Festkalender, Freiburg im Br. 1924, pp. 206-207) preferred the martyr of Terni, excluding the Roman one. According to Delehaye the hagiographers made two namesakes out of a single saint. It seems more probable that the V. who was a native of Terni and lived at Terni became a Roman martyr because he was taken to Rome for trial and there suffered martyrdom, the imperium of the praefectus Urbi extending as far as the hundredth mile from the city.

THE CEMETERY OF ST. VALENTINE

The martyr was buried in Rome in an open-air Christian cemetery at the second mile of the Via Flaminia, where in his honor Pope Julius I erected a basilica and where the inscriptions found attest to the veneration of the martyr as early as the 4th century. The memoria had an apse about 4.40 m wide, built directly against the embankment, recently identified by the architect B. M. Apolloni-Ghetti. This apse was part of the primitive memoria, of which three perimeter walls also remain; these were later for the most part demolished and replaced with the colonnades of a three-aisled basilica, brought back to light in 1888 on the occasion of the new road built by the Municipality of Rome and illustrated by O. Marucchi. In a third phase the crypt and the raised presbytery were built. The walls of the crypt were faced with marble slabs, and its entrances were obtained by opening a passage in the perimeter walls of the memoria and by cutting two small stairways at the end of the side aisles. The construction of the Basilica is assigned by the Liberian Catalogue and by the Lib. Pont. (I, p. 205) to Pope Julius I (336-52); the third phase, with the crypt, is attributed by the Lib. Pont. to Pope Theodore (642-49; I, p. 333), while the Notitia ecclesiarum gives it as the work of Honorius I (625-38; R. Valentini and G. Zucchetti, Codice topogr. della città di Roma, II, Rome 1942, p. 73). This Basilica was then enriched by Benedict II (684-85; Lib. Pont., I, p. 473), by Hadrian I (772-95; ibid., p. 504), by Leo III (795-816; ibid., II, pp. 9, 20), who also [repaired] its roof (ibid., II, p. 28), and by Gregory IV (827-44; ibid., II, p. 78). In 1905, among the ruins of the Basilica, there were extracted fragments in Philocalian letters of a poem composed by Damasus, unknown to the epigraphic sylloges (A. Ferrua, Epigrammata Damasiana, Vatican City 1942, no. 49, pp. 197-198). In February 1928 a fragment came to light in three lines with: «... ut esset... sepulcr... presb(iter) inst(ans)»; the characters and the «presbiter instans» of the third line are identical to the epitaph found near the tombs of the martyrs Protus and Hyacinth in Bassilla, placed by the presbyter Theodore (A. Ferrua, op. cit., no. 49, II, p. 199). At the same time a marble sarcophagus was recovered with the rough-hewn front representing Jesus before Pilate and the Crux invicta, beneath which two soldiers sleep. Under Pope Nicholas II the abbot Teubaldo restored the church and the monastery, finishing the work on 3 February 1960.

In the chronicle of the monastery of St. Michael «ad Mosam» the visit made in the 11th century by a pilgrim to the basilica of St. V. is recorded (J. Mabillon, Vetera analecta, Paris 1723, pp. 350-56). Among the abbeys of Rome, that of St. V. is mentioned both by P. Mallio and by John the Deacon (Ch. Hülsen, Le Chiese di Roma, Florence 1927, p. 129), but in the Turin Catalogue of the churches of Rome (ca. 1320), that of St. V. extra portam is indicated as «sine muris» and as having «non habet servitorem» (ibid., p. 28, no. 57).

The body of the Martyr seems to have been translated toward the end of the 13th century into the chapel of St. Zeno in St. Praxedes. The remains of the underground cemetery were identified in 1594 by P. Ugonio and by A. Bosio, who left a summary description of it. They then saw intact the image of Jesus Christ crucified with four nails, his feet resting on a footrest, clothed in a colobium, at the sides of the cross above the sun and the moon, below the Blessed Virgin and the evangelist John. In a niche on the opposite wall is painted the Blessed Virgin with the Child Jesus and the inscription «sca Dei genetrix», of the same type as that destroyed in Pamphilus (v.). On the other walls were scenes reproduced by Bosio, with the Visitation of the Virgin, two scenes from the legend of the midwife Salome taken from the Protoevangelium of James; three figures of saints, among them «Ses Laurentius». After Ugonio and Bosio the underground galleries were transformed into a cellar, and thus part of the painting of the Crucifixion was destroyed. In 1870 the land, which until then had belonged to the Augustinians, was confiscated and sold. In 1877 O. Marucchi entered the underground area and identified the paintings described by P. Ugonio and A. Bosio. Many were the inscriptions found in the above-ground cemetery, and not a few consular ones, beginning with the year 318 up to 523. In one fragment one reads «ad domnum (m) Valentinum... refrigeret) tibi Valentinus»; another fragment indicates: «depositus est ad domnum Valentinum». In a metrical inscription of a «Pastor medicus» one reads «addetur et tibi Valentini gloria (sancti)». Among the walls of the Basilica was extracted a fragment of a sarcophagus, today in the Capitoline Museum, representing a ship named «Thecla», while the one who steers the ship is «Paulus». Noteworthy are two epigraphic fragments that refer to two deceased persons originally from Interamna, that is, Terni; the first is that of a «Veneriosa que nata est in civitate Interamnatium» in 355 (O. Marucchi, Le catacombe rom., 2nd ed., Rome 1933, p. 610); the second commemorates an «Augurina civis (Interamnen)sis » (ibid., p. 625). These, having died in Rome, would have been laid to rest near the martyr originally from Terni. In the basilica is a marble fragment with the inscription: « semper et ubique devoti ». Some epigraphs, among them that of a purchase of a tomb by the fossor Acilinus, are now in the Christian Museum at the Teutonic Cemetery.

Enrico Josi