"Et aliaram multarum Martyrum"—"et multa millia scorum"—(sanctorum) "et alii Sci (Sancti), id est CCLXII." . . . "in unum locum et alii CXXII. et alii Sci XLVI."—"et aliorum multi scor" (sanctorum).
In other words, the "Catalogue" and the "Labels" on the phials relate how the sacred oil was taken from lamps burning before the graves (the shrines) of S. Agnes and of "many other martyrs buried close by"; of S. Cornelius and "of many thousands of saints" resting in the immediate neighbourhood of his tomb; of S. Philippus and of "many other saints sleeping near his shrine," etc.
In three instances the exact numbers of the nameless martyrs are given, viz.: 262, 122, and 46. The expression "many thousands" which occurs in this venerable memorial of the reverent feeling of Christians of the sixth century towards the noble and devoted confessors of the Faith, is of course an exaggerated one; it may even be termed a rhetorical expression; but it bears its undoubted testimony to the deeply rooted belief of Christians who lived in the centuries which immediately followed the Peace of the Church, that in this sacred City of the Roman dead an enormous number of martyrs was buried, besides those whose names and stories were, as it were, household words in every land where Jesus Christ was adored.
III
There is a celebrated inscription of Pope Damasus (A.D. 366-84) preserved in one of the collections of the epitaphs he placed in the Catacombs (the Sylloge Palestina), an inscription originally placed in the Papal Crypt of the "Callistus" Cemetery, which speaks especially of "a number of martyrs buried together" near that sacred spot. The epitaph commences as follows:
"Hic congesta jacet quæris si turba piorum
Corpora sanctorum retinent veneranda sepulchra
Sublimes animas rapuit sibi Regia cœli."[1]
*
- ↑ Allard translates these lines: "Si vous voulez savoir, ici reposent
amoncelés les ossements d'un grand nombre des saints; ces vénérables
tombeaux gardent les corps des élus dont le royaume des cieux a tiré à lui
