APPENDICES
APPENDIX I.—ON S. PETRONILLA
Baronius, followed by Bishop Lightfoot of Durham and
others, calls attention to an etymological difficulty which
exists in attempting to derive Petronilla from Petros, which
at first sight seems so obvious. These scholars prefer to
connect the name "Petronilla" not with Petros but with
"Petronius." Now, the founder of the Flavian family was
T. Flavius Petro. Lightfoot then proceeds to suggest that
"Petronilla" was a scion of the Flavian house, and became
a convert to Christianity, probably in the days of Antoninus
Pius, and was subsequently buried with other Christian members
of the great Flavian house in the Domitilla Cemetery.
De Rossi, however, and other recent scholars in the lore of the Catacombs, in spite of the presumed etymological difficulty, decline to give up the original "Petrine" tradition, but prefer to assume that Petronilla was a daughter, but only a spiritual daughter, of the great apostle—that is, she was simply an ordinary convert of S. Peter's.
Of these two hypotheses: (a) dealing with the first, in the very free and rough way in which the Latin tongue was treated at a comparatively early date in the story of the Empire, when grammar, spelling, and prosody were very frequently more or less disregarded save in highly cultured circles, the etymological difficulty referred to by Lightfoot can scarcely be pressed, for it possesses little weight.
(b) As regards the second hypothesis—the shrinking, which more modern Roman Catholic theologians apparently feel, from the acknowledgment that S. Peter had a daughter at all, was absolutely unknown in the earlier Christian centuries. To give an example. As late as the close of the
