reason for this investigation, there is no doubt but that the restoration work which was being carried on at the basilica of the saint across the Tiber suggested it to the Pope. The tomb of the famous saint could not be found, although for centuries it had been emphatically alluded to in several of the Pilgrim Itineraries, and in the yet more ancient "Guide," subsequently copied by William of Malmesbury several centuries later.
It was about the year of grace 821, after long and fruitless searching for the lost tomb, and when he had come to the conclusion that the body of S. Cecilia had been carried away probably by Astolphus and the Lombards in their destructive raids, and that the tomb had been destroyed, that Pope Paschal early one morning, while listening to the singing of the Psalms in the great Vatican Basilica, fell asleep; as he slept he saw the form of a saint in glory; she disclosed her name, "Cecilia," and told him where[1] to look for her tomb.
Acting upon the words of the saint in the vision, he found at once the lost tomb, and when the coffin of cypress wood was opened, the body of Cecilia was seen unchanged, still wrapped in the gold-embroidered robe in which she had been clothed when her loving friends laid her to rest after her martyrdom, with the linen cloths stained with her blood folded together at her feet.
She lay in the position in which she had passed away. Those who had buried her, left her thus—not lying upon the back like a body in a tomb, but upon the right side, with her knees drawn together and her face turned away—her arms stretched out before her. In her touching and graceful attitude she seemed as though she was quietly sleeping.
Just as he found her, in the same coffin with the robe of golden tissue and the blood-stained linen folded by her feet,
- ↑ The text of the Liber Pontificalis mentions the Cemetery of Prætextatus as the site of the lost tomb. It was there where her husband Valerian and his brother and the officer Maximus had been buried. Duchesne, the learned editor of the Liber Pontificalis, suggests that the body of S. Cecilia had been removed from its original resting-place in the Crypt of S. Callistus, and had been secretly placed for safety's sake in the Cemetery of Prætextatus. De Rossi, however, and later Marucchi, believe that the Cemetery of Prætextatus, through an error in the Liber Pontificalis, had been written for "Cemetery of Callistus."
