13Caesar and Christ

In the official Italian archaeological journalNotizie degli Scavifor 1951 were reported recent excavations of a grandiose villa near Piazza Armerina, in central Sicily, which had already received some notoriety in the press, for depicting “Bikini girls” in very brief bathing suits (Fig. 13.1). Of this villa traces had always existed above ground, and as early as 1754 the discovery had been reported there of a “temple” (probably the basilica numbered 30 in the plan,Fig. 13.2), with a mosaic floor. In 1881 the trilobate complex (46) was excavated, and in 1929 the great Sicilian archaeologist Paolo Orsi, the expert on prehistoric remains on the island, dug there. Major funds—500,000 lire—made possible large-scale excavation between 1937 and 1943, as a part ofIl Duce’splans for a major celebration of the bimillennary of Augustus’ birth. After the war, government support to the tune of 5,000,000 lire (which inflation reduced in value to $8,000, only a tenth as much as the earlier grant) made it possible to finish excavating the villa and to take steps to preservein situthe mosaics which are its chief glory. This is one of the few excavations on Italian soil whose chief avowed intent was to encourage tourism, and it has succeeded. Piazza Armerina is a boom town, boasting a new hotel, and its narrow streets are choked with sightseeing busses.

Fig. 13.1Piazza Armerina, Imperial Villa, “Bikini girls” mosaic. (B. Pace,I Mosaici di Piazza Armerina, Pl. 15)

Both the mosaics and the villa’s ambitious plan make it a sight worth seeing. There are forty-two polychrome pavements, involving the setting by the ancient workmen of 30,000,000 individual mosaic rectangles, ortesserae, over an area of more than 3500 square yards, a complex unique in extent in the Roman world. The plan, too, is one of the most ambitious known to archaeology, rivalling that of Nero’s Golden House, Hadrian’s villa, or Diocletian’s palace at Spalato on the Dalmatian cost. The villa lies three-and-a-half miles southwest of Piazza Armerina, nearly 2,000 feet above sea level, on the west slope of Monte Mangone, in the midst of green orchards and pleasant groves of nut trees. Its altitude assured its being cool in summer; its setting under the lee of the hill protected it from winter winds. But the slope required terracing, and so the villa was laid out on four levels centering on three peristyles and a portico (plan 2,15,41,26). The parts are connected by irregular rooms (13,14,40). The technique of the masonry shows that the whole complex is of one build, characterized by asymmetrical symmetry, strange, twisted ground-plans, a fondness for curves, and off-center axes, all of which shows a definite break with conventional classicism. The structure is light and elastic: the dome over the three-lobed state dining room (46), nowadays replaced by an unnecessarily ugly modern roof to protect the mosaics, was built of pumice concrete, lightened still further by setting in it lengths of clay pipe and amphorae, to reduce the weight of the superstructure on the bearing walls.

Fig. 13.2Piazza Armerina, Imperial Villa, Gismondi’s reconstruction. (Pace,Mosaici, p. 33)

From a strange polygonal porticoed atrium (2) steps lead down to a porticoed horseshoe-shaped latrine (6) and to the baths (7–12), where spatial architecture runs riot, with single and double apses, a clover-leaf, and an octagonalfrigidariumor room for taking a cold plunge (9). The middle terrace, east of the baths, centers on a huge trapezoidal peristyle (15), with a complex fountain, embellished by a fish mosaic, in the middle, and living rooms opening off to north and south. South of the peristyle a higher terrace is occupied by an odd elliptical court, shaped like a flattened egg, with a buttressed apse at the west end, the trilobate dining room at the east, and a triple set of conventional rectangular rooms, with mosaics of Cupids vintaging and fishing, to the north and south. The total effect is of an agreeable contrast between straight and curved walls. Returning to the rectangular peristyle, we find to the east of it a long double-apsed corridor, like thenarthex, or long narrow portico, in front of an early Christian church. East of this is a suite of rooms centering on the vast, off-centered, apsed basilica—larger than Domitian’s on the Palatine in Rome—which was the earliest part of the villa excavated. On either side of this is a series of rectangular and apsed rooms, the private quarters and nursery, to judge by the mosaics. An aqueduct limits the villa on the north and east. The servants’ quarters are not yet excavated; they probably lay to the southwest, to the left of the monumental entrance (1). The whole is complicated, consistent, functional, organic, clearly the work of a master architect who will challenge comparison with the builder of the Sanctuary of Fortune at Praeneste or with Hadrian himself.

The mosaics must have been done in a hurry by huge gangs of craftsmen, probably imported from North Africa, since the technique resembles that of mosaics at Volubilis, Hippo, Carthage, and Lepcis. Mosaic-making is slow work; nowadays it takes a careful workman six days to lay a square meter of tesserae. To finish the job in the space of a few years must have required a swarm of as many as 500 artisans.

Apart from their vast extent and their subject-matter—of which more in the sequel—the mosaics are of prime importance for the contribution they make to dating the villa.About its date there is controversy. Professor Biagio Pace (who excavated here in the ’30’s), relying on stylistic similarities to late (fifth centuryA.D.) mosaics in Ravenna and Constantinople, would date the villa in aboutA.D.410, and ascribe its ownership to a rich Sicilian landed proprietor. Pace’s pupil G. V. Gentili, who was in charge of the 1950 excavations, argues, following the Norwegian archaeologist H. P. L’Orange, for an earlier date. One piece of evidence not adduced by him is conclusive in his favor. The double-apsed entrance (8) to the baths contains a spirited mosaic depicting the Circus Maximus in Rome, full of life and movement, with the chariots of the four stables, the Greens, Blues, Whites, and Reds, all represented. The Green—the Emperor’s favorite—wins, not without a collision. Down the center of the oval track runs thespina, or division-wall, surmounted by various monuments, including a single obelisk in the center (Fig. 13.3). Now it is known that Augustus set up an obelisk in the Circus Maximus, and that inA.D.357 Constantius added another: therefore any representation of the Circus with only one obelisk must be earlier than 357. Pace’s late date is therefore excluded.

Is there any possibility of still more precise dating? Gentili thinks there is. Beginning from thea prioriproposition that a complex architecturally and artistically as grand as this must be beyond the means of any private citizen, however rich, he assumes that the villa must have been built to the order of an Emperor. Which one? To answer this question he looked among the mosaics for possible portraits, and he found them in several places. For example, in the vestibule (13) between the baths and the trapezoidal peristyle (15) there is an obvious portrait study of the mistress of the villa flanked by two children, presumably her son and daughter. The son has a squint. He is represented again, with the same squint, in the northeast apse of thefrigidarium(9), in the room of the small hunting scene (23), and in the vestibule of Cupid and Pan (35). (The effect of the squint is achieved by setting one eye with a square tessera, the other with a triangular one.)

Fig. 13.3Piazza Armerina, Imperial Villa, Circus Maximus mosaic. (Dorothy MacKendrick photo)

Fig. 13.4Piazza Armerina, Imperial Villa, small hunting scene, mosaic. (Pace,Mosaici, Fig. 30)

Now was the time to have recourse to the study, there to take down from the shelves the works of the Byzantine chronicler John Malalas. He records that Maxentius, the son of the Emperor Maximian Herculius (A.D.286–305), Diocletian’s colleague, was cross-eyed. Armed with this firm clue, Gentili examined the mosaics again, looking for proof or disproof that the villa belonged to Maximian. He found proof. Knowing that Maximian Herculius equated himself with Hercules, as his name shows, he looked for, and found, evidence in a colossal sculptured head of Hercules from the basilica apse, and in the mosaic, of preoccupation with that hero and his exploits. Over and over again, in the borders of robes, in foliage, and self-standing (in 4) he found representations of ivy, which was Hercules’ symbol: the initial of its Latin name,hedera, is the initial of the hero’s name. Furthermore, one of the most extensive and important mosaics in the villa, that in the state dining room (46), has as its subject the labors of Hercules. Gentili’s case looks conclusively proven; it was buttressed when he took up the Circus mosaic (8), to back it with concrete and replace it, and found under it a hypocaust containing coins of the late third century, presumably dropped by the workmen who laid the mosaic in the first place.

The subjects of the mosaics are in part more or less conventional mythological scenes. Odysseus hoodwinks the one-eyed Sicilian giant Polyphemus, making him drunk with a great bowl of wine (27); an obliging dolphin rescues the musician Arion from a watery grave (32), and Orpheus with his lyre charms a vast array of animals, including a goldfinch, a lizard, and a snail (39). Still more interesting are the mosaics which show Maximian’s interests. He appears to have had three obsessions: hunting, the circus, and his children. The three scenes of the chase (23,26,33) haveprompted L’Orange to suggest that the villa was built as a sumptuous hunting-lodge, but the great basilica shows that it was adapted also to the uses of more formal protocol; the Imperial court must sometimes have met here.

The smaller hunting scene (23) is divided into five bands (Fig. 13.4). At the top, two eager hounds, one gray, one red, are off in full cry after a fox. Next below, a young hunter identified by Gentili as Constantius Chlorus, Maximian’s adopted son, accompanied by our old friend the squint-eyed Maxentius, sacrifices to Diana, the goddess of the hunt. The third band is devoted to fowling—with birdlime—and falconry, the fourth to the fox, gone to ground and besieged in his den by the dogs. In the fifth, on the left a stag is about to be caught in a net stretched across a forest path in the unsporting Roman way; on the right is a boar-hunt with an unorthodox hunter just about to make the kill by dropping a large rock from above on the boar’s head. In the center is a vivid huntsman’s picnic. The hunters, wearing puttees, are sitting under a red awning. While they are waiting, one of them feeds the dog. A black boy blows on the fire, over which a succulent-looking trussed bird is roasting. Servants fetch bread from a wicker basket; another basket harbors two ample amphorae of wine.

This is an intimategenrescene. More impressive is the large hunting scene which crowds the whole 190-foot length of the double-apsed corridor (26). Here the aim portrayed is to catch exotic North African animals alive for the wild beast hunts in amphitheaters like the Coliseum. In the south apse is a female figure symbolizing Africa, flanked by a tiger and an amiable small elephant with a reticulated hide. The figure in the opposite apse who has a bear on one side, a panther on the other may be Rome, the animals symbolizing her dominion over palm and pine. In this case Africa is the point of departure of the captured beasts, Rome their destination. Between the two apses the huntingscenes unfold amid fantastic architecture in a rolling, wooded landscape sloping down to the sea in the center, teeming with fish. On land, animals attack each other (a leopard draws blood from a stag’s belly), and hunters in rich embroidered tunics hurl javelins, in the presence of the Emperor, at snarling lions and tigers at bay, set traps baited with kid for panthers (the kid being spread-eagled in a way that looks curiously like a parody of the Crucifixion). The hunters act as bearers—their heads camouflaged with leafy twigs, like Birnam wood coming to Dunsinane—or drag a lassoed bison toward the red ship that will transport it to Italy. A horseman, having stolen a tiger cub, delays the mother’s advance by dropping another cub in her path. A hippopotamus and a rhinoceros are among the game; smaller animals are hauled to the ships in crates on ox-carts; a live trussed boar is carried slung on a pole; a recalcitrant ostrich and an antelope are being pushed up a gangway (Fig. 13.5), while the gangway of another ship is groaning under the weight of an elephant with a checkerboard hide like the one flanking Africa in the apse. Most curious of all, just in front of this same apse the tables are turned: a man has taken refuge in a cage against the attack of a fabulous winged griffin, with the head of a bird of prey. The crowded, vivid, barbarous artistry of this mosaic brings us to the very threshold of the Byzantine age; in Rome’s past, only the Barberini mosaic at Palestrina can match it.

In Maximian’s family even the children were brought up to take part in blood sports. Room 36, a child’s room, perhaps Maxentius’—his squint-eyed portrait recurs in the anteroom (35)—portrays a child’s hunt, in three bands, full of characteristic Roman insensibility to animal suffering. In the upper band, a boy has hit a spotted hare full in the breast with a hunting spear, while another has lassoed a duckling. The middle band portrays hunting mishaps: a small animal nips one fallen small boy in the leg; a cock attacks another with its beak and spurs. In the bottom registerone boy clubs a peacock, a second defends himself with a shield against a buzzard, and a third has plunged his hunting spear into the heart of a goat.

Fig. 13.5Piazza Armerina, Imperial Villa, large hunting scene, mosaic (detail). (MPI)

Fig. 13.6Piazza Armerina, Imperial Villa, Labors of Hercules, mosaic (detail). (Pace,Mosaici, Pl. 7)

The child’s Circus (33), unlike the hunt, is rather fantastic than brutal. Around aspinawith a single obelisk, as in room 8, run four miniature chariots drawn by pairs of birds in the appropriate stable colors: green wood-pigeons, blue plovers, red flamingoes, and white geese. As usual, Green wins, and is awarded the palm. Servants with amphorae sprinkle the track to lay the dust. It is all vivid, detailed, alive, more illuminating than a dozen pages in a handbook.

The masterpiece among the mosaics is clearly the labors of Hercules cycle in thetriclinium(46). These were part of a standard repertory, available for copying from a book of cartoons (we have seen this sort of thing in Pompeii), but here the artist has stamped his own personality on the hackneyed scenes. In his hands they are at once learnedly allusive and bloodily violent. Thus the Augean stables, which Hercules cleaned by diverting a river to run through them, are simply suggested by a river and a pitchfork. Violence is often rather hinted at than insisted on, as in the slit-like eye of the dying Nemean lion, or the Picasso-like protruding eye of the terrified horse of Diomedes (Fig. 13.6). Sometimes the effect is gained by a topical touch, as when Geryon, the triple-headed giant, is given a suit of scaly armor, like the barbarians (cataphractarii) on Trajan’s column. But the full baroque excess, as insistent as in the frieze from the Pergamene altar, or the Laocoön group, comes out in the scene in the east lobe where five huge giants, foreshortened with a technique which anticipates Michelangelo’s on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, convulsively, despairingly, imploringly, yet full of impotent rage, turn their deep-sunk eyes to heaven as they strive to pull from their flesh Hercules’ deadly arrows, steeped in the blood of the Centaur Nessus. In the north lobe the apotheosisof Hercules is no doubt the mosaicist’s enforced tribute to his Imperial master, but in the scenes of metamorphosis in the entrance-ways to the apses—Daphne into a laurel, Cyparissus into a cypress, Ambrosia into a vine—he is following his own paradoxical bent, accepting as it were the challenge of expressing so dynamic a thing as the change from one form to another in the obdurate medium of mosaic.

The ten “Bikini Girls” (38) come last, because these mosaics, which overlie another set, are obviously later than the rest. They owe their fame to the scantiness of their costumes, as brief as any to be seen on modern European beaches. Gentili thinks they are female athletes, being awarded prizes, but Pace may be nearer the truth in supposing that they are pantomime actresses, with tambourines andmaracas, performing in a sort of aquacade, the bluetesseraein which they stand representing water. There is ancient evidence for this curiously decadent art-form. Martial speaks of actresses dressed—or undressed—as Nereids swimming about in the Coliseum, and the Church fathers fulminate against such spectacles. When the orchestra of the most august of theaters, that of Dionysus in Athens, was remodelled in Roman times to hold water, we must suppose, since the space is too small for mock naval battles, that the place once sacred to the choruses of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides was thereafter used for the aquatic antics of just such actresses as the Piazza Armerina mosaics portray. Tastelessness and grandeur, conspicuous waste and a daring architectural plan: this paradoxical blend, so characteristic of the villa, explains both what is meant by decline and why it took the Empire so long to fall.

*****

The villa at Piazza Armerina belongs to an age when Christians were persecuted: the motifs in the mosaics are almost aggressively pagan. But Maximian’s son-in-law Constantine became in the end a convert to Christianity, andbuilt, beginning aboutA.D.322, in honor of St. Peter, a great basilica church on the Vatican Hill, replaced in the Renaissance by the present building. In 1939, at the death of Pope Pius XI, who had asked to be buried in the crypt of St. Peter’s, excavations for his tomb created the occasion for transforming the crypt into a lower church. In lowering the floor level of the crypt for this purpose, the workmen came, only eight inches down, upon the pavement of Old St. Peter’s, Constantine’s church. This in turn rested upon mausolea with their tops sliced off, and their interiors rammed full of earth. At the direction of Pius XII, these mausolea were scientifically excavated.

What was revealed was a pagan Roman cemetery, in some places thirty feet below the floor of the present church. The mausolea were all in use and in good repair when Constantine began his church inA.D.322: the earliest brick stamp found in the area dates from the reign of Vespasian,A.D.69–79. The excavations were carried out under conditions comparable in difficulty only to the recovery of the Altar of Peace: the same constant battle with seepage, the same problem of underpinning one structure in order to read the message of another. Under these formidable difficulties, the cemetery was cleared, and archaeologists found the reason why Constantine moved a million cubic feet of earth and went so far as to violate sepulchres to build Old St. Peter’s on just this site. Whatever modern walls it was necessary to build were carefully marked with Pius XII brick-stamps, that future archaeologists might be in no doubt as to which masonry was modern and which ancient. The cemetery may now be visited by small groups with special permission, under the expert guidance of a polyglot archaeologist. The story he has to tell was not published until over ten years after the excavation began, in a massive two-volumeReportwhich stands fifteen and three-quarters inches high, contains 171 text figures and 119 plates, and weighs fourteen pounds. Fortunately its objectivity is as impressive as itsbulk. The archaeological evidence is lucidly set forth, and no conclusions are drawn which exceed it.

We know from Tacitus that Nero, in his search for scapegoats on whom to shift the blame for Rome’s great fire ofA.D.64, martyred Christians in an amphitheater on the Vatican Hill, and tradition has it that in this amphitheater St. Peter, too, suffered martyrdom. It was to test the validity of this tradition that Pius XII ordered the cemetery under St. Peter’s excavated. What was found was a series of twenty-one mausolea and one open area (P in the plan,Fig. 13.7), all facing southward onto a Roman street. The mausolea are plain brick on the outside, highly baroque within, enriched with mosaics, wall-paintings, and stucco-work. There are both cremation and inhumation burials, but when the mausolea were filled in inhumation was beginning to predominate. Of the mausolea only M is entirely Christian in décor; others began as pagan, later admitting Christian burials, or adapt pagan motifs to Christian symbolism. M contains the earliest known Christian mosaics, which Ward Perkins and Miss Toynbee call a microcosm of the dramatic history of Christianity’s peaceful penetration of the pagan Roman Empire. They are dated by technique and motifs to the middle of the third centuryA.D.The subjects are Jonah and the whale, the Fisher of Men, the Good Shepherd, and, in the vault, Christ figured as the sun. The wall paintings of the cemetery are mostly pagan, the contractors’ stock-in-trade, depicting in myth or in symbol the soul’s victory over death. The great artistic interest of the mausolea is in the stucco-work, both in relief and in the round, superior in quality to that of the subterranean basilica at the Porta Maggiore. Some of it is of unparalleled scale and complexity, excellently preserved (Fig. 13.8), and now protected from dampness by large, constantly burning electric heaters. Of stone sculpture in the round there is very little; it was probably removed by Constantine’s workmen. But there are many marble sarcophagi with pagan and Christianmotifs, testifying to the artistic revival enjoyed by the Roman world with the peace of the Church inA.D.312. They show how the stonemasons carved them as blanks, filling in details like inscriptions and portrait busts to the customer’s order. There is a pathetic one of a baby, who died, the inscription tells us, when he was six months old. There are reliefs of Biblical scenes: the children in the fiery furnace, Joseph and his brethren, the three Magi, and what may be the earliest Christian cross, dated aboutA.D.340; (an alleged cross at Herculaneum is more probably the scar of a ripped-away wall bracket).

Fig. 13.7Vatican City, excavations under St. Peter’s, plan of west end.(J. Toynbee and J. Ward Perkins, The Shrine of St. Peter, p. 136)

Fig. 13.7Vatican City, excavations under St. Peter’s, plan of west end.

(J. Toynbee and J. Ward Perkins, The Shrine of St. Peter, p. 136)

Fig. 13.8Vatican City, excavations under St. Peter’s, Mausoleum F, stuccoes.(Reverenda Fabbrica di San Pietro)

Fig. 13.8Vatican City, excavations under St. Peter’s, Mausoleum F, stuccoes.

(Reverenda Fabbrica di San Pietro)

The cemetery tells us something about the status and the religious convictions of its owners and occupants. Of the persons recorded in its inscriptions, over half have Greek names. They are freedmen or descendants of freedmen, many in the Imperial civil service. Some are tradesmen, some artisans. Only one was of Senatorial rank: his daughter’s body was wrapped in purple and veiled in gold. The richness of the tombs bespeaks an attitude that is modern enough, or rather neither ancient nor modern, but a constant. Paradoxically, importance is attached to material things, to the race for riches and creature comforts, while at the same time there is a preoccupation with the after life, a return, after the skepticism of the earlier Empire, to a belief in a personal immortality in store for those who have led moral lives. The deceased are connected with the world they have left behind by tubes for libations, that wine and milk may be poured down on their bones. Heaven is variously conceived: as a place of blessed sleep, or, like the Etruscan heaven, a succession of banquets, wine, and gardens. Grief is swallowed up in victory; the dead have their patron heroes: Hermes, Hercules, Minerva, Apollo, Dionysus, the Egyptian Isis or Horus—and Christ.

But the pagan cemetery, interesting as it is for the light it casts on the middle class of the early fourth century of our era, is not the centrally important archaeological discoveryunder St. Peter’s, nor does it supply the motive for Constantine’s location of his church just here. That motive the excavators found in the open space they named “Campo P.” Campo P is separated from mausoleum R by a sloping passage, called the Clivus; the drain under the passage contains tiles with stamps dated between the years 147–161, which fall within the reign of Antoninus Pius. A painted brick wall, since made famous as the Red Wall, separates the Clivus from Campo P. Into this wall are cut three superposed niches, two in the fabric of the wall itself, one beneath its foundations, which were actually raised on a sort of bridge at this point to protect the cavity. In front of the niches traces were found of a modest architectural façade, called the Aedicula, or little shrine.

In the cavity the excavators found human bones, which they have never identified further than to describe them as those of a person of advanced age and robust physique. The Aedicula penetrated above the pavement of Old St. Peter’s and formed its architectural focus. The conclusion is inevitable that Constantine inA.D.322 planned his basilica to rise just here, at great trouble and expense, because he believed the lowest niche, under the Red Wall, to enshrine a relic of overarching importance, nothing less than the bones of St. Peter. There is thus no doubt whatever, on objective evidence, that the Aedicula was reverenced in the fourth Christian century as marking the burial place of the founder of the Roman church.

Fig. 13.9Vatican City, excavations under St. Peter’s, Campo P.(Toynbee and Ward Perkins,op. cit., p. 141)

Fig. 13.9Vatican City, excavations under St. Peter’s, Campo P.

(Toynbee and Ward Perkins,op. cit., p. 141)

But this is not the end of the problem. The next question is, “How early can the burial, by objective archaeological evidence, be demonstrated to be?” The answer to this question must be sought, if anywhere, in the context of Campo P. This proved on excavation to be an area of poor graves, marked, like those of the necropolis of the Port of Ostia on Isola Sacra, simply by a surround and a pitched roof of tiles, without any of the pomp of costly marble sarcophagus or richly stuccoed mausoleum. It is to the class which wouldbe buried in such pathetic graves as these that the earliest Roman Christians (of the age of Nero [A.D.64]) must have belonged. (Since theReportwas published, Professor Magi, whom we have already met in connection with the Cancelleria reliefs, has discovered, under the Vatican City parking lot, another cemetery, also of poor graves, of the first centuryA.D.; there is no cogent proof that they are Christian.) The graves in Campo P (Fig. 13.9) were found to lie at various levels: the deepest must be the earliest. The deepest is the one called by the excavators Gamma (see plan, γ,Fig. 13.9): it lies five-and-a-half feet below the pavement of Campo P, and it partly underlies, and is therefore older than, the foundations of the Red Wall, which in turn is dated by the Clivus drain about the middle of the second centuryA.D.Grave Theta (θ) is higher, and therefore later, than Gamma. It is a poor grave, protected by tiles, one of which bears a stamp of Vespasian’s reign (A.D.69–79). It is unsafe method to date an archaeological find by a single brick stamp which could be second-hand, used at any date later than its firing, even much later. But the stamp creates at least a presumptionthat Theta may be dated as early asA.D.79, and, if so, Gamma must be earlier still. Since both these graves appear to have been dug in such a way as to respect the area just in front of the Aedicula, it follows that the bones in the lowest niche must be earlier than either grave.

This is the process by which it is possible (but not rigorously necessary, on the evidence) to date the bones beforeA.D.79, perhaps in the reign of Nero; perhaps they are the bones of a victim of the persecution ofA.D.64; perhaps they are the bones of St. Peter. They were evidently disturbed in antiquity, for this is not a proper burial, but simply a collection of bones; the head, for example, is missing. The original burial must have lain athwart the line of the later Red Wall: when the builders of the Red Wall hit upon it, they may, knowing the legend of St. Peter’s martyrdom in the amphitheater somewhere near this spot, have assumed that this was his grave, and so they arched up the Red Wall’s foundations to avoid disturbing it. The next step was to build the Aedicula (Fig. 13.10), an act associated in literary sources with Pope Anacletus (traditional dates,A.D.76–88), but since not even the most pious Catholics suppose the Aedicula to be this early, an emendation of the name into Anicetus (ca.155–165) is defensible: it is paleographically plausible, and it suits the date of the Red Wall. The traces of the Aedicula as found were asymmetrical: its north supporting column had been moved to make room for a wall that was built sometime before Constantine to buttress the Red Wall, which had developed a bad crack from top to bottom. The excavators found the north face of this buttress wall covered with a palimpsest ofgraffiti, only one of which—in Greek—refers to St. Peter by name, though some others may do so in a cryptic way, and all testify that this spot was one of particular sanctity, much frequented by pilgrims.

Fig. 13.10Vatican City, excavations under St. Peter’s. Aedicula, reconstruction by G. U. S. Corbett. (Toynbee and Ward Perkins,op. cit., p. 161)

The shrine under St. Peter’s is not the only spot in Rome associated with St. Peter. Another is under the Church ofSan Sebastiano, two-and-a-half miles out, just off the Appian Way. Here excavation has foundgraffitimentioning St. Peter and St. Paul, a room for taking ceremonial meals, and Christian tombs of the third centuryA.D.Some scholars believe, but without cogent archaeological evidence, that St. Peter’s body, in whole or in part, was moved to thisretired spot off the main road, from the Vatican Hill, for safety during the persecutions under the Emperor Valerian inA.D.258. This would explain the association of the San Sebastiano site with the apostle; the assumption that the bones were returned to the Aedicula after the danger was past would explain—though it is not the only possible explanation—the disturbed state in which the excavators found them.

In any case, in the years between the building of the Aedicula and the centering of Constantine’s church upon it, there was continuity of pious commemoration of the spot. This is proved by thegraffition the buttress wall, and by a series of burials, Alpha, Beta, Delta, Epsilon, and Mu (α, β, δ, ε, μ) all motivated by a desire to be buried as close as possible to the Aedicula, and all, to judge by their contents—remains of cloth in Beta, for example, showed gold threads—belonging to important people. Some scholars (not including the excavators) have supposed that these are the graves of early Popes.

This was the state of affairs in Campo P when the building of Constantine’s basilica began. The Aedicula was made the focus of the whole building plan: it was left projecting above the pavement of the new church, and it was covered by a canopy upheld by twisted columns. (It is an extraordinary coincidence that Bernini, when he built the canopy over the altar of the Renaissance church, chose twisted columns to uphold it, though he could not possibly have known that Constantine’s canopy also involved this detail.) Constantine’s architect, in the classical tradition, paid the secular Roman basilica the compliment of creative imitation.

It was not until aboutA.D.600 that the altar was placed directly over the shrine, and the presbytery raised to accommodate it. By that time, the tradition was firmly established that pious pilgrims should leave a votive coin in front of the Aedicula: here in the fill the excavators found 1900 coins, Roman, papal, Italian, and from all over Europe,ranging in date from beforeA.D.161 uninterruptedly down to the fourteenth century. Also aboutA.D.600, at the same time as the placing of the altar directly over the shrine, the two upper niches in the Red Wall were combined into one, the Niche of the Pallia, where the vestments of newly-consecrated archbishops were put to be sanctified by close contact with the bones of the first Bishop of Rome: a shaft in the floor of the niche led down to the grave.

The shrine and the Constantinian church survived the sacks of Rome both by the Goths inA.D.410, and by the Vandals inA.D.455; the Saracens inA.D.846 were not so respectful. In their search for treasure they handled the Aedicula very roughly, and it is likely that it is from this sack, and not from the persecution ofA.D.258, that the disturbance of the bones should be dated. In any case, after the sack the life of the shrine went on as before, and in the Renaissance church as in its predecessor the shrine remained the focal point, one of the most venerated spots in Christendom.

*****

With the shrine of St. Peter, venerable, still vital, going back to the two roots of western civilization, pagan Rome (itself the transmitter of Greek culture) and Christianity, it is fitting that we should end our survey of what archaeology has to tell us about the culture to which ours owes so much. The two complexes, the grandiose pagan villa and the humble Christian shrine, which we have discussed in this chapter, are interrelated. The villa is one of the last manifestations of a culture that is played out, the shrine marks the beginning of a new culture that will produce its own grandiose monuments and in its turn be threatened by decline. In a sense, with the simplicity of St. Peter’s shrine the historical cycle returns to the simplicity of primitive Rome. But it is not simply a matter of returning to beginnings and starting over again; the new culture standsupon the shoulders of the old. The Christian shrine has the look of a pagan tomb-monument in the Isola Sacra necropolis; Constantine’s church has the look of a pagan Roman basilica. The language of the Mass is still Latin; the Pope is Pontifex Maximus. The striking thing is the continuity, and this is the most important lesson that archaeology has to teach. Again beneath St. Peter’s, as at so many other ancient sites, what the archaeologist digs up is not things but people. The remains in the niche under the Red Wall are not dry bones; they are live history. The breathing of life into that history is a major and largely unsung triumph of the modern science of archaeology, patiently at work over the last eighty years. To come to know a fragment of our past is to recognize a piece of ourselves. Perhaps, as archaeology interprets history, making the mute stones speak, we may come to know our past so well that we shall not be condemned to repeat it.

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