The Damasan inscriptions comprise c. 60 poems in honour of saints and martyrs, composed by pope Damasus I (366-384), and executed on large marble plaques with very fine, usually red, lettering by the talented 4th c. calligrapher Furius Dionysius Filocalus. The inscriptions were displayed in Rome, at saints' and martyrs' tombs, and were an important part of the programme of monumentalisation of the sites of saintly cult, initiated by the pope. The remains of many of these inscriptions have been found, but others are known only through manuscript transmission. Those which are fragmentary can be completed from the manuscript copies – especially syllogae that are medieval collections of copies of metrical inscriptions from the city’s late antique suburban martyria and basilicae as well as its urban churches. For Damasus’ epigrams the most important syllogae are: the sylloge Laureshamensis (Vat. Pal. 833) from the ninth-tenth centuries; the sylloge Centulensis (of cod. Petropolitano F XIV 1) from the eighth-ninth centuries; and the sylloge Turonensis derived from a seventh-century exemplar and surviving in several later manuscripts (e.g. Closterburgensis 723 and Gottweihensis 64). For more about the manuscripts containing Damasus’ poems see Trout 2015, p. 63-65.

 

This inscription was composed in hexameters. The script is Philocalian. The text is preserved by the sylloge Centulensis. It was probably in the fifteenth century that the tablet was cut into circular and geometrically shaped pieces and inserted into the pavement of the Lateran basilica of Saint John. They were rediscovered during renovations at the Lateran between 1936 and 1938.

 

The subterranean basilica in the Cemetery of Hippolytus on the Via Tiburtina housing the tomb of Hippolytus was first excavated in the early 1880s. Damasus perhaps constructed the original underground basilica, though the extent of his intervention is not clear.

 

(by Katarzyna Wojtalik)