(J. Toynbee and J. Ward Perkins, The Shrine of St. Peter, p. 136)
Fig. 13.8 Vatican 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 discovery under 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 in A.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. 13.9 Vatican City, excavations under St. Peter’s, Campo P.
(Toynbee and Ward Perkins, op. cit., p. 141)