48 Irenaeus: Life, Scripture, Legacythat the first phase, gallery I
1
, could be extended no further longitudinally beyond the
boundary of the plot, but to excavate transverse galleries would have resulted in the
demolition of existing tombs that lined those galleries. Rather there was an additional
reason. The new excavation pointed to a desire to increase the number of burials that
was in fact to amount to “the capacity to some 1,100 tombs.” Thus they conclude: “the
practice of collective inhumations was the real cause and that explains the fact that
the deepening had the advantage of giving to the cemetery a far larger size than it had
previously possessed.”^61
I must observe firstly that Nicholai and Guyon would have to concede that the
role of Callistus in the creation of the later papal mausoleum and associated so called
“cubicula of the sacraments” had been one of conceiving a plan that was only later
fully executed: “The second excavation had proceeded for the same cause as the first
and had followed the same logic and lead to the achievement, or nearly, of the plan
in the form of a grid already in outline, thanks to the cutting of the three transverse
galleries, H, F, G already indicated (fig 4). In this way... the fossores opened there
the future entrances to the underground cemeteries.”^62 But there is an important dis-
tinction that must be drawn between having a concept in one’s mind tentatively and
only partially formed in contrast with a “plan in the form of a grid already in outline.”
Both archaeologists assume the latter because they assume a single monarch bishop at
Rome from the time of Victor having pastoral concern to respond to the desire of the
whole community to be buried together.^63 But there are a number of considerations
that must count against such a conclusion.
Callistus was not buried in the cemetery that has become associated with his
name. His tomb, later monumentalized, has been excavated where the Liber Pon-
tificalis located it, in the cemetery of Callepodius on the Via Aurelia. It is possible
to argue that this occurred due to the particular circumstances of his martyrdom,
which a late account tells was the result of his being “thrown from the window of
his house (per fenestram domus praeciptare) and with a stone tied to his neck (liga-
toque ad collum eius saxo), submerged in a well (in puteum submergi), and rubbish
piled upon his head (et in eo rudera cumulari) .”^64 But that late account, as I have
argued elsewhere in detail, was not the result of any enduring record of events but
rather a folk-memory in which the image of Callistus was associated with that of
the emperor Elagabalus with the result that the death of the latter in a riot was par-
alleled in the imagined death of the former.^65 Liber Pontificalis I.17.12-13 implies,
at all events, that he was buried in Trastevere on the Via Aurelia because that was
where he had lived.
Without such an argument, and even with it, it is difficult to see why Callistus was
not buried in Zephyrinus’s cemetery on the via Appia Antica if he had laid the foun-
dation for the concept of a general burial place for the whole community around the
saints and martyrs who were also its leaders of a common community. At all events,
his immediate successor was not buried there. Urban was buried in the cemetery of
Praetextatus on the via Appia Antica.^66 There was therefore no Callistan model realized
by himself and his immediate successor in Zephyrinus’s cemetery over which he had
been put in charge.