50 Irenaeus: Life, Scripture, Legacycorner of where the Via Regina Margherita today stands opposite San Lorenzo fuori
i muri. But though his grave was monumentalized^71 and was clearly a place of pil-
grimage for his followers, there have not been discovered any epigraphs regarding the
succession of twenty-four Novatian bishops corresponding to that number of catholic
bishops of Rome from Cornelius to Celestine I. But any surprise at this fact follows
from a false assumption that Novatian shared Fabian’s new and unique design for a
cemetery in which the leaders of the community were buried apart in their own crypt
as an indication of their office.
But those who buried Cornelius’s successor, Lucius (a.d. 255), well understood
Fabian’s design, as did also those who buried Stephen, and Xystus II martyred there
as well as Eutychian. Gaius, Eusebius, and Miltiades, though not buried in the crypt of
the popes itself, were buried in the catacomb itself, in separate cubilicula of their own.
The catacomb of Priscilla was to become popular later where Marcellinus, Marcellus,
and Liberius were laid to rest, with Julius I in Callepodius, Silvester in Balbina, and
Damasus in his basilica on the via Ardiatina. It was from the time of Leo I that popes
were laid to rest in Constantine’s basilica on the Vatican Hillside around one claimant
to be the tomb of St. Peter the Apostle. The Liber Pontificalis was to reassure us that the
normal burial place of popes, from Peter to Victor, had been on the Vatican Hillside,
but the practice had then been curiously interrupted until Leo’s time.
The Vatican excavations have exposed the impossibility of this view where the
Aedicula represents a putative tomb but there is no Papal crypt for where Linus, Ana-
cletus, Cletus, and so on might have found their rest. St. Peter’s today remains what it
has conceivably always been, a martyr shrine to one individual apostle, with its circle
of votive candles. It is not the resting place of large numbers of saints, as the catacombs
came to be regarded in the Middle Ages.
What indeed was this new design of Fabian, that clearly was a new departure and
not simply a continuation of what Callistus had definitely intended under the alleged
inspiration of Irenaeus and his concept of apostolic succession? Borgolte has pointed
out that the concept of a crypt for the leaders of the Roman, Christian community
was unique in Roman burial practice; it had no real parallel in either Jewish or Roman
pagan practice.^72 From where was such a concept derived? Jewish catacombs did not
possess a separate crypt reserved exclusively for community leaders: ἀρχισυνάγωγοι
were buried among their people. Roman aristocrats if unrelated were buried apart
from one another and in their own family tombs along with members of their family
and with their freedman who took their gentilicum. Indeed, this may have been why
Cornelius was buried in Lucina, then still a separate burial complex, with a Latin rather
than the Greek epitaph characteristic of tombs in the papal crypt in Callistus. The only
real parallel is the mausoleum of Augustus where the emperor made provision for
himself and his successors to be buried in a cemetery exclusively reserved for them and
the celebration of his imperial power.
Fabian’s concept of episcopal authority was therefore not that of Irenaeus. Fabian’s
Episcopal succession was monarchical in contrast to Irenaeus, who understood the
διαδοχὴ ἀποστόλων in terms of a teaching succession within a Hellenistic philosophi-
cal school. I believe, furthermore, that Fabian’s new concept is also witnessed in the