Free Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes; Fourth Edition by Eamon Duffy Page A

of rich widows or heiresses, and Damasus himself was nicknamed matronarum auriscalpius , ‘the ladies’ ear-tickler’. But the new worldliness of the Roman church and its bishops was not the sole invention of its clergy. Since the mid third century there had been a growing assimilation of Christian and secular culture. It is already in evidence long before Constantine in the art of the Christian burial-sites round the city, the Catacombs. With the imperial adoption of Christianity, this process accelerated. In Damasus’ Rome, wealthy Christians gave each other gifts in which Christian symbols went alongside images of Venus, nereids and sea-monsters, and representations of pagan-style wedding-processions.
    This Romanisation of the Church was riot all a matter of worldliness, however. The bishops of the imperial capital had to confront the Roman character of their city and their see. They set about finding a religious dimension to that Romanitas which would have profound implications for the nature of the papacy. Pope Damasus in particular took this task to heart. He set himself to interpret Rome’s past in the light not ofpaganism, but of Christianity. He would Latinise the Church, and Christianise Latin. He appointed as his secretary the greatest Latin scholar of the day, the Dalmatian presbyter Jerome, and commissioned him to turn the crude dog-Latin of the Bible versions used in church into something more urbane and polished. Jerome’s work was never completed, but the Vulgate Bible, as it came to be called, rendered the scriptures of ancient Israel and the early Church into an idiom which Romans could recognise as their own. The covenant legislation of the ancient tribes was now cast in the language of the Roman law-courts, and Jerome’s version of the promises to Peter used familiar Roman legal words for binding and loosing – ligare and solvere – which underlined the legal character of the Pope’s unique claims.
    For Damasus, the glory of the saints had to be naturalised as Roman. Many of Rome’s martyrs had come from elsewhere, but their deaths in the city had made them honorary citizens. He collected and reburied the bodies of the great saints, composing verse inscriptions for the new tombs which were carved in a specially devised lettering based on classical models. His inscription for the joint shrine of Peter and Paul at San Sebastiano is typical, and it directly tackled the claim made by the Eastern bishops in Pope Julius’ time, that Peter and Paul belonged to the Christian East just as much as to Rome: ‘Whoever you may be that seek the names of Peter and Paul, should know that here the saints once dwelt. The East sent the disciples – that we readily admit. But on account of the merit of their blood … Rome has gained the superior right to claim them as citizens. Damasus would thus tell your praises, you new stars.’ 21 The pagan love of Roma Aeterna, the Eternal City, took on a new and specifically Christian meaning, which attached itself to the papacy, and its inheritance from Peter and Paul. This was not achieved without struggle, most famously the confrontation with the pagan senators led by Symmachus in 384 to preserve the pagan Altar of Victory in the Senate. Damasus mobilised Ambrose to lobby on his behalf in Milan, and the altar was abolished, leaving the statue of the Goddess to be reinterpreted by later ages as an angel. Prudentius, the great Latin hymn-writer, though well aware of the persistence of paganism among the conservative senatorial families, celebrated Rome as the capital of a world united in the Christian faith: ‘Grant then, Christ, to your Romans a Christian city, a capital Christian like the rest of the world. Peter and Paul shall drive out Jupiter.’ In thevisual equivalent of Prudentius’ prayer, the Apostles appear in the togas of Roman senators in the apse-mosaic of the church of Santa Pudenziana, built at the end of the fourth century. 22
    The Romanisation of the