Three
Three
Introduction
I HAVE SUGGESTED SO FAR THAT THE LIBER PONTIFICALIS offers a very particular portrait of the Bishop and people of Rome. Further, the text creates a mental map or virtual Rome in the minds of its readers, and invokes the imperial history of the city. The text thereby provides an essential framework for the history of the bishops and the formation of the Christian community in Rome.
The Liber pontificalis starts with a Life of Saint Peter, first Bishop of Rome, which is of fundamental importance in establishing the agenda and aims of the Liber pontificalis as a whole. As I explained in the introductory chapter, the Lives after Peter are numbered in sequence in all the earliest manuscripts. The history of Rome is presented as a continuous sequence of its bishops. Their time in office, therefore, as well as the ostensible exactitude in recording the length of the vacancy between popes, creates a new Petrine chronology of Roman time. This new chronology also reflects a particular understanding of the history of the bishops of Rome as an unbroken succession of Christian leaders from Saint Peter onwards. When first written, the succession record was for half a millennium, but then was extended by the continuators of the Liber pontificalis for a further three centuries. Many manuscripts of the Liber pontificalis add names to the papal list at least until the series of biographies was resumed in the twelfth century. The fourteenth-century Gesta episcoporum attributed to Jacques Zeno, Brussels, Bibliothèque royale manuscript one hundred forty-eight fourteen, and the fifteenth-century Vitae pontificum of Bartolomeo Platina in their turn drew on the original Liber pontificalis of the earlier
INTRODUCTION
INTRODUCTION
Lives and followed their format. Papal historians thereafter invariably included the Gesta pontificum and sequential lists of the popes in their compilations. All these continuators thus reinforce, in the historiographical genre and format they adopted, the potency of the apostolic succession.
The prefatory letters purporting to be from Jerome to Pope Damasus further enhance this Petrine chronology, for the history is presented as a response to a request to the pope for an orderly account of the history enacted in [the] see from the reign of the Apostle Peter down to [his] own time, so that in humility I may learn which of the bishops of your see deserved the crown of martyrdom and which of them is reckoned to have transgressed against the canons of the apostles.
Damasus responds that he is sending Jerome 'what I have been able to find out about its history'.
These two prefatory letters are in all the earliest complete manuscripts. However improbable the connection with Damasus and Jerome claimed for the initial compilation of the Liber pontificalis may appear to modern readers, this is a classic way to claim authority and enhance the link with an older tradition. The association is one that is familiar from the explanatory letters Plures fuisse and Novum opus exchanged between Damasus and Jerome about the latter's translation of the Bible, included in the prefatory material in many Bible and Gospel manuscripts throughout the middle ages. The association with Damasus as a promoter of a history of Christian Rome may also have been given greater plausibility