Reassessing Salona's Churches: Martyrium Evolution in Question

Reassessing Salona's Churches: Martyrium Evolution in Question

Ann Marie Yasin

Journal of Early Christian Studies, Volume 20, Number 1, Spring 2012,pp. 59-112 (Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University PressDOI: 10.1353/earl.2012.0005

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Journal of Early Christian Studies 20:1, 59–112 © 2012 The Johns Hopkins University Press

For their questions, help, and advice on various aspects of this study, I am extremely grateful to Lisa Bitel, Cecily Hilsdale, Margaret Laird, Robert S. Nelson, Daniel Rich-ter, Galina Tirnanic, Yoram Tsafrir, and the article’s anonymous referees.

1. On Salona’s history, territory, and population, see J. J. Wilkes, Dalmatia (Lon-don: Routledge, 1969), 220–38. On the urban Christian basilicas, see E. Marin, “La topographie chrétienne de Salone: Les centres urbains de la pastorale,” in Actes du XIe congrès international d’archéologie chrétienne, ed. Noël Duval et al., 3 vols., Studi di antichità Cristiana 41 (= Collection de l’École française de Rome 123) (Rome: École française de Rome, 1989), 2:1117–31. In addition to the extramural churches on which this article focuses, Salona’s well-preserved episcopal complex with its double-basilica ensemble and adjacent baptistery is especially noteworthy: T. Marasovic;, “Il complesso episcopale Salonitano nel VI–VII secolo,” in Acta XIII Congressus inter-nationalis archaeologiae christianae. Split-Porec= (25. 9.–1. 10. 1994), ed. N. Cambi and E. Marin, 3 vols., Studi di antichità cristiana 54 (Città del Vaticano: Pontificio

Reassessing Salona’s Churches: Martyrium Evolution in Question

ANN MARIE YASIN

Using the extramural basilicas at Salona as a testing ground, this article seeks to examine a central historiographical and methodological issue in early Chris-tian archaeology: the narrative of evolutionary development of martyria sites from saint’s tomb to monumental center of burial, worship, and pilgrimage. While the widely accepted model may accurately describe the steps of monu-mentalization at some cult places, it can also deceptively streamline much more complicated, and less predictable, site histories. At Salona, a site often held up as exemplifying the conventional pattern of martryium development, the archaeological evidence does not substantiate many of the model’s central principles. Moreover, I suggest that adopting a more critical perspective on the model itself helps us to recognize other possible narratives of cult development suggested by the archaeological, epigraphic, and hagiographic evidence.

Despite its impressive walls, theater, amphitheater, and baths, Salona—provincial capital of Roman Dalmatia, not far from the site of Diocle-tian’s palace at Spalatum (modern Split, Croatia)—is most famous for its wealth of early Christian ruins.1 This reputation is mainly based on the rich

60 JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES

Istituto di Archeologia Cristiana, 1998), 2:1003–14; D. Rendic;-Mioc=evic;, “Question de la chronologie du développement des basiliques doubles de Salone,” Vjesnik za arheologiju i historiju dalmatinsku 77 (1984): 175–86; see also D. Rendic;-Mioc=evic;, “Anastasio ‘Aquileiese,’ martire a Salona e il cimitero che da lui prende nome,” in Aquileia, la Dalmazia e l’Illirico, 2 vols., Antichità altoadriatiche 26 (Udine: Tip. Chiandetti, 1985), 2:315–29.

2. In addition to Kapljuc=, Manastirine, and Marusinac (see n. 3) we know of a basilica near the south cemetery and a basilica in the east cemetery discovered by Dyggve in 1931 (H. Leclercq, s.v. “Salone,” in DACL 15 [1950]: 612–13).

3. J. Brøndsted, “La basilique des cinq martyrs à Kapljuc=,” in Recherches à Salone (Copenhague: J. H. Schultz, 1928), 1:33–186; ed. R. Egger, Der altchristliche Friedhof Manastirine, Forschungen in Salona 2 (Wien: Druck und Verlag der Öster-reichischen Staatsdruckerei, 1926); ed. E. Dyggve and R. Egger, Der altchristliche Friedhof Marusinac, Forschungen in Salona 3 (Wien: Druck und Verlag von Rudolf M. Rohrer, 1939). Noël Duval provides a brief history of excavations of Christian remains at Salona in “Le culte des martyrs de Salone à la lumière des recherches rècentes à Manastirine,” Comptes-rendus des séances de l’Académie des inscriptions et belles lettres 134:2 (1990): 432–53.

4. A guidebook to the ruins was also published on this occasion: L. Jelic;, Fr. Bulic;, and S. Rutar, Guida di Spalato e Salona (Zara: S. Artale, 1894). In fact, Salona has become the place on which the discipline of early Christian archaeology has inscribed its own history perhaps more explicitly than any other site: in 1994, to celebrate the centennial anniversary of the first Congress, the thirteenth meeting of the organization was again held at Salona and was accompanied by a flood of commemoration ranging from the erection of a second permanent plaque on the ruined walls of the Manastirine church to the reprinting of the 1894 proceedings (ed. E. Marin, Acta primi congressus internationalis archaeologiae christianae. XIII–XI kal. sept. a. MDCCCXCIV Spalati-Salonis, Studi di antichità cristiana 50, repr. [Città del Vaticano: Pontificio Istituto di Archeologia Cristiana; Split: Areološki Muzej, 1993]). On the history of the con-gress, see M. Zaninovic;, “The Beginning of a Series of International Congresses on Early Christian Archaeology and Early Christian Archaeology in Croatia,” in Acta XIII Congressus internationalis archaeologicae christianae. Split – Porec= (25. 9.–1. 10. 1994), ed. N. Cambi and E. Marin, 3 vols., Studi di antichità Cristiana 54 (Città del Vaticano: Pontificio Istituto di Archeologia Cristiana, 1998), 1:163–82.

number of burial basilicas preserved there: of the five known extramural churches, three of them, all in the northern outskirts of the city, still pre-serve substantial remains (Fig. 1).2 These sites—Kapljuc=, Marusinac, and Manastirine—have been recognized since the nineteenth century and were celebrated as key exemplars of early Christian architecture even before the full excavation publications appeared in the 1920s–30s.3 So emblematic were Salona’s churches that the city was chosen as the location of the first International Congress of Early Christian Archaeology in 1894. The occa-sion served not only to showcase Salona’s impressive ecclesiastical ruins, but also to ensure the site’s paradigmatic status within the young field of Christian archaeology.4

YASIN / SALONA’S CHURCHES 61

5. E.g., “Les fouilles . . . mettent Salone au centre de plus d’une recherche sur le premier art chrétien. C’est le cas notamment des premières installations monumentales autour des corps saints dont maintenant on peut suivre les étapes à Salone, beau-coup mieux que dans n’importe quelle autre cité antique” (A. Grabar, Martyrium. Recherches sur le culte des reliques et l’art chrétien antique, 2 vols. [Paris: Collège de France, 1946], 1:54).

6. E. Dyggve, History of Salonitan Christianity (Oslo: Aschenhoug, 1951).

More specifically, because of the large number of extramural churches housing relics, for over half a century Salona has been a model site for the examination of the architectural development of saints’ cults. The spe-cial attention paid to Salona’s churches in André Grabar’s erudite, multi-volume Martyrium. Recherches sur le culte des reliques et l’art chrétien antique (1946) has perhaps been the most influential factor in cementing their status as exemplars of martyrium evolution.5 The site’s prominence grew with the English-language publication of Ejnar Dyggve’s History of Salonitan Christianity in 1951, which provided the first synthesis of the excavations at Salona and publicized to a broader audience the importance of the site as a window into early Christian history.6 Above all, Dyggve’s study hailed Salona’s burial churches as ideal illustrations of saint-cult

Fig. 1. Plan of Salona (after: J. J. Wilkes, Dalmatia [London: Routledge, 1969], p. 361, fig. 16; with permission).


7. Dyggve, History of Salonitan Christianity, 71–80. In a significant, though under-cited later article, Grabar criticizes some elements of Dyggve’s picture of the succes-sive stages of cult architecture at Salona: “Les monuments paléochrétiens de Salone et les débuts du culte des martyrs,” in Disputationes Salonitanae 1970 (Split: AM, 1975), 69–74.

8. E.g., F. W. Deichmann, Einführung in die christliche Archäologie (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1983), 57–58; B. Kötting, Der frühchristliche Reli-quienkult und die Bestattung im Kirchengebäude (Köln: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1965), 14–15; R. Krautheimer, Early Christian and Byzantine Architecture, Pelican History of Art, 4th rev. ed. (New York: Viking Penguin, 1986), 35, 51, 56.

9. Robert Milburn, Early Christian Art and Architecture (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1991), 92–94.

10. John Crook, The Architectural Setting of the Cult of Saints in the Early Chris-tian West c. 300–1200 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), 65, quoting Dyggve, History of Salonitan Christianity, ix.

11. Peter Brown, The Cult of Saints (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 33–34, citing Dyggve, History of Salonitan Christianity, 78. Similarly, Ramsay Mac-Mullen, The Second Church: Popular Christianiy A.D. 200–400 (Atlanta, GA: Society of Biblical Literature, 2009), 50.

development from common graves to memorial buildings and from these small shrines to monumental basilicas.7

In line with Grabar and Dyggve, more recent scholarship regularly treats Salona’s burial churches as “textbook” cases of martyrium development and deploys them as models with which to reconstruct the architectural developments at other sites.8 Handbooks of early Christian architecture stress the site’s significance for illustrating a much broader trend. For example, in his Early Christian Art and Architecture (1991), Robert Mil-burn writes, “The development of the martyr-shrine is illustrated best of all by the excavations which have been carried out at Salona.”9 Similarly, John Crook validates Dyggve’s assessment of the magnitude of the site’s importance: “. . . Salona [is] rightly characterized by its investigator, Ejnar Dyggve, as ‘after Rome . . . the most important urban area on European soil for studies in [the] archaeology of early Christianity.’”10 Historians too have made productive use of Dyggve’s summary of the excavations in their own work on the dynamics of late antique saints’ cults. For exam-ple, Peter Brown’s massively influential text, The Cult of Saints, drew on Dyggve’s History to illustrate one of its central claims:

At Salona, the first known Christian memoria was created in 304 by a well-to-do lady, Asclepia, above the grave of a martyr, Anastasius, in a building that had been designed to house also her own tomb and those of her family. Thus, for the influential layman, the grave, always “a fine and private place,” could reach out to appropriate the martyr, and so bring a holy grave, either directly or by implication, out of the Christian community as a whole into the orbit of a single family.11


12. Recent modest archaeological interventions at Marusinac were cut short by the 1991 war: E. Marin, “Nouvelles recherches sur Marusinac à Salone,” Akten des XII. internationalen Kongresses für christliche Archäologie. Bonn 22.–28. Sep-tember 1991, ed. Josef Engemann, 2 vols., Studi di antichità cristiana 52 (= JbAC Supp. 20.1–2) (Münster: Aschendorffsche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1995), 2:1016–23. Substantial reinvestigation of the Manastirine site carried out by a Franco-Croatian team between 1983 and 1997 has now resulted in a detailed site report: ed. N. Duval and E. Marin, Salona III: Recherches archéologiques franco-croates à Salone. Man-astirine: Établissement préromain, nécropole et basilique paléochrétienne à Salone, Collection de l’École française de Rome 194/3 (Rome and Split: École française de Rome, 2000). A valuable, two-volume study of Salona’s Christian inscriptions has also recently appeared: ed. N. Gauthier, E. Marin, and F. Prévot, Salona IV. Inscrip-tions de Salone chrétienne IVe–VIIe siècles, Collection de l’École française de Rome 194/4 (Rome and Split: École française de Rome, 2010).

Sources such as these demonstrate just why Salona’s churches are under-stood today as so important: they provide early, material testimony for the architectural manifestation of saint veneration, and they can be read as paradigmatic of other, less well-preserved sites. They serve, therefore, as a key link in piecing together the history of a much larger phenomenon.

Yet, despite the exemplary status that has been assigned to Salona’s churches, the surviving evidence is shockingly limited. Indeed, the story of cult development has been constructed despite significant shortcomings and contradictions in the archaeological record of Salona’s churches. It is likely that we will never know numerous details about the chronological development of the church sites, though recent excavations are helping to clarify the picture and future archaeological work will undoubtedly answer additional questions.12 In the meantime, however, it is important to ana-lyze how the story of the site’s development has functioned as a powerful interpretative narrative in its own right. A critical re-examination of the excavation records and the consequences of the methodological positions they espouse is a crucial step—both for field archaeologists and scholars in related fields who rely on their conclusions—to approaching future work on Salona and other sites of martyr veneration and ad sanctos burial.

MODELS OF MARTyRIuM DEVELOPMENT

The accepted model for the birth of Christian sacred architecture traces a line of evolution marked by successive stages of increasing monumen-tality: martyrs’ tombs were transformed from “ordinary” graves to small shrines, and then from modest cult centers to focal points of large, com-munal basilicas. In the decades following the 1946 publication of Grabar’s wide-ranging synthesis, Martyrium, martyrs’ shrines, previously known


13. After the publication of Martyrium, Grabar published a very simplified English- language summary of the main lines of the architectural portion of his argument: André Grabar, “From the Martyrium to the Church: Christian Architecture, East and West,” Archaeology 2 (1949): 95–104. For a perceptive review of the historiography of Grabar’s Martyrium text, see Annabel Jane Wharton, “Rereading Martyrium: The Modernist and Postmodernist Texts,” Gesta 29 (1990): 3–7.

14. Grabar sharply defended his case for a direct link between the two types of sacred buildings against critics, especially Ward-Perkins’s contention that no connec-tion is to be found between the architecture of Christian martyria and pagan heroa: André Grabar, “Maryrium ou ‘vingt ans après’,” Cahiers archéologiques 18 (1968): 239–44; J. B. Ward-Perkins, “Memoria, Martyr’s Tomb and Martyr’s Church,” JTS n. s. 17:1 (1966): 20–37.

15. Richard Krautheimer, for example, taking early Christian cult sites of Rome as his primary subject, argued for drawing a sharp distinction between what he called “cemetery basilicas” (basilicae ad corpus) as opposed to “covered cemeteries” (coeme-teria) in “Mensa-Coemeterium-Martyrium,” Cahiers archéologiques 11 (1960): 15–40; this text develops more fully some of the critiques raised in his review of Grabar’s Martyrium in The Art Bulletin 35 (1953): 57–61. See also Bernhard Kötting’s asser-tion that there is no martyr tomb without altar and no altar without a nearby martyr tomb: Der frühchristliche Reliquienkult und die Bestattung im Kirchengebäude (Köln: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1965), 22–23. Friedrich Wilhelm Deichmann strongly criticized Krautheimer’s analysis of the Roman evidence on both philological and archaeological grounds. His 1970 rebuttal to Krautheimer’s position concluded that no permanent altars over saints’ graves are to be found until the late sixth century (“Märtyrerbasilika, Martyrion, Memoria und Altargrab,” Mitteilungen des Deutschen Archäologischen Instituts, Römische Abteilung 77 [1970]: 144–69), and argues more comprehensively a concern raised earlier by Ward-Perkins (“Memoria, Martyr’s Tomb”) over the early dating of the relation between the martyr-grave and the altar.

largely from individual site reports, now moved as a class of monuments into the fast lane of academic discourse.13 Two issues in particular captured the attention of scholars of early Christian architecture. Fiercely debated, on the one hand, was the possible connection between the architecture of Christian martyria and that of Roman funerary architecture and earlier pagan heroa.14 A second strand of investigation focused on the physical and chronological relation between saints’ tombs and the altars of churches.15

Out of this intense academic inquiry, the monumentalization of saints’ tombs became a familiar phenomenon to students of late antique archi-tecture and the early church. In fact, even in spite of the relative lack of consensus among specialists on details of chronology and geographical diversity, a familiar story of church development out of martyrs’ tombs—a streamlined model of step-by-step martyrium evolution present in earlier scholarship—now became commonplace. Bolstered through frequent reit-eration, the historical process of growth from a lowly tomb to a center of worship and pilgrimage has been codified into a dominant narrative of transformation following an outline of clearly defined architectural devel-


16. C. Pietri’s study remains an indispensable account of Damasus’s bishopric (Roma christiana. Recherches sur l’église de Rome, son organisation, sa politique, son idéologie de Miltiade à Sixte III (311–440), 2 vols., Bibliothèque des Écoles française d’Athènes et de Rome 224 [Rome: École française de Rome, 1976], 1:407–872), nicely summarized in C. Pietri, “Damase, evêque de Rome,” in Saecularia Damasiana: Atti del Convegno internazionale per il XVI centenario della morte di papa Damaso I, Studi di antichità cristiana 39 (Città del Vaticano: Pontificio Istituto di Archeologia Cristiana, 1986), 29–58.

17. M. Ihm’s collection of Damasene inscriptions (Damasi Epigrammata [Lipsiae: In aedibus B. G. Teubneri, 1895]) has been updated by A. Ferrua, ed. Epigrammata Damasiana, Sussidi allo studio delle antichità cristiane 2 (Roma: Pontificio Istituto di archeologia cristiana, 1942). See P.-A. Février, “Un plaidoyer pour Damase. Les inscriptions des necropoles romaines,” in Institutions, société et vie politique dans l’empire romain au IVe siècle ap. J.-C., ed. M. Christol et al., Collection de l’École française de Rome 159 (Rome: École française de Rome, 1992), 497–506. Damasus’s interventions at saints’ tombs have been less comprehensively examined, though good studies of individual sites have appeared, e.g., J. Guyon, “L’oeuvre de Damase dans le cimetière aux deux lauriers sur la Via Labicana,” in Saecularia Damasiana: Atti del Convegno internazionale per il XVI centenario della morte di papa Damaso I, Studi di antichità cristiana 39 (Città del Vaticano: Pontificio Istituto di Archeologia Cris-tiana, 1986), 226–58; and L. Reekmans, “L’oeuvre du Pape Damase dans le complexe de Gaius à la catacombe de S. Callixte,” in Saecularia Damasiana: Atti del Convegno internazionale per il XVI centenario della morte di papa Damaso I, Studi di antichità cristiana 39 (Città del Vaticano: Pontificio Istituto di Archeologia Cristiana, 1986), 226–58. See also the recent insightful intervention of D. E. Trout, “Damasus and the Invention of Early Christian Rome,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 33 (2003): 517–36.

opments. The history of a given site, in other words, is ordered into a series of progressive, increasingly monumental phases centered on a saints’ grave. In addition, the motivation driving this architectural growth is understood as popular in the broadest sense, the result of increasing demands for access to relics and burial near the tombs of the saints (ad sanctos).

This narrative of monumentalization underlies nearly all modern schol-arship on tombs of saints and carries particular weight because it seems to explain so well the main lines of development at certain famous, if not exactly typical, late antique sites. One can see, for example, in the efforts of Bishop Damasus (366–84 c.e.) the project of transforming saints’ tombs in the Roman catacombs into holy places.16 By adding stairwells, widening access galleries, and opening up spaces to gather around saints’ tombs, Damasus made the graves accessible to a larger public of pious Chris-tians. He elevated the sacred tombs themselves by adding familiar monu-mental architectural elements, such as columns and arches, and creating grandiose verse inscriptions that recalled the lives and martyrdoms of the saints.17 The Damasan shrines transformed the once common tombs into


18. On the broader cultural phenomenon of constructing the past of the martyrs, see Elizabeth A. Castelli, Martyrdom and Memory: Early Christian Culture Making (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004) and Lucy Grig, Making Martyrs in Late Antiquity (London: Duckworth, 2004).

19. On the appearance and date of the aedicula to ca. 160–70 c.e., see J. M. C. Toynbee and J. Ward-Perkins, The Shrine of St. Peter and the Vatican Excavations (New York: Pantheon Books, 1957), 135–41. The official report of the 1940–49 exca-vations provides the most detailed presentation of the findings underneath the pres-ent confession: B. M. Apollonj Ghetti et al., Esplorazioni sotto la confessione di San Pietro in Vaticano esequite negli anni 1940–1949, 2 vols. (Città del Vaticano: [n.p.], 1951). See also the thorough, critical overview by R. Krautheimer and A. Frazer, “S. Pietro,” in Corpus basilicarum christianarum Romae. The Early Christian Basilicas of Rome (IV–IX Cent.), ed. R. Krautheimer, S. Corbett, and A. K. Fraser, 5 vols. in 7 (Città del Vaticano: Pontificio Istituto di Archeologia Cristiana, 1977), 5:165–279.

20. Toynbee and Ward-Perkins, Shrine of St. Peter, 200–201.21. This passage excerpted from a much more detailed description in Krautheimer,

Early Christian and Byzantine Architecture, 56–58.

memorials that facilitated the commemoration of the martyrs’ collective past on a massive scale.18

Similarly, conventional interpretations of early Christian church archi-tecture have stressed the buildings’ role in monumentalizing and focusing attention on the remains of saints. In the excavations conducted in the 1940s beneath the altar of St. Peter’s at the Vatican, for example, it was discovered that the basilica construction did not originally completely bury the mid-second-century aedicula shrine, but instead enveloped it in exqui-site marble and left it projecting through the floor of the fourth- century church.19 This archaeological testimony confirmed the tight relationship between the basilica’s architectural plan and the earlier shrine: every com-ponent of the basilica directed the visitor to the apostle’s memoria. As Jocelyn Toynbee and John Ward-Perkins reported in their summary of the excavations, the original shrine was, “the architectural focus of the whole building.”20 Krautheimer’s descriptions further exemplify this interpreta-tion: “Primarily, the transept enshrined the memoria of the apostle, the very focus of the entire construction. . . . As in all Constantinian archi-tecture, precious, colorful materials and furnishings focused attention on the interior and led the visitor in a crescendo towards the goal of his pilgrimage.”21 From the monumentality of the architectural elements to the lavish decoration and powerful manipulation of light and shadow of the interior, the structure’s components worked in tandem to elaborate the apostle’s shrine. Furthermore, renovations carried out in the late sixth century, including the elevation of the choir, erection of a permanent altar over the memoria, and construction of a ring-crypt to facilitate the shrine’s


22. The precise dating of these interventions is disputed and archaeologically unclear, though generally accepted as accomplished under Gregory the Great due to literary evidence of the Liber Pontificalis 66.4 (ed. L. Duchesne, Le liber pontificalis. Text, introduction et commentaire, 3 vols. [Paris: De Boccard, 1955], 1:312: fecit ut super corpus beati Petri missas celebrarentur) corroborated by the first-hand testimony of a visiting deacon of Gregory of Tours (Krautheimer and Frazer, “S. Pietro,” 277–78); on the development of this and other ring-crypts in Rome, see Crook, Architectural Setting, 80–89.

23. Grabar, Martyrium; see also Grabar’s English-language summary of the eastern and western forms (“From the Martyrium to the Church”) and Wharton’s critique (“Rereading Martyrium”).

24. E.g., consider N. Duval’s frequently expressed position: “en archéologie chré-tienne, chaque cas est particular, chaque Église a sa tradition et ses raisons, chaque site, chaque série épigraphique offre un visage proper, différent de celui du voisin” (“III. Quelques précisions sur les réalités architecturales et l’évolution du culte et une question de méthode,” in B. Brenk and J. Dresken-Weiland, “Zwei Berichte über die Entwicklung des Martyrerkultus in Manastirine (Salona),” Antiquité tardive 9 [2001]: 397). For a lengthier survey of the architectural diversity of early Christian churches across the Mediterranean, see N. Duval, “Les installations liturgiques dans les églises paléochrétiennes,” Hortus Artium Medievalium 5 (1999): 7–30.

crowds of visitors, have consistently been interpreted as the culmination of the basilica’s primary architectural function: to provide visibility and accessibility to the saintly remains.22

The narrative about the development of the martyrium has justifiably stood the test of time both because it accommodates so well our under-standing of certain familiar sites, such as Old St. Peter’s and Damasus’s Roman catacomb shrines, and because it establishes the roots of impor-tant devotional practices that flourished in the Middle Ages, such as relic veneration, pilgrimage, and urban burial. Without a doubt, the martyrium model is immensely valuable for these insights. At the same time, however, excavation data regularly contradict the notion that the monumentaliza-tion of martyrs’ tombs followed a widespread and predictable pattern of sequential development. Many previous scholars have explicitly pointed to geographical discrepancies in architectural production across the early Christian world. Notably, Grabar’s Martyrium itself posited a fundamen-tal split between the architectural forms of the culturally Greek East, with its construction of heroa-inspired, centrally-planned martyria, and the Latin West, which favored the roomier, oblong basilica hall.23 In recent years, early Christian archaeologists have become increasingly sensitive to regional diversity and have become more wary of applying conclusions based on a specific set of archaeological circumstances to other areas of the Mediterranean.24 Krautheimer’s own analysis of St. Peter’s, for exam-ple, stressed the uniqueness, the un-typicality, of the arrangement at that


25. E.g., Krautheimer, Early Christian and Byzantine Architecture, 58–59: “Thus the Constantinian basilica of St. Peter’s was not an ordinary church, but a martyrium, bound to remain exceptional throughout early Christian times.”

26. E.g., Yvette Duval, Loca Sanctorum Africae: Le culte des martyrs en Afrique du IVe au VIIe siècle, 2 vols., Collection de l’École française de Rome 58 (Rome: École française de Rome, 1982); I. Gui, N. Duval, and J.-P. Caillet, Basiliques chrétiennes d’Afrique du Nord (inventaire et typologie), vol. 1, Inventaire des monuments de l’Algérie, Collection des études augustiniennes, Série Antiquité 129–130 (Paris: Institut d’études augustiniennes, 1992); Pascale Chevalier, Ecclesiae Dalmatiae: L’architecture paléochrétienne de la province romaine de Dalmatie (IVe–VIIe s.) en dehors de la capitale Salona, 2 vols., Collection de l’École française de Rome 194/2 (Rome and Split: École française de Rome, 1996); Anne Michel, Les églises d’époque byzantine et umayyade de la Jordanie Ve–VIIe siècle. Typologie architecturale et aménagements liturgiques, Bibliothèque de l’antiquité tardive 2 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2001).

shrine.25 The recent wave of monographs devoted to regional studies of early church architecture likewise highlights the inadequacy of any univer-sal model to represent diverse architectural reactions to the increasingly popular veneration of saints in the fourth to sixth centuries.26

Despite such revisions and nuances of scholarly interpretation, however, the conventional evolutionary model remains deeply entrenched in stud-ies of early Christian architecture and saints’ cults. Especially outside of archaeological circles, the study of sites whose architectural development does not strictly conform to the model of progression has done little to unsettle the authority of the dominant narrative. The model itself, with its underlying notion that cult and cult places literally “grew up around” martyrs’ tombs, has not been directly contested.

Nevertheless, this model of organic development centered around saints’ tombs is potentially misleading for several reasons. First, a false sense of homogeneity makes us less attuned to regional and local differences and the significance of such forms of diversity. Second, it encourages us to fit the complex evidence from any given site into a generic, teleological nar-rative, thereby hampering our ability to recognize other agents of histori-cal change and to evaluate other possible interpretations. In other words, by naturalizing the sequential development of shrines centered on saints’ tombs, the prevailing model of martyrium growth handicaps our under-standing of how local late antique histories of saints’ cults were actively shaped by and through other factors, including political and social posi-tioning, transformations of architectural and decorative programs, and the crafting of hagiographic narratives.

This article seeks to re-examine this conventional model of martyrium evolution. I propose to revisit the archaeological footing for the model by taking a careful look at one of the most cited examples of its forma-


27. See n. 8–11 above.28. See G. Mackie, Early Christian Funerary Chapels in the West: Decoration,

Function and Patronage (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), 212–30.29. Lib. Pontif. 74, Iohannes IV (Duchesne 1:330): Hic temporibus suis misit per

omnem Dalmatiam seu Histriam multas pecunias per sanctissimum et fidelissimum Martinum abbatem propter redemptionem captivorum qui depraedati erant a genti-bus. Eodem tempore fecit ecclesiam beatis martyribus Venantio, Anastasio, Mauro et aliorum multorum martyrum, quorum reliquias de Dalmatias et Histrias adduci praeceperat, et recondit eas in ecclesia suprascripta, iuxta fontem Lateranensem. On the questionable nature of the relics in the Lateran chapel (intact corpses, corporeal fragments, or contact relics) and the circumstances of their transferal, see Mackie, Early Christian Funerary Chapels, 223–27.

tion: the funerary churches of Salona (Croatia), which were central to the early history of Christian archaeology, and are, as we have seen, still regularly called up to exemplify the process of saint cult development.27 Perhaps better than any other site, Salona allows us to focus closely on the emergence of the martyrium model in historiographic terms and to test its basis in archaeological evidence. Salona’s churches also offer a test-case for examining the extent to which the archaeological evidence been read through the model while simultaneously serving as a basis for the model’s development and elaboration. I also hope to demonstrate that thinking past the rigid framework dictated by the evolutionary martyrium model can suggest new possibilities for interpreting archaeological and literary evidence along both religious and socio-political grounds.

SALONA’S SAINTS

For centuries before the archaeological sites of Christian Salona were rediscovered, the city’s saints were known and their cults celebrated. A variety of historical sources attest to a number of Salonitan saints, pro-viding evidence of their identities and sometimes anniversaries of death. Since the mid-seventh century, the memory of several of the city’s local martyrs had been preserved in Rome through their inclusion in a chapel off the Lateran baptistery, the oratory of S. Venanzio.28 The chapel was built by pope John IV (640–42 c.e.), a native of Dalmatia, in order to house the transferred remains of a number of martyrs from his homeland, which was then under increasing Avar and Slav threat.29 John IV com-memorated the relic translation with a monumental apse and surrounding wall mosaic, which depicts images of ten Dalmatian saints whose names appear in inscriptions above (Fig. 2). The saints’ garb identifies three of the individuals as bishops (Venantius, Domnius, and Maurus), one as a priest with a chasuble (Asterius), one as a deacon wearing a dalmatic (Septimus),


30. Giovanni Battista de Rossi, Musaici cristiani e saggi dei pavimenti delle chiese di Roma anteriori al secolo XV (Roma: Spithöver, 1899), fasc. XIX, 5–6; Victor Saxer, “Les saints de Salone. Examen critique de leur dossier,” in u službi c=ovjeka: zbornik nadbiskupa-metropolite dr Frane Franic;a, Mélanges offerts à l’archevêque de Split Fr. Franic; (Zbornik Nadbiskupa-Metropolita Dr. Fr. Franic;a) (Split: Crkva u svijetu, 1987), 315.

31. H. Delehaye, “Saints d’Istrie et de Dalmatie,” AB 18 (1899): 394; J. Zeiller, Les origines chrétiennes dans la province romaine de Dalmatie, Studia historica 47, repr. (Roma: “L’Erma” di Bretschneider, 1967), 10, 15–16. Text: ed. T. Mommsen, “Prologi

four as military figures in white chlamydes with purple tablia and belted tunics (Telius, Paulinianus, Antiochianus, and Gaianus), and Anastasius wearing a pallium over a tunic.30

Textual sources associate only three of the individuals who are included in the S. Venanzio mosaic specifically with martyrdom in Salona. The so-called “Small Chronicle” of 395 c.e. specifies that Domnius, a figure named in the Lateran mosaic, and one Felix (who is otherwise unattested) were martyred under Diocletian in Salona in the year 299 c.e.31 The Mar-

Fig. 2. Color lithograph of apse and arch mosaics of the oratory of S. Venanzio at the Lateran, Rome (source: Giovanni Battista de Rossi, Musaici cristiani e saggi dei pavimenti delle chiese di Roma anteriori al secolo XV [Roma: Spithöver, 1899], pl. 19); © Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, Rare Book Collection, Washington, DC.


Paschae ad Vitelem scripti a. 395,” in Chronica minora saec. IV. V. VI. VII., 3 vols., Monumenta Germaniae Historica, auctorum antiquissimorum 9, 11, 13 (Berolini: apud Weidmannos, 1892), 1:736–38. Zeiller suggests that the Salonitan Felix of the Small Chronicle is the same as a Felix, “episcopus Spellatensis,” whose martyrdom is recorded on May 18 (Origines chrétiennes, 22–23, 88–89; ActaSS Maii IV:167–69).

32. Delehaye, “Saints d’Istrie,” 394; Saxer dismisses the discrepancy of the number of soldier martyrs since he sees them as an erroneous interpretation of the abbreviation “mil. III.” for “miliarium tertio” which thereby transformed an original topographic indication into soldiers (miliarium into milites) (“Saints de Salone,” 313, 321–23). Text: ed. G. B. de Rossi and L. Duchesne, “Martyrologium hieronymianum ad fidem codicum adiectis prolegomenis,” in ActaSS Nov. II.1:i–136.

33. Delehaye, “Saints d’Istrie,” 395. Others have been less troubled by the discrep-ancy in the number of soldier martyrs accompanying Domnio (cf. Zeiller, Origines chrétiennes, 16–19). Picking up on issues raised by H. Delehaye (“Nouvelles fouilles à Salone,” AB 47 [1929]: 77–88), Saxer argues there is no connection whatsoever, indeed that Salona originally had no military saints (“Saints de Salone”).

34. On the two Domnios, and the variously attested relic translations from Salona to Rome and to Split, see F. Bulic;, “I Ss. Anastasio e Dojmo martiri Salonitani,” Bullettino di archeologia e storia dalmata 21 (1898): 113–32; Delehaye, “Saints d’Istrie,” 400–403; Zeiller, Origines chrétiennes, 3–13, 27–46; Saxer, “Saints de Salone,” 296–309. On the homonymous Anastasii, see Zeiller, Origines chrétiennes, 57–77; H. Delehaye, “S. Anastase martyr de Salone,” AB 16 (1897): 488–500; L.

tyrologium hieronymianum (“Martyrology of St. Jerome”) also registers April 11 as the martyrdom anniversary of a bishop Domnio along with either eight or three soldiers (Domnio is spelled inconsistently and has different numbers of companions in various manuscript versions).32 The same source lists Salonitan martyrs Anastasius and Septimus the deacon on August 26 and on April 18 respectively. In addition, apart from the brief martryrological entries, we have more lengthy Passio accounts for two Salonitan martyrs, Domnio and Anastasius, both of whom appear on the S. Venanzio mosaic at the Lateran.

Interpreting these textual sources in light of the Lateran mosaic is, how-ever, far from straightforward. For example, as Hippolyte Delehaye pointed out over a century ago, given the numeric discrepancies, it is unclear how the four named military saints depicted in the monumental mosaic relate to the three or eight anonymous soldiers listed as martyred together with Bishop Domnio in the martyrology.33 The longer hagiographic texts are problematic too, not only because of their questionable chronology, but also because the hagiographic tradition in each case conflates accounts of two individuals of the same name (one Domnio is said to be a priest of Salona contemporary with the apostles, the other Domnio a martyr under Diocletian; one Anastasius is identified as a fuller, the other a soldier hold-ing the military position of cornicularius).34 Thus while the seventh-century


Jelic;, “S. Anastasio Fullone e S. Anastasio corniculario, martiri salonitani,” Bullet-tino di archeologia e storia dalmata 21 (1898): 85–100; F. Bulic;, “I Ss. Anastasio e Dojmo”; Saxer, “Saints de Salone,” 309–13.

35. Brøndsted, “Basilique des cinq martyrs.” See also the recent summary in Gauthier et al., Salona IV, 1:16–19.

Roman mosaic depicts a number of Dalmatian saints, only the names of three, Domnius, Anastasius, and Septimus, are attested in the textual tra-dition of Salonitan martyrs.

With the beginning of archaeological investigation at Salona in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, epigraphic evidence was unearthed which seemed to localize the cults of saints already known through hagiography and the Lateran mosaic. Numerous fragmentary inscriptions, which were found in the excavations of the northern cemetery churches and included names of Salonitan saints, helped to corroborate a picture of martyrium foundation, development, and eventual decay as the city faced increasing external threats. Scholars used the inscriptions, sometimes no more than a few letters, to map specific saints’ cults to par-ticular sites. Taking these together with the limited textual evidence they narrated a life cycle of cult development at each site, from initial tomb site veneration to full-blown burial basilica, eventual relic translation, and site abandonment. Now, however, the epigraphic evidence from Salona’s saints appears much less straightforward, and renewed investigation of the inscriptions’ architectural contexts as well as consideration of the con-temporary political value of the textual sources for Salona’s saints can, I suggest, point to other possible patterns and motivations for development at Salona’s three main cemetery churches.

KAPLJUC +

The fourth-century funerary basilica of Kapljuc= was founded in the midst of a pre-existing cemetery zone just beyond the north side of the city walls of Salona (Figs. 1 and 3). While Kapljuc= is perhaps the earliest of Salo-na’s three well-preserved extramural churches, it is also the least studied. Johannes Brøndsted’s important excavation report of 1928, commendable in its time for its detailed measurements and plans, has not been updated by extensive modern fieldwork.35 Brøndsted thus remains the primary source for the site, and his story of the church’s evolution heavily influenced both Grabar and Dyggve’s discussion of martyr cult development at Salona.

Brøndsted’s report included a summary diagram to illustrate the pro-gressive stages of the basilica’s evolution (Fig. 4). The cemetery in which

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36. Finds from the Kapljuc= cemetery, apparently contiguous with the so-called “cemetery of the sixteen sarcophagi,” included numerous funerary inscriptions from the first to fifth century. See E. Marin, “Les nécropoles de Salone,” in Actes du XIe congrès international d’archéologie chrétienne, ed. Noël Duval et al., 3 vols., Studi di antichità Cristiana 41 (= Collection de l’École française de Rome 123) (Rome: École française de Rome, 1989), 2:1227–39, esp. 1231; Bulic;, “Ss. Anastasio e Dojmo”; and F. Bulic;, “Sterro di abside di una chiesa antica cristiana ad Owest della ‘necropoli suburbana di 16 sarcofagi’ a Salona,” Bullettino di archeologia e storia dalmata 34 (1911): 3–39.

37. Brøndsted, “Basilique des cinq martyrs,” 179. Asterius is included among the group of Dalmatian martyrs depicted in the mosaic from the S. Venanzio oratory (see above). He is thought to have been a priest based on the ecclesiastical garb he wears in the mosaic, in contrast to the four soldier-companions attired in military gear (Zeiller, Origines chrétiennes, 89; see also de Rossi, Musaici cristiani, fasc. XIX, f. 5v). Though we have no hagiographic text for Asterius, it is possible that he belonged to the group of companions martyred with Bishop Domnio based on the inclusion of his name on a fragmentary inscription from the Manastirine site, which also lists the four companions Antiochianus, Gaianus, Telius, and Paulinianus (insc. nos. A641 and 143B as reconstructed by Duval and Marin, Salona III, 285–94; and insc. no. 70 in Gauthier et al., Salona IV, 1:256–59; see also Duval, “Culte des martyrs de Salone,” 444–51). Brøndsted (“Basilique des cinq martyrs,” 178–79), followed by Dyggve (History of Salonitan Christianity, 11), further suggests that the fragmentary painted inscription “. . T.RIV” found in one of the cunei of the amphitheater in Salona indi-cates a small sanctuary to the saint, and perhaps also his fellow martyrs, at the site of their martyrdom. More recently it has been argued that the amphitheater chapel must date to the sixth century, not the fourth as Brøndsted had proposed (Gauthier et al., Salona IV, 1:248–50). See also I. Nikolajevic;, “Images votives de Salone et de Dyrrachium,” Zbornik Radova Vizantoloskog Instituta 19 (1980): 59–70; and Mackie, Early Christian Funerary Chapels, 221–22.

the basilica ultimately grew was in use from as early as the first century c.e.36 Though we lack a comprehensive plan of the cemetery in the period before the construction of the church, it is clear that it contained a variety of types of tombs, from simple amphora burials and pitched-tile graves to chamber-tombs and sarcophagi. The apse of the subsequent church replaced an earlier curved wall, which Brøndsted reconstructed as belong-ing to a freestanding funerary exedra, illustrated as phase II. This exedra, it was claimed, provided a certain prominence to the single tomb located before it, that of the martyred priest Asterius, whose remains were believed to have been brought to Kapljuc= after his martyrdom under Diocletian.37

In phase III, the construction of the basilica focused on Asterius’s tomb, which now occupied the honored position at the apse’s center (see Fig. 4). With one significant exception, the other pre-existing tombs were destroyed or buried under the walls and floors of the church. The exception consists of a second large tomb pre-dating the church (labeled “G” on the plan, Fig. 3), which Brøndsted believed belonged to the four soldiers Antiochi-anus, Gaianus, Telius, and Paulinianus, companions to Bishop Domnio,


38. See previous note and Zeiller, Origines chrétiennes, 18–19 and 87.39. Mosaic no. 13 (Brøndsted, “Basilique des cinq martyrs,” 122–23; inscr. no. 89

in Gauthier et al., Salona IV, 1:290–92).40. Inscr. no. 81 (Brøndsted, “Basilique des cinq martyrs,” 174); see Brøndsted,

“Basilique des cinq martyrs,” 182–85, on the decline of the site in the sixth and seventh centuries when he believed its martyrs’ remains were transported to the still active church of Manastirine.

who, it was thought, had also suffered martyrdom in the amphitheater during Diocletian’s reign.38

The basilica is a variation on the standard three-aisled plan with the nave of the western section paved with large, undecorated blocks in con-trast to the colorful mosaic flooring of the nave in the eastern portion of the church. The mosaic pavement itself does not form a unified decora-tive program, but is composed of separate panels, several of which include funerary and votive inscriptions, inserted over the course of the church’s history (Fig. 5). One marble funerary inscription set in a tessellated frame records a consular date for the year 385 c.e. and thus serves as a terminus ante quem for the construction of the basilica.39 The final phases of the church (Roman numerals IV–VI on diagram, Fig. 4) witness various repairs and alterations to the structure including the restoration of the apse wall and the construction of additional annexes on the north and west sides. The last dated inscription from the church is from 516/17 c.e., and it is sometime after this that the site falls out of use.40

The story of the basilica’s history published in the original excavation report conforms neatly to the conventional narrative of martyrium evolu-tion: out of a common cemetery, a martyr’s tomb (or in this case two) rises to prominence as the focal point of a monumental basilica, which serves for congregational meetings and liturgical celebration. The venerated remains subsequently attract additional burials to such an extent that expansion of the site was required. Yet, for each of the central claims of this inter-pretation of the Kapljuc= basilica, there is surprisingly little firm evidence.

Beginning with Asterius’s tomb in the apse (Fig. 6), the very reason for the church’s existence according to traditional reasoning, there is already much room for doubt. The credibility of the narrative of monumentaliza-tion rests, first of all, on the pre-existence of the tomb of the martyr. Yet on this point the evidence is at best questionable. The interpretation depends on two features of the site’s archaeology in particular: the relationship of the tomb to the apse wall and indications that the tomb housed the mar-tyr’s remains prior to the basilica’s construction.

To take the first point, analysis of the rapport between the tomb and the

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41. In brief, the center of earliest and thickest apse (.95 m), A1, is almost half a meter north of the central line of the tomb; the significantly thinner (.6–.65 m) A2 built over A1 is more closely aligned with the tomb’s midline running only approxi-mately five centimeters south of it; finally, the third apse on the site, A3, returns to the approximate wall-thickness of the first apse (.9 m) but is much reduced in diameter (3.6 m as opposed to 4.6 m for A1 and 4.9 m for A2) and once again fails to align with the tomb within, this time with a central axis that runs 25 cm south of that of the grave. See Brøndsted, “Basilique des cinq martyrs,” 37, for A1–A3 thickness and diameter dimensions; Brøndsted, “Basilique des cinq martyrs,” 56–57, for comparison of apse axes to the center-line of the tomb; and Brøndsted, “Basilique des cinq mar-tyrs,” 40, figs. 5–7, for diagrams of the alignment of the tomb to each of the three apse walls. Brøndsted provides no precise measurement for A2’s axis vis à vis that of the tomb, but says only that, “le centre de l’apside A2 ne se trouve qu’à très peu de cm. au Sud de l’axe médien de la tombe” (Brøndsted, “Basilique des cinq martyrs,” 57).

apse is complicated by the fact that the site actually preserves three non-concentric curved apse walls (labeled A1–A3 by Brøndsted, see Figs. 3, 7, and 8). Moreover, none of them is precisely aligned with the axis of the tomb within.41 Brøndsted reconstructed the earliest apse (A1) as belong-ing to a funerary exedra and the second (A2) to the basilica (see Fig. 4, no. III) reasoning that, “after the position and the special construction of this tomb, it must be considered beyond doubt that it was the focus of cult above which the basilica was originally built. The first apse of this

Fig. 6. Kapljuc= Basilica, view of apse, looking north (note: cement buttress wall separating apse from nave is modern) (photo: A. M. Yasin).


42. Brøndsted, “Basilique des cinq martyrs,” 57: “D’après la position et la con-struction spéciale de cette tombe, on doit considérer comme hors de doubte qu’elle a été le foyer de culte au-dessus duquel on a originairement élevé la basilique. La pre-mière abside de cette basilique doit donc être celle par rapport à laquelle la tombe occupe la position la plus centrale, et c’est, comme le montre la fig. 6 [in Brøndsted’s original publication], l’abside A2.”

43. See n. 41 above.44. While we only possess the lowest section of A1 (Brøndsted, “Basilique des

cinq martyrs,” 37) and the upper portions of the wall may have been thinner, the same holds true for the walls of A2 and A3 that were built on top of the remains of A1. It seems reasonable to expect therefore that the ratio of the thicknesses of the three apse walls is accurately reflected by the measurements of the surviving portions listed in n. 41 above.

45. Elsewhere Brøndsted acknowledges the problem (“Basilique des cinq martyrs,” 179), but resolves it with the conjecture that the exedra actually formed part of a funerary chapel belonging to a Christian family and that Asterius’s remains were not placed in alignment with the apse out of respect for the tombs that had already been placed within the so-called chapel. With no evidence for a pre-existing exedra structure, let alone a chapel or nearby tombs, this explanation must remain wholly speculative.

46. Bulic;, “Sterro di abside.”

basilica must therefore be that in relation to which the tomb occupies the most central position, and that is . . . the apse A2.”42

This trajectory of development can be subjected to greater scrutiny. First there are technical questions raised by the dimensions of the three apse walls: the earliest apse, A1, measures .95 m wide while the subsequent apse wall is only .6 to .65 m thick.43 The reconstruction that Brøndsted proposed is thus questionable since it would mean that the construction of the monumental basilica replaced the apse of a small funerary exedra with a wall that was more than thirty percent thinner.44 Similarly, given that all three apse walls fail to align with the center tomb, there is no rea-son to assume that the original funerary exedra, purpose-built to memo-rialize the grave, would be any less likely to be lined up with the axis of the tomb than the apse of the subsequent basilica.45 Since in our present state of knowledge about the site we lack clear indication of any walls, supports, pavement, or other architectural features contemporary to the A1 apse, the existence of a funerary monument preceding the basilica appears difficult to substantiate.

Second, there is the issue of the tomb itself. The published interpretation depends on the grave, together with the funerary exedra that surmounted it, pre-existing the basilica’s construction, but this chronology is not based on firm evidence. The tomb, discovered by Frane Bulic; in 1909, takes the form of a rectangular pit with stone-lined walls (see Fig. 6).46 At the corners and two long sides of the cavity stood six mismatched, limestone

Fig. 7. Kapljuc= Basilica, walls visible at north side of apse exterior, looking west (from left to right in photo: A3 [= tallest surviving apse wall], A1 [only a portion is visible under A2], A2) (photo: A. M. Yasin).


47. Bulic;’s publication describing the 1909 discovery concluded, “È probabile che questo spazio così circoscritto e limitato, lungo internamente 2,25 e largo 0,95 m., trovato vuoto di oggetti e pieno solamente di terra d’ingombro, fosse destinato a contenere un oggetto, diciamo un sarcofago, una cassa di piombo, che quindi questo spazio potrebbe essere una specie di confessione, di cripta, sopra la quale ci dovrebbe essere stato un pavimento di uno o più placconi, sul quale era l’altare” (“Sterro di abside,” 26, also quoted in Brøndsted, “Basilique des cinq martyrs,” 133). Brønd-sted (“Basilique des cinq martyrs”) disagrees with Bulic;’s hypothesis that an altar was raised over the tomb, but given the state of the evidence, the question cannot be resolved either way.

48. Even Brøndsted, “Basilique des cinq martyrs,” 133, considered the tomb, as an architectural type, “vraiment curieux.”

colonettes, spolia cut from longer columns to approximately one-meter height. Bulic; found the subterranean chamber filled only with earth, but hypothesized that it was originally meant to house an object such as a sar-cophagus underneath the floor of the church. How the tomb was indicated at the surface-level of the church is unknown. Nor is it clear whether it was surmounted by an altar or ciborium.47 While it has been assumed that the tomb predates the basilica, there is no evidence to support the anterior-ity of the pit or the precise identification of its contents. There is, indeed, nothing to disprove the possibility that the cavity was created during the construction of the church or that it was perhaps inserted at some later point. In fact, the un-tomb-like nature of the construction, with its sub-terranean stone-lined walls and decorative colonettes, points away from its identification as a pre-existing tomb.48 Given the current state of the

Fig. 8. Kapljuc= Basilica, diagram of apse phases superimposed (J. Brøndsted, “La basilique des cinq martyrs à Kapljuc=,” in Recherches à Salone [Copenhague: J. H. Schultz, 1928], 1:40, fig. 4; reproduced by permission of publisher).


49. Brøndsted, “Basilique des cinq martyrs,” 134: “Par sa position ce tombeau à crypte se désigne clairement comme le foyer central du culte, au-dessus duquel on a élevé l’église.” Cf. n. 47.

50. As E. Marin has noted, this is the only tomb at Salona that undoubtedly pre-serves its privileged place; see “L’inhumation privilégiée à Salone,” in L’inhumation privilégiée du VIe au VIIIe siècle en occident. Actes du colloque tenu à Créteil les 6–18 mars 1984, ed. Y. Duval and J.-C. Picard (Paris: de Boccard, 1986), 222.

51. See Brøndsted, “Basilique des cinq martyrs,” 139–42, for the description of tomb G; cavity dimensions: 1.7 m long x 1.1 m wide and .6 m deep.

52. Brøndsted, “Basilique des cinq martyrs,” 139, noted a 1.1 m break in the north wall of the tomb, near the northwest corner, through which the contents of the tomb were apparently removed.

evidence, it is just as possible, or perhaps even more likely, that the pit was not a tomb that pre-dated the church but a reliquary deposit constructed at the time of the building’s foundation, or even added later.

The problem of interpretation, I suggest, lies in the assumptions about martyrium evolution. In keeping with the expectation that martyrs’ basilicas develop directly from ordinary tombs, apse A1 and the tomb it contains were reconstructed as a funerary structure even though there appears to be no incontrovertible evidence for such a pre-existing monu-ment. The existence of an underground tomb within the apse was taken as proof that it was the causal element of the church’s construction: “By its position, this crypt-tomb clearly called attention to itself as the central focus of cult above which the church was raised,” Brøndsted wrote.49 Such logic is patently teleological: because there is a cavity in the church’s apse, it must have been the tomb around which the church construction was organized. Lacking any secure evidence for the temporal relation between the basilica and the pit in its apse, a developmental sequence of the mar-tyrium monumentalization fills in the connection.

At the same time, focusing on a narrative of presumed monumentaliza-tion of the sanctuary area has led scholars to downplay the significance of other pre-basilican features. Identifying the cavity in the apse as the mar-tyr’s tomb, which became the focal point of the basilica, has effectively isolated that grave as the only one from the earlier cemetery that came to matter in subsequent phases. And yet, there is clear evidence for a differ-ent tomb that both pre-dated the basilica and was certainly preserved by the church construction: tomb G (see Fig. 3).50 Originally, this freestanding funerary monument was a stone-built structure enclosing a rectangular cav-ity (Fig. 9).51 The cavity, once again found empty by the excavators,52 was closed by a large stone, the upper surface of which had been carved with a roughly rectangular hole and a series of circular depressions for receiving


53. The stone, now broken, remains in the Split Museum though a corner frag-ment is apparently missing.

54. Though he stated the martyrs’ tomb attribution definitively in the conclusion (“Basilique des cinq martyrs,” 179), earlier in the report Brøndsted had been more cautious, suggesting that tomb G may have contained the remains of one or more martyrs, but that it could also date to a pre-Diocletianic period (“Basilique des cinq martyrs,” 142). As early as 1929, Delehaye questioned Brøndsted’s identification of tomb G as belonging to Christian martyrs: “est-il bien sûr que le tombeau G soit autre chose qu’une sépulture païenne?” (“Nouvelles fouilles,” 86). On the four sol-dier saints from Salona, see section on “Salona’s Saints” above and n. 30, 32–33.

55. See n. 37 above.56. Mosaic no. 5 (Brøndsted “Basilique des cinq martyrs,” 118–19; inscr. no. 65

in Gauthier et al., Salona IV, 1:243–44).57. There is also another fragmentary mosaic (no. 16) from the church pavement

which includes the words “marturem An[ . . . ]” and may therefore indicate that St. Antiochianus too was venerated in the church, though only two heavily damaged let-ters of the martyr’s name survive, and the incomplete text does not permit reconstruc-

the conventional offerings to the Roman dead.53 When the basilica was built, the stone was preserved at floor level, and it was respected by the subsequent architectural and decorative embellishments of the church’s ambo, chancel screen, and mosaic pavements (Figs. 5 and 10).

Though no inscription was found in association with tomb G, Brøndsted suggested that it most likely contained the remains of the four Salonitan soldier martyrs depicted in the S. Venanzio mosaic at the Lateran (i.e. Telius, Paulinianus, Antiochianus, and Gaianus; Fig. 2), and that the four circular “plates” carved in the surface of the rock (“one for each martyr”) were arranged so as to make veiled reference to a cross without overstep-ping the bounds of pre-313 c.e. propriety.54 Pursuing this line of thought, Brøndsted considered it “extremely unlikely” that the so-called tomb in the center of the apse belonged to anyone but the martyr-priest Asterius, who was also depicted in the S. Venanzio mosaic and whose remains he believed were brought with those of the four soldier-martyrs to the Kapljuc = cemetery for burial.

Though there is a complete absence of hagiographical evidence for Asterius’s life, death, or burial, we do have one piece of clear material evidence pointing to the existence of his cult in the Kapljuc= church.55 A fragmentary mosaic votive inscription thought to date to the early fifth century and set into the floor of the nave before the sanctuary (no. 5 on the plan, Fig. 5) clearly commemorates, “a vow made to the martyr Aste-rius” (. . . vot / um fecit ad ma / rtirem Asterium).56 This appeal made to St. Asterius is of utmost significance because it undeniably attests to the veneration of this saint at the Kapljuc= basilica.57 Yet, one must be cautious

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tion of the context of the inscribed name, whether funerary or devotional: Gauthier et. al., Salona IV, 1:245–46; J.-P. Caillet, L’évergétisme monumental chrétien en Italie et à ses marges, Collection de l’École française de Rome 175 (Rome: École française de Rome, 1993), 388–89; Brøndsted, “Basilique des cinq martyrs,” 126.

58. This possibility has also been raised in the recent publication of Salona’s Christian inscriptions, though with varying degrees of certainty by different authors: Gauthier et al., Salona IV, 1:16, 101, and 244.

in interpreting this evidence. The St. Asterius inscription is a votive, not a martyrium dedication or record of a relic deposit. It does not purport to mark the precise site of the saint’s remains, but rather to provide a per-manent commemorative marker of an exchange between an earthly donor and heavenly patron. It is also posterior to the construction of the basilica, and therefore cannot support the claim for the anteriority of the cavity in the apse. Strictly speaking, it confirms only that at the time the mosaic was set, St. Asterius was venerated here by the individual or family who commissioned the panel. Finally, while the mosaic indicates an individual appeal to St. Asterius, given the incomplete nature of the evidence, we can-not rule out that other saints may have been venerated within the basilica as well and were perhaps those believed to be deposited under the altar. In fact, given the proximity of the Asterius votive panel to the undoubt-edly pre-basilican tomb G, it is reasonable to hypothesize that this was believed to be the grave housing the honored saint’s remains.58 While the presence of Asterius’s tomb under the altar remains an intriguing possi-bility, in the current state of knowledge of the site, without corroborating evidence either of the church’s dedication or from the apse area itself, the identification of the original date and contents of the cavity in the church’s apse are uncertain.

For some later scholars turning to Brøndsted’s report, the appeal of the interpretation of cult development from the saints’ simple tombs seems to have outweighed more critical investigation of the archaeological evidence he provided. While Brøndsted expressed his opinions confidently, particu-larly in the report’s conclusion, he was nonetheless careful to maintain a distinction between the presentation of archaeological excavation data and his more subjective interpretation of it. Indeed, he frequently qualified his analysis and explicitly expressed some uncertainties in the body of the report. Yet by the time of Grabar’s publication of Martyrium, the exca-vator’s hypothetical attributions had been elevated to fact. Grabar wrote assuredly of the presence of saints’ tombs over which later cult structures were erected (and many have just as assuredly followed on his authority): “. . . at the cemetery of Kapljuc = is an ancient wall against which a funerary


59. Grabar, Martyrium, 1:54–55. Grabar sees two separate sub divo martyria joined by construction of the basilica where “les tombeaux des martyrs se trouvèrent réunis dans le chevet” (Grabar, Martyrium, 1:55).

60. Brøndsted, “Basilique des cinq martyrs,” 144–52.61. Brøndsted, “Basilique des cinq martyrs,” 153.62. Gauthier et al., Salona IV, 1:16.63. Brøndsted, “Basilique des cinq martyrs,” 153: “Tout ce qu’on peut dire, c’est

qu’une fois l’église constuite, les tombes en terre cuite l’ont peu à peu environnée d’une couronne serrée, ininterrompue.”

64. Brøndsted, “Basilique des cinq martyrs,” 127.

apse was built for the purpose of deposing in its interior the body of St. Asterius . . . and one finds erected only a short space before the apse of St. Asterius a second martyr tomb; this one held the bodies of four military saints.”59 Reading Grabar’s description of the site, it is indeed easy to for-get that neither of these tombs carries a surviving inscription identifying the saints presumed to have been buried within.

Finally, there is the issue of the so-called ad sanctos burials in and around the church. The vast majority of the graves accounted for on Brøndsted’s plan are simple terracotta tombs either of pitched tiles, pot shards, or amphorae (Fig. 11).60 The excavation report eschewed any attempt to estab-lish a relative chronology of these burials and indeed stated that there is no way even to determine which are Christian and which are not.61 Many of those that Brøndsted did date on the basis of their inscriptions to the fourth century are now, in the re-examination of the epitaphs carried out as part of the recently published catalogue of Salona’s Christian inscriptions, thought to be older.62 There appears therefore to be little secure evidence to support Brøndsted’s description of the terracotta graves forming a “tight crown” which created an increasingly dense cluster around the tomb of Asterius in the apse after the construction of the church.63

We also need to be skeptical of claims for a sequence of increasingly dense ad sanctos burials inside the church. The excavator’s indications of which mosaic panels cut through or overlap which together the more tenuous comparison of letter forms, provide evidence for a rough relative chronology of the mosaics in the nave. Yet the resulting sequence dem-onstrates neither a conspicuous crowding around the supposed martyrs’ tomb G nor points to a clear pattern of growth outward from either tomb G or the memoria in the apse: mosaics 5 through 8, which form an east-ern cluster, are apparently later than several of those further west, nos. 9, 11, 13, 16, and 17 (Fig. 5).64 In addition, the inscriptions are fragmentary, and only two inscribed panels, nos. 9 and 13, are certainly funerary with another (no. 11) likely (each apparently corresponding with sarcophagi

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65. Brøndsted, “Basilique des cinq martyrs,” 119–24, 130 (cf. inv. 142, 149, and 89 [= Brøndsted nos. 9, 11, and 13] in Gauthier et al., Salona IV, 1:374–75, 385–86, 290–92). The funerary nature of nos. 9 and 13 is unquestionable; no. 13 only pre-serves some fragmentary letters but was situated above a burial sarcophagus. Marin plausibly suggests that mosaic no. 9, which commemorates multiple individuals, cor-responds both to sarcophagus N and the burial found at the adjacent south wall, and that no. 13 belongs with sarcophagus O (“L’inhumation privilégié,” 222).

66. In addition to the Asterius mosaic (no. 5) Brøndsted suggests that nos. 3, 6, and 14–17 are likely to have been votive texts, of which, nos. 3, 5, and possibly 16 are the most convincing (“Basilique des cinq martyrs,” 118–19, 126, and esp. 129–30).

67. Marin, “L’inhumation privilégiée à Salone,” raises the possibility that tomb G may belong to the principal donor of the church’s construction.

found below pavement level).65 Other pavement inscriptions, such as no. 5 naming “the martyr Asterius” discussed above, commemorate votive dedications or benefactions to the church rather than burials.66 The current state of the evidence from both inside and outside the church therefore offers little support for a conventional reading of ad sanctos burials that expand to surround a saint’s tomb in ever greater numbers.

At this point, it is important to clarify that it is highly likely that the Kapljuc= basilica at some point contained the remains of one or more local saints. Tomb G, for example, with its monumental stone preserved in the floor of the church must be acknowledged as a significant holdover from the pre-church cemetery and one that perhaps indicates the vener-ated tomb of a martyr (or martyrs) whose identity is not directly attested at the gravesite. But other scenarios are also possible; one could imagine, for example, that the tomb housed the remains of one or more individu-als whose family was influential enough to lobby successfully against the tomb’s destruction when the church was being built.67 The point here, in other words, is not to argue that tomb G did or did not contain the remains of the four soldier martyrs or that the pit in the apse was or was not the original tomb of priest Asterius. There is, I contend, simply not enough evidence to make a credible case in either direction. It is critical to rec-ognize, however, that historically such claims have been made, and with remarkable conviction, because they enable the site to mesh comfortably with, and in turn persuasively reinforce, the evolutionary structure of the conventional model for cult expansion.

MARUSINAC

It is also difficult to reconcile the complicated archaeology of Salona’s Marusinac church with the evolutionary martyrium model, and yet the rhetoric of the narrative dominates discussion of this site too. Indeed, an


68. In addition to the terminus ante quem provided by inscription no. 20 from the northern structure which preserves the date of 428 c.e. (R. Egger, “Chronologie und Typengeschichte,” in Der altchristliche Friedhof Manastirine, Forschungen in Salona 2 [Wien: Druck und Verlag der Österreichischen Staatsdruckerei, 1926], 107, 153), epigraphic and numismatic finds from the recent excavations in the so-called “basilica discoperta” site point to construction starting in the beginning of the fifth century: E. Marin, “Marusinac-Salona: Novitates (avec un appendice épigraphique de Denise Feissel),” in Frühes Christentum zwischen Rom und Konstantinopel: Acta Congres-sus Internationalis XIV Archeologiae Christianae, Vindobonae 19.–26. 0. 1999, ed. R. Harreither et al., 2 vols., Studi di antichità cristiana 62 (Città del Vaticano: Pon-tificio Istituto di Archeologia; Wien: Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2006), 1:513–14). See also the recent overview of the site in Gauthier et al., Salona IV, 1:14–16.

69. The site has been compared to the cathedral of Salona and other examples of a type of so-called “double churches” (Pascale Chevalier, “Les églises doubles de Dalmatie et de Bosnie-Herzégovine,” Antiquité Tardive 4 [1996]: 149–59), though recent archaeological investigations of the northern structure would appear to call this association into question (see n. 72 below).

70. For the excavation history of the site, see R. Egger, “Einleitung,” in Der altchristliche Friedhof Marusinac, ed. E. Dyggve and R. Egger, Forschungen in Salona 3 (Wien: Druck und Verlag von Rudolf M. Rohrer, 1939), 1–5.

alternative reading of the evidence suggests the possibility that a version of such a narrative long pre-dates modern excavation history of Salona. The late antique archaeological and hagiographic testimony may point to efforts to establish such a venerable history for the complex in the centu-ries directly following its construction.

Like Kapljuc=, Marusinac offers a case of an early Christian funerary basilica implanted atop a pre-existing extramural cemetery (Figs. 1 and 12). This site, however, presents not just a simple church, but a more elaborate collection of ecclesiastical structures from the first half of the fifth century.68 The principal components of the complex include, at the south end, a large three-aisled basilica with a well-preserved mosaic pavement, an atrium to the west that incorporates an earlier free-standing mausoleum (mausoleum L) in its northwest corner, a second, large basilica-shaped enclosure at the north end, and an irregularly shaped open area between it and the basilica to the south.69 The site, published by Ejnar Dyggve and Rudolf Egger in 1939,70 has attracted much scholarly attention due to disagreement over the nature of the north building: though in plan the structure resembles a typical basilica, Dyggve argued that the columns are too small to have supported the heavy roof that would have been needed to span the nave. Drawing on literary references to eastern pilgrimage churches without roofs he reconstructed the edifice not as a standard church building but as an open-air apsed structure with a three-sided interior portico, what he called


71. E. Dyggve, “Rekonstruktion,” in Der altchristliche Friedhof Marusinac, ed. Dyggve and Egger, 102–3; E. Dyggve, “Basilica discoperta: un nouveau type d’édiface cultuel paléochrétien,” in Atti del IV. Congresso internazionale di archeologia cris-tiana, Città del Vaticano, 16–22 Ottobre, 1938, 2 vols., Studi di antichità cristiana 16, 19 (Città del Vaticano: Pontificio Istituto di archeologia cristiana, 1940), 1:415–31; Dyggve, History of Salonitan Christianity, 79; Grabar particularly explores the potential connection between the so-called basilica discoperta of Marusinac and the organization of certain Hellenistic heroa (Martyrium, 1:121–41).

72. A preliminary reports of the recent excavations in the northern sector of the Marusinac site have appeared in Marin, “Nouvelles recherches sur Marusinac,” esp. 2:1020–21, and Marin, “Marusinac-Salona: Novitates.” Older critiques of the “basilica discoperta” reconstruction include: R. M. Milenovic;, “Zum Problem der ‘basilica discoperta’,” Jahreshefte des Österreichischen archäologischen Institutes in Wein 41, Beiblatt I (1954): 129–58 (see also the response by E. Dyggve and R. Egger, “Archäologie und Statistik,” Jahreshefte des Österreichischen archäologischen Insti-tutes in Wein 43, Beiblatt [1956]: 77–90); A. Von Gerkan, “Die angebliche Basilica discoperta,” in Tortulae. Studien zu altchristlichen und byzantinischen Monumenten, ed. W. N. Schumacher, Römische Quartalschrift für christliche Altertumskunde und Kirchengeschichte Supp. 30 (Rom: Herder, 1966), 143–46; and Krautheimer, Early Christian and Byzantine Architecture, 35 and 181 n. 3.

73. On the Martyrologium hieronymianum, see Felice Lifshitz, The Name of the Saint: The Martyrology of Jerome and Access to the Sacred in Francia, 627–827 (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006). On the St. Anastasius entry and its variations in different manuscripts, see Saxer “Saints de Salone,” 295, 310–11; Delehaye, “S. Anastase,” 488–90; Zeiller, Origines chrétiennes, 59.

the “basilica discoperta,” the first archaeologically attested example of its type.71 This is not the place to engage with the arguments surrounding Dyggve’s reconstruction hypothesis, though it is worth pointing out that recent excavations have confirmed earlier critiques of Dyggve’s “basilica discoperta” by drawing particular attention to the fact that the exterior walls of the north structure are of different thicknesses and the result of separate construction phases.72

Even from this schematic overview it is clear that the site is not an easy match with the evolutionary martyrium model: the complex contains not one but multiple significant focal points and, as can be seen from the plan, accommodates numerous areas of clustered burials. And yet, by drawing more on hagiographical tradition than archaeological evidence, such a narrative has been mapped onto the site. In brief, the accepted explana-tion promoted by Dyggve and others relies on hagiographic sources to identify the tomb of St. Anastasius as the originating seed of the subse-quent monumental architecture. The Martyrology of Jerome (Martyrolo-gium hieronymianum), produced in the sixth or seventh century, registers a St. Anastasius, a fuller from Salona, on August 26, but narrative details are only filled in by later sources.73 According to the oldest recension of


74. R. Egger prints an edition of the text of the oldest recension of the passio (Bibliothèque royale de Belgique Cod. 7984, f. 172v–173v), which he identifies as tenth-century without further explanation (“Die Passio Sci. Anastasii und ihr Fortle-ben,” in Der altchristliche Friedhof Marusinac, ed. Dyggve and Egger, 132, with text and commentary at 136–42). More recently, Saxer noted that this recension cannot be pinned down chronologically by either stylistic clues or internal dating evidence

Anastasius’s passio (possibly tenth-century),74 the saint, a native of the city of Aquileia, was martyred in the beginning of the fourth century under Diocletian, but after his death, the wealthy Salonitan matron Asclepia managed to orchestrate the rescue of his body and bury it in a basilica

Fig 12. Marusinac, plan of church complex (source: E. Dyggve and R. Egger, ed., Der altchristliche Friedhof Marusinac, Forschungen in Salona 3 [Wien: Druck und Verlag von Rudolf M. Rohrer, 1939], 16, fig. 23 [=ÖAI Inv. Nr. 958]; reproduced by permission of the Österreichisches Archäologisches Institut).


(“Les Saints de Salone,” 312). For additional discussion of the manuscript tradition and sources, see Zeiller, Origines chrétiennes; Delehaye, “S. Anastase”; Delehaye, “Nouvelles fouilles”; Egger, “Die Passio,” 132–36; Saxer, “Saints de Salone,” 312–13.

75. Lines 55–56 in the text of the oldest recension of the Passio (Egger, “Die Pas-sio,” 136).

76. The epitaph dates to either 599 or 603 c.e., depending on the how the final characters of the indiction date are restored. Full text (ed. Guathier et al., Salona IV, 1:305–12, with additional commentary and bibliography): + Hic iacit Iohannes,/ peccatur et in/dignus presbiter./ + Expleto annorum cir/culo quinto, hunc/ sibi sepul-crum Io/hannis condere iussit,/ Marcellino suo procon/sule nato, germano prae/sente simul cunctosque/ nepotes. Ornavit tumolum./ Mente fideli defunctus, acces/sit obsis una cum coniunge, natis,/ Anastasii servans reverenda/ limina s(an)c(t)i. Tertio post decimum/ augusti numero mens(is) ind(ictione) <I?>I,<brae> / finivit saeculi diem.

77. “Wie so oft, bildet auch in Marusinac ein Märtyrergrab den Ausgangspunkt des Coemeteriums, und zwar den einzigen. Wir dürfen der Passio glauben, welche das Grab des Märtyrers Anastasius in territurio Salonitano gelegen angibt und den Namen der Stifterin des Grabes, Asklepia, überliefert. Kein Zweifel, die Flur Marusinac war einst im Besitze dieser Frau. . . . Wie schon öfter angeführt, ist das von Asklepia errich-tete Anastasius-Grab mit unserem Mausoleum L identisch” (Egger, “Chronologie und Typengeschichte,” 109). On the archaeology of mausoleum L including the description of the platform thought to have supported sarcophagi, see R. Egger, “Beschreibung der Ruinen,” in Der altchristliche Friedhof Marusinac, ed. Dyggve and Egger, 10–13; Dyggve, “Rekonstruktion,” 81–85; and Dyggve, History of Salonitan Christianity, 78. Egger would include the construction of mausoleum L with the cemetery that dates before a destruction layer of 395; he places the construction of the monumental church complex after this destruction and before the inscription of 428 (“Chronolo-gie und Typengeschichte,” 107; on the inscription from 428 c.e., see n. 68 above).

she had built in the saint’s name outside of Salona (beatum martyrem in Salonitano territurio collocavit).75 With the discovery of a late sixth-/early seventh-century inscription of one priest Johannes located in the western part of the northern structure (no. 35 on plan, Fig. 12), which commemorates the deceased for “protecting the honored threshold of St. Anastasius,” the identification of the Marusinac site with the martyrium founded by the pious Asclepia of the passio was fixed.76

According to this interpretation, the Marusinac area originally formed part of a wealthy Salonitan family’s rural dwelling, a type of villa rustica, which included a private cemetery zone. The large mausoleum L, which was later incorporated into the northwest corner of the atrium (see Fig. 12), was identified as the family tomb of Asclepia and the structure in which she deposited the martyr Anastasius’s remains and was herself bur-ied together with her husband (a detail not mentioned in the passio but inferred from the platform in mausoleum L thought large enough by the excavators to have originally supported two sarcophagi).77 Increasing ven-eration of the martyr led to the gradual development of a cemetery around


78. Dyggve “Rekonstruktion”; see also the summary by Rendic;-Mioc=evic;, “Anas-tasio ‘Aquileiese,’” esp. 319.

the mausoleum that housed the saint’s remains. Eventually, a monumental funerary basilica was constructed, and at this point the martyr’s remains were translated from the private mausoleum to a loculus underneath the altar before the apse of the church (Fig. 13).78

The interpretation of the Marusinac site, therefore, outfits the under-girding structure of the evolutionary martyrium narrative with the specif-ics taken from the hagiographic tradition of St. Anastasius. The reading does not grow out of the material remains uncovered at the site so much as form the framework into which the archaeological evidence has been inserted. This triumphant, evolutionary narrative of cultic and architectural monumentalization thus prescribes rather than describes the evidence: it turns the late antique cemetery into the private estate of Asclepia’s fam-ily, transforms the anonymous mausoleum L into the burial place of both martyr and founding patron as well as the site of abundant popular ven-eration, and legitimates the south basilica as the locus and monumental manifestation of Anastasius’s cult. Yet, archaeological backing for most of the central elements of this narrative is lacking. So far, no material evi-

Fig. 13. Marusinac, detail of east end of south church with tomb before apse (photo: A. M. Yasin).


79. Jelic; et al., Guida di Spalato, 236–42; cf. R. Munro, Rambles and Studies in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Dalmatia (Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons, 1895), 255–61; R. E. Petermann, Führer durch Dalmatien (Wien: Alfred Hölder,1899), 349. Jelic; follows de Rossi’s reconstruction of CIL 3:13134: “DEPOSI . . . I KAL SEP” as “Deposi[tio Anastasii martyris VI]I Kal(endas) Sep(tembres)” (“S. Anastasio Fullone,” 93–94). Zeiller is more circumspect (Origines chrétiennes, 52 n. 1; 75–76), and H. Delehaye was highly critical of this interpretation (“S. Anastasio Martire di Salona,” Bullettino di archeologia e storia dalmata 21 [1898]: 57–84; and “S. Anastase”).

dence has been uncovered attesting to villa structures on the site, to the existence of a matron Asclepia, to the identities of the individuals buried in mausoleum L, to the translation of a corpse from the mausoleum to the presbyterium of the south church, or to the identity of the saint or saints buried in the apses of either north or south basilica structures. It seems justifiable to question, therefore, just how suitable the evolutionary mar-tyrium narrative is for explaining this site.

As we saw at the Kapljuc= basilica, setting aside preconceived expectations about the genesis and growth of martyr cult sites can direct attention to previously undervalued aspects of surviving evidence. It will take additional archaeological investigation of the relative chronologies of the different architectural elements at Marusinac before a definitive, materially-based history of the site’s development can be written. However, what we do know about the history of St. Anastasius’s cult bears important ramifica-tions for the interpretation of the Marusinac site and might also suggest potential alternative scenarios. Most importantly, it reveals that Anasta-sius’s identity and the location of his remains were contested both in the early Middle Ages and in the modern period. The modern disagreements serve as cautionary tales about the malleability of literary descriptions to suit the interpretation of material remains. The contests attested in the medieval sources, on the other hand, may provide clues about the cir-cumstances that led to the development of the narrative in the first place.

To take the more recent first, in the history of modern scholarship, Anas-tasius’s remains have been rhetorically located at multiple sites by differ-ent authors at different times. In the late nineteenth century, one school held that the burial described in the saint’s passio must have taken place at Salona’s Manastirine site to the southeast of Marusinac (see Fig. 1). This conjecture was based largely on two inscriptions found at Manastirine: a fragment of a date formula that was reconstructed as St. Anastasius’s feast day and a second-century inscription of one L. Ulpius, who was thought to have been an early Christian ancestor of our late antique matron Ascle-pia and whose epitaph marked the site of the family estate on which the matron reportedly buried the saint some two centuries later.79 Various


80. Jelic; et al., Guida di Spalato, 235–38, 242–45; Munro, Rambles and Studies, 255–61.

81. Jelic; et al., Guida di Spalato, 234. In making the case that there was only a single St. Anastasius from Salona (the fuller, not the cornicularius), and that his burial should be located at Marusinac (not Manastirine), Delehaye argued that the final words of the plaque set up at Manastirine (in praedio Asclepiae) should be struck (“S. Anastase,” 500, and “S. Anastasio Martire,” 72).

82. Though some scholars preferred to position Anastasius at both Marusinac and Manastirine, most were eventually persuaded that Marusinac was the only cult site of St. Anastasius at Salona. Consensus has shifted away from Jelic;’s position of two Salonitan St. Anastasii (in “S. Anastasio Fullone”) due to the persuasive case made by Delehaye against the historicity of a cult to St. Anastasius the cornicularius at Salona (“S. Anastase”).

83. Zieller, Origines chrétiennes, 62; Delehaye also seems to have this mausoleum in mind (“S. Anastase,” 497–98).

structures at Manastirine were identified as belonging to Asclepia’s villa, and some authors located St. Anastasius’s tomb as well as Asclepia’s own sarcophagus (uninscribed) and the graves of her descendants amid the ruins.80 At the turn of the century, both popular guidebooks and signage at the site identified the ruins at Manastirine, not Marusinac, with the impressive sacred pedigree of the saint’s presence: visitors to the recently excavated ruins at Manastirine saw it identified as, Coemeterium legis sanctae christianae in praedio Aesclepiae.81

Later scholarship, however, relocated Anastasius’s cult site from Man-astirine to Marusinac and crafted a new scenario that situated the ele-ments from the passio narrative within the architectural landscape of that site. The epitaph of Johannes presbyter, mentioned above, discovered in 1890 in the northern structure of Marusinac (number 35 on Fig. 12), pro-claimed the cleric was “Anastasii servans . . . limina s(an)c(t)i,” and there-fore unquestionably situated St. Anastasius’s cult at Marusinac.82 There remained, however, differences of opinion as to how the physical remains at the site should be identified: Johannes’s epitaph proved Anastasius was venerated at Marusinac, but where was the saint’s tomb? Some scholars, reading the “threshold” language of Johannes’s gravestone quite literally, associated the original location of St. Anastasius’s grave with the remains of mausoleum “d,” which was near the priest’s epitaph, beneath the west-ern end of the northern basilica-shaped structure (see Fig. 12).83 The more popular interpretation was put forth in Egger and Dyggve’s excavation report, which also brought the evidence of this inscription together with the literary evidence of the passio. They offered the narrative of the site’s history outlined above that subsequently became the dominant interpre-tation of the site. They identified the massive buttressed structure at the


84. On the dating of the passio, see n. 74 above.

west end of the complex, mausoleum L, as the original burial place of Anastasius, his undertaker Asclepia, and her husband, which therefore rendered it the raison d’être of the whole subsequent ecclesiastical zone.

It is important to recall that in terms of topographical specificity, the passio text only indicates that Asteria buried St. Anastasius “in Salonitano territurio.” The different nineteenth- and twentieth-century identifications of Anastasius’s burial place illustrate the flexibility with which scholars have used the passio to locate the saint at multiple distinct locales amid Salona’s ruins. Scholars took the ruins at Manastirine to be the remains of Asclepia’s villa when it was thought that that site was the setting for the events described in the passio. However, with the late nineteenth-century discovery at Marusinac of an epitaph that cited St. Anastasius’s thresh-old, the matron’s and the saint’s tomb were surmised to be among the ruins there, and the question became only one of determining which of the mausolea excavated at the site best fit the bill. Each of these modern attributions attempts to map a devotional text, which itself only gestures broadly toward Salona’s extraurban topography, onto particular struc-tures of a specific architectural complex. This historiography reveals that the assertions about the location of St. Anastasius’s tomb have been made with a certainty that is out of proportion with both the state of knowl-edge of the archaeological data and the topographical indications of the hagiographical evidence.

The late antique and medieval history of Anastasius’s cult also attests to contestation over the location of his remains. Indeed, separate traditions located the saint’s relics at Rome and/or at Split. Reading between the hagiographical lines suggests that the argument may have been more about securing local legitimacy of the cult than describing a specific topographic reality. In other words, what if the hagiographic account was less descrip-tive than constructive of cultic histories? It might then be possible for us to recognize in the text and its reception evidence for multiple separate claims for the local-ness of the saint’s cult. The oldest surviving recension of the text, the date of which is uncertain but may be as recent as the tenth century, as well as later embellished versions, speak to the pressing need to locate the body and cult of St. Anastasius at Salona—yet at that time, we must not forget, his remains were most certainly no longer there.84

By the mid-seventh century, after the Slavic incursions, Salona was an abandoned ruin. Its population had fled to the nearby islands or taken refuge within the protective walls of Diocletian’s former palace at nearby


85. On the date of the destruction of Salona, which recent scholarship places in the mid-620s or 630s c.e., see Ivan Marovic;, “O godini razorenja Salone [Reflexions about the Year of the Destruction of Salona],” Vjesnik za arheologiju i povijest dalma-tinsku 99 (2006): 253–73 (with English summary at 273); and N. Jašic;, “Constantine Porphyrogenitus as Source for the Destruction of Salona,” Vjesnik za arheologiju i historiju dalmatinsku 77 (1984): 315–26.

86. On the dating of the mid-seventh-century and later portions of the Liber pontificalis, see Raymond Davis, The Book of the Pontiffs (Liber Pontificalis): The Ancient Biographies of the First Ninety Roman Bishops (Liverpool: Liverpool Uni-versity Press, 1989), xxxvii–viii.

87. Historia Salonitanorum atque Spalatinorum pontificum, XI–XII (ed. János M. Bak et al., Thomae archidiaconi Spalatensis. Historia Salonitanorum atque Spalatino-rum pontificum. Archdeacon Thomas of Split. History of the Bishops of Salona and Split [Budapest: Central European University Press, 2006], 52–57). Rendic;-Mioc=evic;, “Anastasio ‘Aquileiese’,” 328; Zeiller, Origines chrétiennes, 57–58; Saxer “Saints de Salone,” 306.

88. Conc. Spalatense can. 1; De adm. imp. 29. Both sources are quoted and dis-cussed by Saxer (“Saints de Salone,” 301–7), who thinks it likely that the surviving redaction of the 925 c.e. council canon belongs to the eleventh century.

89. Bulic;, “I Ss. Anastasio e Dojmo,” 122–23.

Spalatum (Split).85 Moreover, the apparently contemporary entry for the papacy of John IV (640–42 c.e.) in the Liber pontificalis testifies that the pope translated the relics of St. Anastasius along with other Dalmatian saints to Rome where he had them installed in the church he built to house them, adorned with the images of the cohort examined above (Fig. 2), adjacent to the Lateral baptistery.86

John IV’s mid-seventh-century translation of relics to Rome was not, however, the only reported instance of Anastasius’s remains leaving Salona. The thirteenth-century History of the Bishops of Salona and Split by Arch-deacon Thomas of Split includes a chapter on the translation of relics from Salona to nearby Split. According to the History, John of Ravenna, reported to be the first archbishop of Spalatum, converted a portion of Diocletian’s former palace into his cathedral and ordered the translation of the body of St. Domnius (whom this author distinguishes from St. Domnio) from Salona. But the relic-gathering mission into Salona’s ruins resulted in the discovery of two relic-filled sarcophagi, those of St. Domnius and St. Anas-tasius, both of which were taken to the new archbishop’s church in Split.87 The presence of the relics of the two saints in the Spalatum cathedral is also attested by two earlier sources: a canon of the church council held in Split in 925, and Constantine VII Porphyrogennetos’s De administrando imperio of the middle of the same century.88 The two sarcophagi flank the altar and remain the focus of veneration of the two martyrs to this day.89

Scholars have attempted to reconcile the contradictory claims that the


90. Jelic;, “S. Anastasio Fullone,” esp. 97. On the sources for the traditions of the two Salonitan Anastasii, see above n. 34.

91. Zeiller, Origines chrétiennes, 58–77.92. On the larger phenomenon, see P. Geary, “Sacred Commodities: The Circula-

tion of Medieval Relics,” in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Per-spective, ed. A. Appadurai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 169–91; P. Geary, Furta Sacra: Thefts of Relics in the Central Middle Ages, rev. ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990); for the Dalmatian cults, see Trpimir Vedriš, “Martyrs, Relics, and Bishops: Representations of the City in Dalmatian Translation Legends,” Hortus Artium Medievalium 12 (2006): 175–86.

93. “Saints de Salone,” esp. 302–3.

saints’ remains rest both in Rome and in Split through various means: by arguing for the existence of two saints of the same two names, one of each in each city (e.g., Anastasius the fuller in Rome and Anastasius the cornicularius in Split, based on the disagreement in the hagiographic sources of the saint’s profession);90 by conceding that the pope’s exporta-tion of the relics was only partially carried out and left a portion of the two saints’ corpses for the Spalatum mission to retrieve; or, finally by denying the church of Spalatum’s claims to Anastasius’s authentic remains altogether.91 Yet we are also now accustomed to viewing saints’ narratives from a political perspective and to analyzing the roles they could serve in an environment of competing urban communities.92 Victor Saxer, for example, has pointed out the political weight of the tenth-/eleventh-century declarations of Spalatum’s possession of Sts. Domnius and Anastasius, in particular of the claim of primacy, via Domnius back all the way to St. Peter, that it afforded the church of Spalatum.93 Likewise, we should con-sider the contemporary rhetorical value of the hagiographic texts on which so much topographical and archaeological interpretation of Anastasius’s cult has depended. How might the translation of Anastasius’s remains in the mid-seventh century and claims for his cult that perhaps stretched even earlier have affected the kinds of medieval narratives told about the earliest history of his cult?

Though the passio of St. Anastasius purports to describe the death of the martyr under Diocletian in the beginning of the fourth century, since the oldest surviving recension appears in a manuscript dating perhaps some six centuries later, it is not unreasonable to posit that the text was to some extent wrapped up in post-fourth-century jockeying over the saint’s iden-tity and the location of his bones. Indeed, it is telling that connections and competition between communities over the saint are embedded within the text itself: the passio narrative both forges links to and distinguishes Salona from the nearby Christian center of Aquileia and another potential site of


94. It has been suggested that the “Afri” of the text resulted from a confusion with “Pharia,” an old name for Hvar-Lesina, one of the nearby islands off the Dalmatian coast (Zeiller, Origines chrétiennes, 61; cf. Egger, “Die Passio,” 141). Egger argues that the “portionem martyris” taken by the Africans refers to the stone with which he was martyred (“Die Passio,” 138).

Anastasius’s cult. In fact, though earlier twentieth-century commentators have looked at the text primarily as a window onto Salona’s archaeologi-cal remains, it actually narrates the foundation of three different cult cen-ters of the saint in three different locales, culminating in that at Salona. Anastasius, the passio relates, was a fuller from Aquileia, who moved to Salona and made public declaration of his Christianity there. According to the text, he was martyred under Diocletian (whose palace, not coinci-dentally, formed the architectural infrastructure of early medieval Split) by drowning in the sea weighed down by a large stone. The narrator then relates how the Salonitan woman Aesclepia sent her servants to retrieve his body, but this tale of inventio is far from a straightforward discovery of a previously unrecognized tomb. The story is rather one of verbal alterca-tion in which Asclepia’s men had to procure the corpse from another band who was already in the very act of taking it up. After the Salonitans used a “sacred trick” (sanctam calumniam) to accuse this rival group, whom the text calls merely “Africans,” of being murderers, the foreigners ultimately gave up the body (or perhaps merely a part of it: portionem martyris . . . sustulerunt).94 Asclepia’s servants then returned with it to Salona where, as we have already noted, the pious woman is said to have buried it. The text relates, however, that the “Africans” retained possession of the stone with which St. Anastasius had been martyred, and “they carried it back to their country and a basilica was built in his name” (et illum lapidem portaverunt in patriam suam et basilica in nomine eius facta est).

Thus the passio attests to three cult sites of St. Anastasius. The descrip-tion of the oratory in the Aquileian fuller shop and the incident of the contest over the saint’s body appear to have been included both to connect these related cult places and to demonstrate Salona’s superiority to them. Anastasius’s primary cult is to be found at Salona, the text assures its audi-ence, not Aquileia or Africa. The narrator solidifies Salona’s claim with the weight of three hagiographic “proofs”: it was in Salona that Anastasius professed his faith, it was the Christian community from there who cared for his remains, and, most importantly, it was there that his corpse was buried. If, as seems possible, some version of this story circulated before the mid-seventh century when the pope’s translation of Anastasius’s relics occurred, it would have bolstered Salona’s claim to the saint. During late


95. See Kate Cooper, “The Martyr, the Matrona and the Bishop: The Matron Lucina and the Politics of Martyr Cult in Fifth- and Sixth-Century Rome,” Early Medieval Europe 8 (1999): 297–317; Felice Lifshitz, “The Martyr, the Tomb, and the Matron: Constructing the (Masculine) ‘Past’ as a Female Power Base,” in Medieval Concepts of the Past: Ritual, Memory, Historiography, ed. P. Geary, G. Althoff, and J. Fried (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 311–41; Nicola Denzy, The Bone

antiquity, the need to underscore a local Salonitan identity for Anastasius may have been seen as particularly pressing since the city could claim to be neither the saint’s birthplace (Aquileia) nor house the sole sanctuary dedicated to him (Aquileia’s oratory in the saint’s former shop and the basilica in “Africa” possessing the instrument of his martyrdom). More-over, in a post-mid-seventh-century world, after the saint’s body had been removed, such a description of the Salonitan heritage of the saint’s cult would have underscored a “golden age” of martyrs and pious Christian followers. This history would have served as a source of local pride and identity for Salona and thus by extension also for her descendants in nearby Spalatum who in the Middle Ages claimed possession of Anasta-sius’s body in their cathedral.

Yet another element in the passio speaks to the desire to elevate and pro-mote the local cult of St. Anastasius over claims by other Christian centers, namely, the motif of the matron undertaker. Within the corpus of tales of male martyrs’ deaths, the appearance of an aristocratic woman to take up the body and provide it a proper Christian burial is a commonplace. In fact, there are a number of features of the legend of St. Anastasius’s burial that draw on cherished hagiographic topoi. The recovery of the male saint’s body by a pious Christian matron, her translation of the corpse, the burial of it on her private property, and the narrative of the tomb site as etiology for the subsequent holy place are all common tropes. The appearance in the text of a wealthy woman such as Asclepia to care for St. Anastasius’s body and provide him proper burial on her own property would likely have been familiar, perhaps even predictable, to the text’s audience. These elements would have resonated, and placed Salona’s Asclepia in the league of similarly heroic matrons. The passio made the local Asclepia a peer of pious undertaker women such as Pompeiana who buried St. Maximilian in Carthage (and who was said to have been rewarded by her own sub-sequent burial near the saint), Catula who recovered the remains of St. Dionysus (Denis) and buried them outside Paris, Lucilla whom Damasus credits with burying Roman martyrs Peter and Marcellinus, and, perhaps most famously, Lucina who buried Roman saints Sebastian and Bishop Cornelius.95 The parallels between Asclepia (and St. Anastaius and Salona)


Gatherers: The Lost Worlds of Early Christian Women (Boston: Beacon Press, 2007), esp. xi–xv; Lisa Bitel, Landscape with Two Saints: How Genovefa of Paris and Brigit of Kildare Built Christianity in Barbarian Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), esp. 59; and more broadly, Carolyn Osiek, “Roman and Christian Burial Practices and the Patronage of Women,” in Commemorating the Dead: Texts and Artifacts in Context: Studies of Roman, Jewish, and Christian Burials, ed. L. Brink and D. Green (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2008), 243–70.

96. Cooper, “The Martyr, the Matrona and the Bishop,” 300.97. Other scholars have also urged similar caution; see, e.g., Saxer, Saints de Salone,

and Gauthier et al., Salona IV, 1:103.

with these other matrons (and saints and cities) are unlikely to have been purely accidental. Instead, the congruencies suggest that elements of St. Anastasius’s passio, especially his burial, were crafted so as to conform to patterns of the literary genre and thereby legitimate and elevate his cult. We should at least be open to the possibility that, as a formulaic element, a historical matron Asclepia may never existed at all, that she could have been as much a “pious fiction” as it has been suggested that her parallel characters in other hagiographic texts were.96 At the minimum, it seems fair to say that, if such a figure did actually exist, her role in promoting St. Anastasius’s cult was described in the passio with other narratives of cult foundation in mind. Either way, the standardized narrative elements must be acknowledged by any attempt to use such texts to explain specific material archaeological remains, such as the identification of the patron, chronology, and burials of Marusinac’s mausoleum L.

I would suggest, therefore, that we need to be more cautious than has often been the case about taking the passio as the direct, historical tes-timony about the martyr’s burial that it purports to be.97 This certainly doesn’t mean that the hagiographic text is inconsequential or irrelevant as a historical source. Rather, it suggests, as I have argued above, that there was an explicit attempt to elevate and legitimize the local cult of St. Anastasius through multiple hagiographic mechanisms, which included testifying to the antiquity of the cult, bolstering the credibility of the nar-rative by shaping it in familiar generic terms, and situating the tale within the local landscape.

It is not necessary to map the passio’s story literally onto Anastasius’s cult site at Marusinac in order to hypothesize that these sorts of mechanisms could also have been at play in the late antique crafting of that physical environment. Mausoleum L, for example, need not have been the family tomb of someone named Asclepia, as many modern readers of the passio would have it, to have conferred an important sense of the site’s venerable


age. That is, even if the tradition of St. Anastasius’s burial as we know it was not historically accurate in all its particulars, and even if it did not yet exist when the church complex was built in the fifth century, the incor-poration of an old and clearly elite freestanding burial structure into the ecclesiastical complex likely conferred an aura of antiquity and legitimacy to the site. In this sense, the mausoleum could have functioned much as the incorporation of spoliated architectural elements did at other early Christian sites. The mausoleum, in other words, need not have originally been Asclepia’s tomb or the grave of the martyr to have been important to the church.

Going one step further, it may even have been possible that the eccle-siastical landscape played a part in shaping the hagiography rather than the other way around. Visible remains of generations-old walls, such as those of the preexisting mausoleum L, could have been identified as having once belonged to the estate of a historical or embellished matron Asclepia through a process of pious backdating and legend foundation. In such a scenario, instead of the saint’s story describing known truths about the landscape, the built environment would serve as one source of narrative inspiration. Hagiographic accounts would then wield the power to inflect the landscape with additional sacrality by fixing details of martyrologi-cal narratives onto perceptible topographic features. Once the passio had outlined the “backstory” of how the mausoleum came to be, the architec-ture at the site would have appeared to provide material evidence for the presence of the saint’s relics there and thereby legitimated the veracity of the hagiographic account. According to such a reading, the passio would not document early fourth-century events but would offer an idealized picture of that time for a significantly later age.

There is no more (and no less) archaeological evidence to support these hypothetical scenarios than for the standard interpretation that uses the passio to identify mausoleum L as both the burial place of the saint and patroness, and the originating seed out of which the Marusinac complex grew. Nevertheless, the fact that the origin story of St. Anastasius’s cult place conforms so comfortably to late antique narrative patterns renders it problematic as a source for interpreting material realia from the site. That said, we don’t need the passio to be “true” about Ascpelia, her burial of St. Anastasius, and what has been presumed to be the location of their original tombs in order to hypothesize a credible narrative of develop-ment at the Marusinac site in which the old and impressive buttressed mausoleum plays an important role in shaping the perception and status of the saint’s cult.


98. On the date of the church’s construction, see Duval and Marin, Salona III, 645–46.

99. Egger, Altchristliche Friedhof Manastirine, 41.100. By 1951 Dyggve already began to call into question the idea of martyrs hav-

ing been buried in private villas (History of Salonitan Christianity, 75). On Duval and Marin’s more comprehensive case against Egger’s Landhaus hypothesis, see n. 106 below.

101. Egger provides the first full description and the first diagrams of the tomb, but his reading is flawed, as Duval and Marin have noted, by the a priori identification of St. Domnio’s tomb at the lowest level (Salona III, 414–17). Duval and Marin are skeptical of the identification and prefer to see the installation of Domnio’s corpse as a second phase, i.e. that his body was placed in a pre-existing tomb (Salona III, 420–22). In their conclusions, however, they admit the likelihood of Domnio’s tomb as the motivation for the concentration of Christian tombs nearby (Salona III, 634–35).

102. N. Duval, “Mensae funéraires de Sirmium et de Salone,” Vjesnik za arheo-logiju i historiju dalmatinsku 77 (1984): 205–6; N. Duval and E. Marin, “Encore les ‘cinq martyrs’ de Salone: un temoignage epigraphique desormais bien etabli,” Memo-riam sanctorum venerantes. Miscellanea in onore di Monsignor Victor Saxer (Città del Vaticano: Pontificio Istituto di Archeologia Cristiana, 1992), 285–307; Gauthier et al., Salona IV, 1:259–62.

MANASTIRINE

The site of Manastirine, Salona’s most thoroughly excavated and exten-sively published funerary basilica, has also frequently been read through the relatively straightforward course of the martyrium model’s evolutionary progression. Here, again in the midst of a pre-existing cemetery, one tomb is understood to have set in motion a chain of monumentalizing actions that culminated in the construction of the large, three-aisled basilica in the mid-fifth century.98 Though there is no corresponding passio of the martyr Domnio surviving, in his excavation report, Egger posited that the saint was buried, as Anastasius had been according to his own passio, by a wealthy Christian family on private property.99 He identified the earli-est walls he found, therefore, as belonging to a building on this private estate, what he called the Landhaus.100 Tomb O, identified by Egger as the probable burial site of patron saint Domnio, bishop of Salona martyred under Diocletian, was understood to have subsequently attracted a ring of ad sanctos tombs and family mausolea (Fig. 14).101 The tomb itself, dis-covered in 1874, contains three tiers of burials below ground with a later construction (labeled Roman numeral “I” on Fig. 15) built above ground. Incorporated into this later construction were fragments of an inscribed mensa table (Fig. 16), one of which preserves most of the first four letters of Domnio’s name and serves as the basis for the attribution of the site.102 The ad sanctos burials closest to the holy grave belong to fellow bishops,


103. Marin “L’inhumation privilégiée à Salone,” 223–24; Duval “Mensae funé-raires,” 205–18; Gauthier et al., Salona IV, 1:262–65, 268–72; 2:799–802, 830–32; and see n. 113 below.

104. Summary in Duval and Marin, Salona III, 620–45. Long before the recent excavations at Manastirine, N. Duval convincingly argued for the private funerary function of the apsed mausolea, which had been called “chapels” by the original excavator (Egger, Altchristliche Friedhof Manastirine): N. Duval, “Réflexions sur l’architecture à plan rayonnant et ses rapports avec le culte des martyrs à propos de Manastirine (Salone), de Kelibia et d’Uppenna (Tunisie),” in Disputationes Salonita-nae 1970 (Split, AM: 1975), 83–90.

105. Duval and Marin, Salona III, 646–48.106. For a summary of the arguments against Egger’s Landhaus thesis, see Duval

and Marin, Salona III, 624–28. The eastern apse clearly belongs to the construction of the church and the pair of apses on the west side belong to a string of private mausolea predating the church (mausolea III and II) (Duval and Marin, Salona III, 629–32, 642–45).

107. Duval and Marin, Salona III, 552. There is a chance that mausoleum IV is contemporary with the area since its west wall seems to be a continuation of the west wall of the area enclosure; the mausoleum’s eastern wall, however, is clearly later than the area (Salona III, 557, 633).

as several fragmentary inscriptions from these tombs attest.103 An enclosed funerary area to the east accommodated more humble individuals, while more prominent figures or families were housed in adjacent monumental mausolea (see Fig. 14).104 The church constructed according to Egger in the 430s c.e., having apparently been executed in a single phase (apart from minor transformations of the narthex and the addition of a solea in the sixth century), was situated such that the row of privileged tombs adjoin-ing Domnio’s grave lay under the southern side of the transept. The altar was elevated on a platform erected over a group of other earlier burials in front of the apse (Figs. 14 and 17).105

The recent excavations published in 2000 have importantly decon-structed several elements of Egger’s traditional narrative of this site and encourage a rethinking of some of the mechanisms of the site’s develop-ment. The earlier excavators’ notions of an imperial period villa on the site (Egger’s Landhaus) have now been definitively refuted, as has Egger and Dyggve’s reconstruction of the first Christian edifice, an enclosed struc-ture with three apses and an internal court.106 The walled funerary area presents another interpretative challenge. While it apparently precedes the construction of all of the individual mausolea, the excavators state that it should logically post-date the installation of St. Domnio in tomb O in the first half of the fourth century (see Fig. 14).107 Yet not only do we lack firm dating criteria for the earliest phase of burials in the area, we cannot be absolutely sure that it was always Christian, though it appears that it was


108. Duval and Marin, Salona III, 634. The authors note that it is difficult to deter-mine which tombs within the enclosure are contemporary with it and which added later; they also indicate that the evidence does not allow us to conclude whether the funerary area was even Christian (Salona III, 634). Gauthier et al. draw particular attention to the sarcophagus from ca. 320 c.e. inscribed with a threat of a fine for tomb violators payable to the church (in Salona IV, 1:10–12; 2:750–53). B. Brenk argues that the form of the sub-divo burial area only makes sense in a Christian con-text: “II,” in B. Brenk and J. Dresken-Weiland, “Zwei Berichte über die Entwicklung des Martyrerkultus in Manastirine (Salona),” Antiquité tardive 9 (2001): 390. Cf. N. Duval’s response to this point, “III. Quelques précisions sur les réalités architecturales et l’évolution du culte et une question de méthode,” in B. Brenk and J. Dresken-Weiland, “Zwei Berichte über die Entwicklung des Martyrerkultus in Manastirine (Salona),”

Fig. 14. Manastirine, plan showing all phases superimposed (source: N. Duval and E. Marin, ed., Salona III: Recherches archéologiques franco-croates à Salone. Manastirine: Établissement préromain, nécropole et basilique paléo-chrétienne à Salone, Collection de l’École française de Rome 194/3 [Rome and Split: École française de Rome, 2000], 639, fig. 246; © EFR, Rome, 2000).

by about the 320s c.e.108 Moreover, regardless of the chronology, the area can hardly be characterized as organized around the site of the tomb O; rather it takes the form of an autonomous burial enclosure, cordoned off so as to separate the burials within from the other tombs in the cem-


Antiquité tardive 9 (2001): 395. Though he does not discuss the Salona case, Éric Rebillard’s research offers an important caution against too readily identifying mixed or familial burial zones as Christian cemeteries (especially The Care of the Dead in Late Antiquity, trans. Elizabeth Trapnell Tawlings and Jeanine Routier-Pucci [Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009], 1–26).

109. On Roman burial enclosures in general, see H. von Hesberg, Römische Grab-bauten (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1992), 57–72; on funerary enclosures and collective tombs as a means of shaping family and other group iden-tity, see A. M. Yasin, Saints and Church Spaces in the Late Antique Mediterranean: Architecture, Cult, and Community (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 46–100 (with additional bibliography), and A. M. Yasin, “Funerary Monuments and Collective Identity: From Roman Family to Christian Community,” The Art Bulletin 87 (2005): 433–47.

110. Duval and Marin, Salona III, 554–79, 638–40.

etery.109 Second, the new analysis of the archaeological remains has clari-fied the order of construction of the individual mausolea: mausoleum IV is definitely the earliest, built sometime shortly after ca. 330–40 c.e., and apparently followed by VI, then V.110 For these constructions too there is

Fig. 15. Manastirine, plan, elevation, and perspectival reconstruction diagrams of Tomb O (source: R. Egger, ed., Der altchristliche Friedhof Manastirine, Forschungen in Salona 2 [Wien: Druck und Verlag der Österreichischen Staatsdruckerei, 1926], left: p. 11, fig. 8 [=ÖAI Inv. Nr. 979/6]; right: p. 12, fig. 10 [=ÖAI Inv. Nr. 979/2]; reproduced by permission of the Österreichisches Archäologisches Institut).


111. On the order of these mausolea, see Duval and Marin, Salona III, 506–32, 634–36, 638–45. Duval and Marin note that mausolea VIII and VII are contempo-rary to one another, and that X, III, and II seem to have been constructed in a single building campaign with X definitely post-dating its neighbor VII, but the chronologi-cal relation with III to the southwest, which was destroyed by the later construction of the church, is somewhat unclear (Duval and Marin, Salona III, 642).

not necessarily any direct relation to tomb O. Instead, these earliest mau-solea were literally built onto the pre-existing area and clearly arranged immediately around that earlier structure.

Similarly, most of the subsequent mausolea, beginning with the paired set VIII and VII built off the west wall of number IV, are obviously aggluti-native in their structure (Figs. 14 and 18).111 Thus while burial in the same geographic zone as the saints may have been appealing (one inscription of ca. 375 c.e. explicitly indicates the deceased’s association with or proximity

Fig. 16. Reconstructed fragments of mensa carrying inscription of “Domn[ius]” from later construction over Tomb O, Split Archaeological Museum, Inv. Nr. A 567 AH (photo: A. M. Yasin; reproduced by permission of the Arheološki Muzej, Split).


112. The inscribed sarcophagus states that the deceased, the woman Honorata, “martyribus adscita cluet” (Gauthier et al., Salona IV, no. 159, 1:401–4). Another much later inscription, found outside the eastern apse of the church, calls attention to its location amid saints’ graves in the sixth century: “[. . . han]c arcellam / mihi condedi ad medianus / martures” (Gauthier et al., Salona IV, no. 612, 2:982–84).

to martyrs),112 it is not obvious that the mausolea’s position was dictated exclusively by an attraction to tomb O as a traditional ad sanctos reading would suggest, rather than an association (whether practical, ideological, or both) with the preceding structures against whose walls they were built. Likewise, it is possible to see the collection of bishops’ tombs immediately north of tomb O as a type of “attraction of kind,” perhaps reflecting desire for burial adjacent to the martyr, but also conceivably expressing a wish to associate one’s tomb with others of the same class—to incorporate oneself, in other words, into the community of bishops by adding one’s

Fig. 17. Manastirine, reconstruction drawing of altar and monument over Tomb O (behind which celebrant stands) (source: N. Duval and E. Marin, ed., Salona III: Recherches archéologiques franco-croates à Salone. Manastirine: Établissement préromain, nécropole et basilique paléochrétienne à Salone, Collection de l’École française de Rome 194/3 [Rome and Split: École française de Rome, 2000], 353, fig. 159b; © EFR, Rome, 2000).


113. It is nevertheless important to acknowledge the hypothetical nature of the attributions of several of these tombs. With the exception of tomb “A” identified by an inscribed sarcophagus as belonging to the bishop Primus, also commemorated as the nephew of Domnio, and tomb “D” of one Gaianus (see n. 116 below), inscription fragments cannot be definitively matched to specific tombs (Duval and Marin, Salona III, 433–48). See also Saxer, “Saints de Salone,” 299–300; Marin, “L’inhumation privilégiée à Salone,” 223–24; Duval, “Mensae funéraires,” 205–18; Duval, “Culte des martyrs de Salone,” 451–52. On the special placement and clustering of clerical tombs in early Christian burial churches, see Yasin, Saints and Church Spaces, 94–97.

114. Brenk, “II,” 391. See also Gauthier et al., Salona IV, 2:830–32.

grave to the row of venerable office holders.113 Indeed, as Beat Brenk has noted, the location of the earliest of the presumed ad sanctos burials, that of Bishop Primus, whose sarcophagus identifies him as “nepos Domnio-nis martores,” may have been chosen because of the familial bond rather than as expression of any broader spiritual significance.114

Finally, if the evolutionary martyrium narrative were to have been strictly followed at this site it would seem odd that when the church was built, theoretically at the culminating moment of the monumentalizing narra-tive, the structure relegated the holy tomb of the martyr to the southern

Fig. 18. Manastirine, funerary mausolea VI, IV and VIII (from left to right) seen from north. Note that the walls of mausoleum IV (in center) abut enclosure wall of earlier area, and are abutted by the later wall of mausoleum VIII (on right) (Photo: A. M. Yasin).


115. For the platform, see Duval and Marin, Salona III, 353, 647.116. Of the three sarcophagi located directly before the apse above which the altar

was most likely erected, only one is certainly identified by an inscription (no. 153), and it commemorates the burial of Gaianus, probably not the martyr, but the bishop who held office 381–91 c.e. (Marin, “L’inhumation privilégiée à Salone,” 223–24; Gauthier et al., Salona IV, 2:799–802). Brenk also notes the unexpected arrangement centered not on Domnio’s tomb but those of later bishops (“II,” 390).

end of the so-called transept rather than centering it (Fig. 14). Instead it is highly significant that the basilica was focused on the group of later tombs before the apse, at least one of which certainly belonged to a bishop whose inscribed sarcophagus was found in situ. Indeed, the structure collectively monumentalized these graves by elevating a 3 m square masonry platform directly above them, which is thought to have served as the church’s altar (Fig. 17).115 This arrangement could, in other words, point more to the importance of the lineage of the local clergy than to the eschatological influence of the supposed saint’s tomb.116 Taking into account the relative chronologies of individual features, the results of recent excavations at Manastirine thus do less to substantiate the conventional developmental model of burial and monumentalization than to demonstrate the popu-larity of burial near preexisting tombs in order to capitalize on the caché of earlier monuments.

CONCLUSION

This investigation of Salona’s three primary Christian burial complexes has sought to challenge the traditional reading of archaeological evidence from these sites. Our re-examination of the archaeological and textual sources for the late antique saints’ cults has revealed just how little firm evidence there is to support the conventional histories of architectural development at the extraurban shrines. These findings are all the more significant given the primacy that Salona has played in scholarship on late antique saints’ cults. If my analysis is correct, the interpretation of three of the principal sites, on which the evolutionary model of martyrium development heavily rests, appears far less clearly monolithic. Both the stability and the explana-tory force of model itself, therefore, are called into question.

Moreover, not only does the conventional model for martyrium evolu-tion provide an overly confident and homogeneous picture of cult devel-opment, it also narrows the range of inquiry to a single trajectory. Because the model cannot account for anomalous aspects of the sites, it steers investigation away from them. Yet, as we have seen, evidence from each


of Salona’s churches offers hints at other possible alternative explanations for developments that have as much to do with social status and influence as religious piety. The archaeological and hagiographic sources also pres-ent compelling issues that fall outside the conventional explanation for the growth of martyria altogether. Deconstruction of the model provides a new critical position from which to examine well-known sites afresh and to explore new directions of investigation. Only through the further test-ing of the narrative against evidence from a broad range of late antique Christian cult sites will it be possible to come to a more accurate picture of the diverse manifestations of saint veneration in late antique commu-nities and of the mechanisms driving architectural, religious, and cultural transformations witnessed throughout the early Christian world.

Ann Marie yasin is Associate Professor of Classics and Art History at the university of Southern California in Los Angeles, California

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Reassessing Salona's Churches: Martyrium Evolution in Question

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