Pope Saint Anterus: The Nineteenth Pope, a Forty-Day Reign, and the Greek Tombstone That Outlived His Legend

The nineteenth in a series on the popes.

For most of the first three centuries the bishops of Rome are little more than a column of names and a column of dates. The men are real; the evidence is thin. We have Eusebius counting off the years of each episcopate, a sixth-century book of legends, a scatter of hostile witnesses—and, almost never, anything the pope himself touched. The tombs are lost, the inscriptions broken up for lime, the bodies moved and moved again. Anterus, the nineteenth pope, reigned for about forty days, which is to say he did very little that history could record and left less. And yet he is the first pope in this series whose own tombstone survived to be read by modern eyes. When the great archaeologist de Rossi crawled into the Crypt of the Popes on the Appian Way in 1854, the broken Greek slab that had closed Anterus’s grave was still there, and one word on it was still legible. The word was bishop. It was not martyr.⁠¹

That single surviving word is the whole difficulty of Anterus in miniature. For the Church would spend the next fifteen centuries commemorating him as a martyr, and the oldest evidence we possess—the stone he was buried under, and the calendar his own city kept—never called him one. The nineteenth pope is a small study in the distance between a record and a legend: forty days that produced almost no history, a tomb that produced a great deal of it, and a piece of marble that quietly disagrees with the story later told about the man beneath it.

This is the nineteenth pope in my series on the popes. The series has so far worked its way to the sixteenth, Callixtus; I leap ahead here—past Urban I and Pontian, the seventeenth and eighteenth, still to come—because Anterus, alone among the near-anonymous popes of the mid-third century, left the thing none of his predecessors did, and the thing turns out to be worth taking out of turn.

A Papacy Born of the First Abdication

To understand Anterus’s forty days one has to understand the weeks before them, which belonged to a persecution and to the first resignation in the history of the papacy.

In 235 the emperor Severus Alexander was murdered by his own troops, and the throne passed to Maximinus, called the Thracian—a soldier-emperor with no love for his predecessor’s household, which had been notably friendly to Christians. Eusebius records the turn with unusual precision about its target. Maximinus, “on account of his hatred toward the household of Alexander, which contained many believers… began a persecution, commanding that only the rulers of the churches should be put to death, as responsible for the Gospel teaching.”⁠² This was not a general terror against the faithful in the streets. It was a decapitation strike aimed at leadership—precisely the sort of persecution that would fall first, and hardest, on the bishop of Rome.

It did. One of its earliest victims was Anterus’s predecessor, Pope Pontian, who together with his old antagonist Hippolytus—the brilliant rival of Callixtus, and by tradition the first antipope—was deported to the mines of Sardinia, the “unhealthy island” to which Rome sent men to die slowly.⁠³ And here the Roman church did something it had never done before. Rather than leave itself leaderless while its bishop languished in a mine from which no one returned, Pontian resigned. The Liberian Catalogue, the fourth-century papal king-list, marks the moment with a single stark verb: on the fourth day before the Kalends of October—28 September 235—Pontian discinctus est, “was ungirded,” divested of his office.⁠⁴ It is the first documented abdication of a pope: a full millennium before Celestine V, and more than seventeen centuries before Benedict XVI, a bishop of Rome laid the office down so that another could take it up.

Anterus was that other. He was ordained, the Liberian Catalogue says, on the eleventh day before the Kalends of December—21 November 235.⁠⁵ The gap of nearly eight weeks between Pontian’s resignation and Anterus’s election the sources do not explain; perhaps it took that long for word to travel and a vacancy to be certain under the conditions of a persecution. What the dates do make plain is the character of the moment. Anterus was not elected in a season of peace. He was elected into the teeth of the very persecution that had just carried off his predecessor—chosen, in effect, to stand in the place the emperor had marked for death. That fact will matter greatly when we come to ask how he died.

Forty Days

Of the reign itself there is almost nothing to say, because there is almost nothing to know. The ancient sources agree only on its brevity and disagree, mildly, on its exact length. Eusebius, writing within living memory of the century, says simply that Pontian “was succeeded by Anteros,” and that “after he had held the office for a month, Fabianus succeeded him.”⁠⁶ The Liberian Catalogue is more precise and slightly longer: one month and ten days. The Liber Pontificalis, later still, gives one month and twelve days. The old Catholic Encyclopedia rounds the whole matter off as “some forty days.”⁠⁷ Reckoned from 21 November 235 to his death on 3 January 236, the span comes to about six weeks; the frequently repeated “forty-three days” is a modern computation of the calendar, not a figure any ancient writer gives. The honest statement is the vague one: Anterus was pope for about six weeks in the dead of a Roman winter, in the middle of an imperial persecution, and then he died.

What he did with the six weeks is a blank the sources fill with a single, doubtful legend—to which we now turn, because it is the hinge on which everything about Anterus’s later reputation swings.

The Legend: Collector of the Martyrs’ Acts

The one deed tradition assigns to Anterus comes from the Liber Pontificalis, the “Book of the Popes,” a compilation whose earliest recension dates to the sixth century—roughly three hundred years after Anterus lived. Its notice reports that he was a Greek, the son of one Romulus; that he had the acts of the martyrs collected from the notaries and deposited in the church; and that he was crowned with martyrdom in consequence.⁠⁸ It is a tidy story—a pope who loved the memory of the martyrs so much that he became one himself—and for that very reason it should be handled with care, because tidy stories about obscure early popes are exactly what the Liber Pontificalis was in the habit of manufacturing.

The decisive objection is not external but internal. The Liber Pontificalis tells the same story three times, about three different popes. It credits the collection of the martyrs’ acts to Clement I, to Anterus, and to Fabian—assigning the same institution to a first-century pope, to a mid-third-century pope who reigned six weeks, and to the pope who followed him. Louise Ropes Loomis, whose 1916 translation put the Liber Pontificalis into readable English, saw the pattern plainly and warned her readers about it in the introduction: the author “has three early popes, Clement, Anteros and Fabianus, each make provision for the collection of facts regarding” the martyrs, and, she added, “Few of these statements can be accepted unless corroborated by outside testimony.”⁠⁹ When one institution is credited to three men across two centuries, it is not three facts. It is one legend, told thrice.

And of the three, only one telling is administratively coherent. Fabian, Anterus’s successor, reigned fourteen years in the long lull between the persecutions of Maximinus and Decius, and is independently and securely credited with the real reorganization of the Roman church: he divided the city into seven ecclesiastical regions, set a deacon over each, and appointed seven subdeacons to work with the notaries in gathering the records of the martyrs’ trials.⁠¹⁰ That is a plausible administrative program for a settled, fourteen-year pontificate in a time of peace. It is not a plausible program for a man who held the office for six weeks in the middle of a persecution that had just deported his predecessor to a mine. The old Catholic Encyclopedia notes drily that the Liber Pontificalis “ascribes this institution to both Clement I and Fabian, the latter being more probable,” and that the whole notion of a systematic first-century collection is “unattested in any early document.”⁠¹¹ The likeliest explanation is the simplest: the compiler took Fabian’s genuine, later reform and pushed it backward onto the near-anonymous predecessor, giving Anterus something to have done—and then, as we shall see, a reason to have died.

Was Anterus a Martyr?

Here is the heart of it, and it is worth being exact, because Anterus is one of the clearest small cases in early papal history of a pious tradition that the evidence does not support and that the Church herself eventually, quietly, let go.

The martyrdom rests on one witness and one witness only: the Liber Pontificalis, three centuries after the fact, which says Anterus was killed for having the martyrs’ acts collected. The old Catholic Encyclopedia, no enemy of papal tradition, states the scholarly verdict without flinching: the tradition “seems old and respectable; nevertheless the best scholars maintain that it is not sufficiently guaranteed by its sole voucher, the ‘Liber Pontificalis,’ on account, among other things, of the late date of that work’s compilation.”⁠¹² The New Catholic Encyclopedia is blunter still: “Its report that he was a martyr is untrustworthy.”⁠¹³

Against the one late witness stand three early ones, and they all point the other way.

The first is the Liberian Catalogue, drawn up around 354—within a century and a quarter of Anterus’s death, and the oldest papal chronology we possess. Its notice of Anterus reads: Antheros m. uno dies X. Dormit III non. Ian.—“Antherus, one month, ten days. He fell asleep on the third day before the Nones of January.”⁠¹⁴ The verb is dormit, “he sleeps”—the ordinary word for a natural death. It is not passus, “he suffered,” which is the word the very same document uses a few lines later for Anterus’s successor Fabian, who genuinely was martyred under Decius. The fourth-century Roman compiler had the vocabulary to mark a martyr, and he marked Fabian and did not mark Anterus. That is not an argument from silence. It is an argument from a deliberate distinction, made by a Roman source close to the events.

The second early witness is the Depositio Martyrum, the Roman church’s oldest martyr-calendar, preserved in the same Chronograph of 354. It lists the martyr-popes of the third century—Pontian is there, on 13 August; Fabian is there, on 20 January. Anterus is not there at all.⁠¹⁵ His predecessor and his successor both earned a place on the martyr-list of their own city; Anterus, buried between them in the same crypt, did not.

The third witness is the tombstone itself, and we will come to it in a moment.

The most telling evidence, though, is not ancient but modern—and it comes from the Church’s own liturgical books, which have changed their minds. The old Roman Martyrology, the Tridentine text used for centuries, entered Anterus under 3 January as a martyr: “At Rome, on the Appian Way, the birthday of Pope St. Anterus, who suffered under Julius Maximinus, and was buried in the cemetery of Callistus.”⁠¹⁶ The current Martyrologium Romanum, revised after the Second Vatican Council and promulgated in its second typical edition in 2004, records the same day and the same man with one pointed difference. It calls him only pope, and it speaks not of his passion but of his burial: “Rome, in the cemetery of Callistus on the Appian Way, the burial of Saint Antherus, pope, who, after Pontian the martyr, held the episcopate for a short time.”⁠¹⁷ The martyr title is gone. And it is gone from Anterus in the very sentence that still awards it to Pontian—“after Pontian the martyr.” The reviser had both words available and chose, for Anterus, the word the fourth-century stone had chosen first. The Church’s calendar, after fifteen hundred years, came back around to what the Liberian Catalogue said in 354: this pope fell asleep.

None of this is to deny that Anterus may well have suffered. He held the most dangerous office in the empire during an active persecution of exactly that office; men in his position did die for it, and his own predecessor had just been sent to the mines. It is entirely possible that he was worn down, imprisoned, or worse. The point is narrower and more honest: the specific story—that he was martyred for collecting the acts of the martyrs—is a late legend built on top of a doubtful legend, and the earliest evidence, including his own grave, declines to confirm it. What can be said is that he died in a persecution; what cannot be said, on the evidence, is that he died a martyr’s death, still less the particular death the Liber Pontificalis invented for him.

The Tombstone

Everything distinctive about Anterus comes down, in the end, to a broken piece of marble, and the story of its recovery is one of the great episodes of Christian archaeology.

By the middle of the nineteenth century the location of the ancient papal cemetery on the Via Appia—the coemeterium Callisti, the catacomb the deacon Callixtus had administered before he became pope—had been lost for a thousand years. In 1849 the young archaeologist Giovanni Battista de Rossi noticed a marble fragment reading NELIVS MARTYR built into a ruined structure above a vineyard on the Appian Way, and reasoned that it must read [COR]NELIVS MARTYR—the tomb of the martyr-pope Cornelius, which the old sources placed in the still-undiscovered cemetery of Callixtus. Pope Pius IX bought the vineyard; de Rossi excavated; and in 1854 he broke into a small underground chamber whose walls were lined with the graves and the shattered Greek epitaphs of the third-century popes. He had found what he called “the little Vatican,” the central monument of all the Christian cemeteries: the Crypt of the Popes.⁠¹⁸

It was the inscriptions that proved what the crypt was. On the broken slabs de Rossi read the names of pope after pope—Pontian, Anterus, Fabian, Lucius, Eutychian—cut in Greek, the language still used by the Roman church of the third century for its most solemn epitaphs. Matched against the Liber Pontificalis and the pilgrim itineraries and the Chronograph of 354, the names settled the identification beyond dispute. And among them, on the narrow oblong slab that had sealed his grave, were the broken remnants of the epitaph of Anterus. The old Catholic Encyclopedia describes the find exactly: de Rossi discovered “the site of his sepulchre… with some broken remnants of the Greek epitaph engraved on the narrow oblong slab that closed his tomb, an index at once of his origin and of the prevalence of Greek in the Roman Church” of the period.⁠¹⁹

Two things about that stone deserve to be said carefully, because they are easy to overstate and the truth is better than the overstatement.

The first is what the stone actually preserves. It is fragmentary; the name is partly restored by scholars from its position in the loculus and its place in the sequence of popes, and the reading of the Greek letters of the name itself—whether Anteros or the fuller Antheros—is not entirely settled. What is securely legible on the surviving marble is the title: the Greek word for bishop, ΕΠΙ, the opening of episkopos, cut beside the name.⁠²⁰ The original slabs of the popes are fixed to this day on the walls of the Crypt of the Popes, broken and incomplete, where any visitor to the Catacomb of San Callisto can see them.⁠²¹ And here the mute evidence rejoins the argument of the last section. The slabs of Pontian and Fabian in the same crypt name each man bishop and martyr—on Pontian’s, the martyr title added by a later hand. The slab of Anterus names only the bishop.⁠²² The stone says bishop. It never said more.

The second is Anterus’s place in the crypt. He was, in all likelihood, the first pope actually laid to rest in it. The chamber would become the official burial place of the third-century papacy, but Anterus’s is among the earliest interments—and possibly the earliest of all. His predecessor Pontian had died first, in exile on Sardinia, but Pontian’s body was not brought home until later, when Fabian had it exhumed from the island and translated to Rome; and Anterus’s other great predecessor, Zephyrinus, had been buried in a separate tomb above ground.⁠²³ So the man who reigned six weeks and left no history was, as it happens, the inaugural tenant of the papal necropolis—the first bishop of Rome to be gathered into the company of the popes at the place that would define papal burial for a century. His broken Greek stone is, by the same token, among the two or three oldest surviving papal tombstones in existence. It is a strange distinction for so brief a reign: to be remembered not for anything one did, but for being the first to be remembered in stone.

The Ghost of a Forged Decretal

One further attribution deserves a word, if only to be dismissed, because it shows how legend went on accreting around Anterus long after his death. Among the medieval collection of documents known as the False Decretals—a body of church-law texts forged in ninth-century Francia and passed off as the letters of the early popes—there is an “Epistle of Anterus” laying down rules for the translation of bishops from one see to another. It is a forgery, and a recognized one; the old Catholic Encyclopedia files it away with a citation to Hinschius’s edition of the Pseudo-Isidorian decretals and moves on.⁠²⁴ But it is worth noticing what the forger did. He took the one pope whose reign was too short to have left any real acts—a blank six weeks—and filled the blank with a document of his own composing, on a question of ninth-century church politics. Anterus, having little history of his own, became a convenient vessel for other men’s. The martyrdom, the martyr-acts, and the forged decretal are three deposits of the same process: a near-empty name accumulating the legends a later Church needed it to carry.

What We Can Actually Say

Strip Anterus to the load-bearing evidence and very little remains—but the little that remains is, in its way, more interesting than the legend that was built to cover the gap.

He was a Roman bishop, probably of Greek origin, ordained on 21 November 235 in the middle of Maximinus’s persecution, into a chair his predecessor had resigned rather than leave empty—the first papal abdication on record. He held the office about six weeks and died on 3 January 236. He was buried in the newly opened Crypt of the Popes on the Via Appia, quite possibly its first papal tenant, under a Greek slab that named him bishop and nothing more. His successor Fabian was chosen a week later, by the famous descent of a dove, and reigned fourteen years before dying a martyr under Decius.⁠²⁵ That is the record. It is short because the reign was short, and honest because there is nothing to add to it that the evidence will bear.

What the evidence does not support is the story that grew over it: that Anterus organized the collection of the martyrs’ acts—a project that belongs to Fabian—and that he was martyred for doing so—a death his own tombstone, his own city’s oldest calendar, and the near-contemporary Liberian Catalogue all decline to confirm. The Church, in her own good time, has come to say the same. Her current martyrology quietly dropped the martyr’s title the older books had given him and left him what the fourth-century stonecutter left him: a pope, who fell asleep, and was buried.

There is something fitting in it. Of all the popes in this series, Anterus did the least and left the most durable single trace—not a decree, not a doctrine, not a building, but a name in Greek on a broken slab, the first papal grave modern eyes were allowed to read. The stone has outlived every legend attached to it, and it goes on saying, against three hundred years of embellishment, exactly and only what is true: here lies a bishop of Rome. Nineteen popes into the story, that turns out to be enough to be going on with—and closer to the Gospel, perhaps, than the embellished martyrdom later laid over it. The man who is remembered chiefly for his tomb is a fair emblem of a Church whose oldest and surest witness has always been her dead.

Next in the series: Pope Saint Urban I, the seventeenth pope (coming soon).

Further Reading

For the early papacy generally: J. N. D. Kelly and Michael J. Walsh, The Oxford Dictionary of Popes, 2nd ed. (Oxford University Press, 2010), and Eamon Duffy, Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes, 4th ed. (Yale University Press, 2014). The indispensable primary sources for a pope of this era are the Liber Pontificalis, translated by Louise Ropes Loomis as The Book of the Popes (Columbia University Press, 1916), and the papal chronology, martyr-list, and bishop-list preserved in the Chronograph of 354, edited by Theodor Mommsen in the Chronica Minora (Berlin, 1892) and available in Roger Pearse’s online translation. On the discovery of the Crypt of the Popes and the papal epitaphs, the classic account is Giovanni Battista de Rossi, La Roma Sotterranea Cristiana (Rome, 1864–1877), adapted for English readers by J. Spencer Northcote and W. R. Brownlow, Roma Sotterranea (London, 1879). Eusebius’s brief notices are in the Ecclesiastical History, Book VI, translated by Arthur Cushman McGiffert in the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 2nd series, vol. 1 (1890).

This post is part of an ongoing series on the popes. You can read about Saint Peter, the first pope, Saint Linus, the second pope, Saint Anacletus, the third pope, Saint Clement, the fourth pope, Saint Evaristus, the fifth pope, Saint Alexander I, the sixth pope, Saint Sixtus I, the seventh pope, Saint Telesphorus, the eighth pope, Saint Hyginus, the ninth pope, Saint Pius I, the tenth pope, Saint Anicetus, the eleventh pope, Saint Soter, the twelfth pope, Saint Eleutherius, the thirteenth pope, Saint Victor I, the fourteenth pope, Saint Zephyrinus, the fifteenth pope, and Saint Callixtus I, the sixteenth pope.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was Pope Saint Anterus?

Anterus was the nineteenth Bishop of Rome counting Peter as first, reigning from 21 November 235 to 3 January 236—about six weeks, one of the shortest pontificates of the early Church. He was probably of Greek origin. He was elected during the persecution of the emperor Maximinus the Thracian, immediately after his predecessor Pontian resigned the office—the first documented papal abdication—having been deported to the mines of Sardinia. Almost nothing is known of what Anterus did in his brief reign; his lasting significance is that his is the first papal tomb inscription to survive, discovered in the Crypt of the Popes in 1854.

How long was Anterus pope?

About six weeks. The ancient sources give slightly different figures: Eusebius says he held the office “a month”; the fourth-century Liberian Catalogue says one month and ten days; the later Liber Pontificalis says one month and twelve days; and the old Catholic Encyclopedia rounds it to “some forty days.” Counting the calendar from his ordination on 21 November 235 to his death on 3 January 236 gives about forty-three days, but that precise number is a modern computation, not a figure any ancient source records.

Was Pope Anterus really a martyr?

The evidence says probably not, at least not in the way the legend claims. The martyrdom rests solely on the Liber Pontificalis, compiled about three centuries later, which says he was killed for having the acts of the martyrs collected. Three earlier sources point the other way: the Liberian Catalogue of 354 says he “fell asleep” (dormit), the natural-death word, rather than “suffered” (passus), the word it uses for the genuinely martyred Fabian; Anterus is absent from the oldest Roman martyr-list, the Depositio Martyrum, though Pontian and Fabian are both on it; and his surviving tombstone bears the title bishop with no martyr mark, unlike the slabs of Pontian and Fabian in the same crypt. Tellingly, the Church’s current (2004) Roman Martyrology dropped the martyr title, calling Anterus simply “pope” and recording his “burial.” He very likely suffered under the persecution, but the specific story of a martyr’s death for collecting the martyrs’ acts is a late legend the earliest evidence does not support.

What is Anterus known for?

His tomb, not his reign. Anterus is the first pope whose actual burial inscription survived to be read in modern times. When Giovanni Battista de Rossi identified the Crypt of the Popes in the Catacomb of Callixtus in 1854, he found the broken Greek slab that had sealed Anterus’s grave. Anterus was probably the first pope physically buried in that crypt—which became the official papal necropolis of the third century—so his epitaph is among the two or three oldest surviving papal tombstones in existence. The legend that he organized the collection of the martyrs’ acts is doubtful: the Liber Pontificalis credits the same project to Clement I and Fabian as well, and only Fabian’s version, part of his genuine reorganization of the Roman church, is historically secure.

Why did his tombstone matter so much?

Because it settled an identification and preserved a fact. The Greek epitaphs of the popes—Anterus’s among them—are what proved to de Rossi that the chamber he had found in 1854 was the lost papal crypt of the cemetery of Callixtus. And the surviving stone testifies, against the later legend, to what Anterus actually was: it is cut in Greek, an index of his origin and of the Greek still spoken in the Roman church of that era, and it names him only bishop—not martyr. The oldest evidence about Anterus is the marble he was buried under, and it says less than the legend but more than nothing: a bishop of Rome, laid in the ground on the Appian Way in the winter of 236.

Footnotes

1. 1. On the 1854 discovery of the Crypt of the Popes and the surviving Greek epitaph of Anterus, see Thomas J. Shahan, "Pope St. Anterus," in The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 1 (New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1907), NewAdvent.org, and the discussion at nn. 18–22 below. The observation that the legible portion of the slab preserves the title "bishop" and no martyr title is drawn out there.

2. 2. Eusebius, Historia Ecclesiastica VI.28, trans. Arthur Cushman McGiffert, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 2nd series, vol. 1 (1890). Available at NewAdvent.org. Quoted phrases verbatim. The persecution is generally read as political—aimed at the household and appointees of the murdered Severus Alexander—rather than doctrinal, which is why it fell on "the rulers of the churches."

3. 3. Johann Peter Kirsch, "Pope St. Pontian," in The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 12 (New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1911), NewAdvent.org: "One of its first victims was Pontian, who with Hippolytus was banished to the unhealthy island of Sardinia." On Hippolytus, Callixtus, and the Sardinian mines, see the Callixtus entry of this series.

4. 4. Liberian Catalogue (Catalogus Liberianus), in the Chronograph of 354: Theodor Mommsen, ed., Chronica Minora, vol. 1, MGH Auctores Antiquissimi 9 (Berlin, 1892); transcription and translation at Tertullian.org. The Pontian entry: "in eadem insula discinctus est IIII kal. Octobr." (28 September 235). Kirsch, "Pope St. Pontian," reads discinctus est as a formal resignation made so a new pope could be chosen while Pontian remained in exile.

5. 5. Liberian Catalogue, Pontian entry (continuing): "et loco eius ordinatus est Antheros XI kal. Dec. cons. ss." — Anterus ordained on the eleventh day before the Kalends of December, i.e., 21 November 235. Mommsen, Chronica Minora I; Tertullian.org.

6. 6. Eusebius, Historia Ecclesiastica VI.29.1, trans. McGiffert, NPNF 2nd series, vol. 1; NewAdvent.org. Eusebius mistakenly synchronizes the accession with the emperor Gordian (238), roughly three years late; the corrected date of 236 comes from the Liberian Catalogue, and McGiffert's note flags the error.

7. 7. Liberian Catalogue ("Antheros m. uno dies X"—one month, ten days), Mommsen, Chronica Minora I; Liber Pontificalis, "Anteros," in Louise Ropes Loomis, The Book of the Popes (Liber Pontificalis) (New York: Columbia University Press, 1916), 23 (one month and twelve days); Shahan, "Pope St. Anterus," Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 1 (1907) ("some forty days").

8. 8. Liber Pontificalis, "Anteros" (Loomis, The Book of the Popes, 23–24), which calls Anterus a Greek, son of Romulus; states that he had the acts of the martyrs collected from the notaries and deposited in the church; reports that he was crowned with martyrdom; and records his burial in the cemetery of Callixtus on the Via Appia on 3 January. The substance is corroborated by the Catholic Encyclopedia (Shahan) and the New Catholic Encyclopedia (Weltin); the earliest recension of the Liber Pontificalis dates to the first half of the sixth century. Loomis and the Liber Pontificalis number Anterus the twentieth pope; counting conventions for the earliest bishops differ, and the modern Petrine count followed here makes him the nineteenth.

9. 9. Loomis, The Book of the Popes, Introduction, xvii–xviii: "Our author seems to have felt a special ardor for the memory of the martyrs. He has three early popes, Clement, Anteros and Fabianus, each make provision for the collection of facts regarding them… Few of these statements can be accepted unless corroborated by outside testimony."

10. 10. Gabriel Meier, "Pope St. Fabian," in The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 5 (New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1909), NewAdvent.org: "The 'Liber Pontificalis' says that he divided Rome into seven districts, each supervised by a deacon, and appointed seven subdeacons, to collect, in conjunction with other notaries, the 'acta' of the martyrs, i.e. the reports of the court-proceedings on the occasion of their trials." Cf. Eusebius, HE VI.29, VI.39, on Fabian.

11. 11. "Notaries," in The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 11 (New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1911), NewAdvent.org, which records the Liber Pontificalis's ascription of the regionary-notary system for collecting the martyrs' acts to Clement I and to Fabian, notes that the first-century version is unattested in any early document, and judges the Fabian attribution "more probable."

12. 12. Shahan, "Pope St. Anterus," Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 1 (1907); NewAdvent.org. The reference is to the Liber Pontificalis, ed. L. Duchesne, vol. 1 (Paris, 1886), 147, with Duchesne's introduction xcv–xcvi.

13. 13. E. G. Weltin, "Anterus, Pope, St.," in New Catholic Encyclopedia (2nd ed.), reproduced at Encyclopedia.com: "The Liber pontificalis says Anterus was a Greek, son of a Romulus, and that he was interested in collecting acts of martyrs. Its report that he was a martyr is untrustworthy. The Liberian catalogue says that he 'fell asleep,' and he does not appear in lists of martyrs." Weltin cites J. N. D. Kelly, Oxford Dictionary of Popes (1986), 16.

14. 14. Liberian Catalogue, Anteros entry: "Antheros m. uno dies X. Dormit III non. Ian. Maximo et Africano cons." Mommsen, Chronica Minora I; Tertullian.org. "III non. Ian." = 3 January; the consuls Maximus and Africanus fix the year at 236. The following entry marks Fabian "passus" (suffered/martyred).

15. 15. Depositio Martyrum, in the Chronograph of 354: Mommsen, Chronica Minora I, 71–72; transcription at Tertullian.org. Fabian appears at "XIII kal. Feb." (20 January) and Pontian at the Ides of August (13 August), both "in Callisti"; Anterus is not in the list.

16. 16. Roman Martyrology (Baronius/Tridentine text), 3 January: "At Rome, on the Appian Way, the birthday of Pope St. Anterus, who suffered under Julius Maximinus, and was buried in the cemetery of Callistus." The "birthday" (natalis) in martyrological usage is the day of death, understood as birth into heaven.

17. 17. Martyrologium Romanum, editio typica altera (Vatican City: Typis Vaticanis, 2004), 3 January, no. 2 (official English rendering): "Rome, in the cemetery of Callistus on the Appian Way, the burial of Saint Antherus, pope, who, after Pontian the martyr, held the episcopate for a short time." The revised entry designates Anterus a pope (Latin papa) and records his depositio (burial), reserving the martyr title for Pontian—a deliberate contrast with the older Roman Martyrology (n. 16), which had called Anterus himself a martyr who "suffered under Julius Maximinus."

18. 18. On de Rossi's discovery: the 1849 "[COR]NELIVS MARTYR" fragment, the purchase of the vineyard under Pius IX, and the 1854 identification of the Crypt of the Popes ("il piccolo Vaticano"), see Giovanni Battista de Rossi, La Roma Sotterranea Cristiana, 3 vols. (Rome, 1864–1877), and the English adaptation by J. Spencer Northcote and W. R. Brownlow, Roma Sotterranea (London, 1879); a concise narrative is in the official guide of the Catacombs of San Callisto, catacombesancallisto.it.

19. 19. Shahan, "Pope St. Anterus," Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 1 (1907), citing Northcote and Brownlow, Roma Sotterranea (London, 1879), I, 296–300: the site of the sepulchre was "discovered by De Rossi in 1854, with some broken remnants of the Greek epitaph engraved on the narrow oblong slab that closed his tomb, an index at once of his origin and of the prevalence of Greek in the Roman Church up to that date."

20. 20. The Anterus slab is broken; the Catholic Encyclopedia describes "some broken remnants of the Greek epitaph" (Shahan, "Pope St. Anterus"). The securely legible element is the Greek title epi(skopos), "bishop"; the name is restored from the slab's position in the crypt and the sequence of popes. The letters of the name are variously reproduced (the Latinized "Anterus"/"Anteros" alongside the fuller Greek "Antheros"); the exact glyphs are not the point—the survival of the title, without a martyr mark, is. On the epigraphy see Orazio Marucchi, Manual of Christian Archaeology, and De Rossi, La Roma Sotterranea Cristiana II, plate III.

21. 21. The original broken slabs of five popes are fixed to the walls of the Crypt of the Popes (Cappella dei Papi) in the Catacomb of San Callisto: official site, catacombesancallisto.it. The human remains were removed centuries ago; the marble epitaphs remain in situ.

22. 22. The surviving Greek epitaphs of Anterus's crypt-mates name each man bishop and martyr, while his names only the bishop. Fabian's slab, found by De Rossi, reads "Fabian, bishop and martyr" (Meier, "Pope St. Fabian," Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 5 [1909], citing De Rossi, Roma Sotterranea II, 59); Pontian's, recovered in 1909 in the nearby crypt of St. Cecilia, reads "PONTIANOS, EPISK. MARTUR," but, as Kirsch records, "the word mártur was added later and is written in ligature" (Kirsch, "Pope St. Pontian," Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 12 [1911]). The five original papal slabs, Anterus's among them, are fixed in situ on the walls of the Crypt of the Popes; official guide, Catacombs of San Callisto, catacombesancallisto.it.

23. 23. On Anterus as probably the first pope interred in the Crypt of the Popes: Weltin, "Anterus," New Catholic Encyclopedia (Encyclopedia.com), notes he "was the first pope buried in the bishops' crypt of the Cemetery of Callistus." Pontian's body was translated to Rome from Sardinia only later, under Fabian (Meier, "Pope St. Fabian," Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 5); on Zephyrinus's separate above-ground tomb, see the Zephyrinus entry.

24. 24. The "Epistola Anteri" attributed to Anterus is a ninth-century Pseudo-Isidorian forgery (one of the False Decretals); its subject is the translation of bishops between sees. Shahan, "Pope St. Anterus," Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 1 (1907), citing Paul Hinschius, ed., Decretales Pseudo-Isidorianae (Leipzig, 1863), 156–160, and Migne, Patrologia Graeca X, 165–168.

25. 25. Eusebius, Historia Ecclesiastica VI.29.2–4, trans. McGiffert: Fabian, a stranger newly come to the city, was chosen when "suddenly a dove flying down lighted on his head, resembling the descent of the Holy Spirit on the Saviour in the form of a dove"; NewAdvent.org. Fabian, elected 10 January 236 (Liberian Catalogue) after a vacancy of about a week, reigned until his martyrdom under Decius in 250.