CLEMENT
14
CLEMENT
lived on till the reign of Trajan. It is unlikely that
he was a member of the imperial family. The con-
tinual use of the Old Testament in his Epistle has
suggested to Lightfoot, Funk, Nestle, and others that
he was of Jewish origin. Probably he was a freed-
man or son of a freedman of the emperor's household,
which included thousands or tens of thousands. We
know that there were Christians in the household of
Nero (Phil., iv, 22). It is highly probable that the
bearers of Clement's letter, Claudius Ephebus and
Valerius Vito, were of this number, for the names
Claudius and Valerius occur with great frequency in
inscriptions among the freedmen of the Emperor
Claudius (and his two predecessors of the same gens)
and his wife Valeria Messalina. The two messengers
are described as "faithful and prudent men, who
have walked among us from youth unto old age
unblameably"; thus they were probably already
Christians and living in Rome before the death of
the Apostles about thirty years earlier. The Prefect
of Rome during Nero's persecution was Titus Flavins
Sabinus, elder brother of the Emperor Vespasian,
and father of the martyred Clemens. Flavia Domi-
tilla, wife of the MartjT, was a granddaughter of
Vespasian, and niece of Titus and Domitian; she
may have died a martyr to the rigours of her banish-
ment. The catacomb of Domitilla is shown by
existing inscriptions to have been founded by her.
Whether she is distinct from another Flavia Domi-
tilla, who is styled "Virgin and Martyr", is uncer-
tain. (See Flavia Domitilla and Nereus and
AcHiLLEUs.) The consul and his wife had two sons,
Vespasian and Domitian, who had Quintilian for
their tutor. Of their life nothing is known. The
elder brother of the martyr Clemens was T. Flavins
Sabinus, consul in 82, put to death by Domitian,
whose sister he had married. Pope Clement is rei>-
resented as his son in the Acts of Sts. Nereus and
Achilleus, but this would make him too young to
have known the Apostles.
Martyrdom. — Of the life and death of St. Clement nothing is known. The apocryphal Greek Acts of his martyrdom were printed by Cotelier in his "Patres Apost." (1724, I, SOS: reprinted in Migne, P. G., II, 617; best edition by Funk, "Patr. Apost.", II, 28). They relate how he converted Theodora, wife of Sisinnius, a courtier of Nerva, and (after miracles) Sisinnius himself and four hundred and twenty-three other persons of rank. Trajan ban- ishes the pope to the Crimea, where he slakes the thirst of two thousand Christian confessors by a miracle. The people of the country are converted, seventy-five churches are built. Trajan, in conse- quence, orders Clement to be thrown into the sea with an iron anchor. But the tide every year recedes two miles, revealing a Divinely built shrine which con- tains the martyr's bones. 'This story is not older than the fourth century. It is known to Gregory of Tours in the sixth. About 868 St. Cyril, when in the Crimea on the way to evangelize the Chazars, dug up some bones in a mound (not in a tomb under the sea), and also an anchor. These were believed to be the relics of St. Clement. They were carried by St. Cyril to Rome, and deposited by Adrian II with those of St. Ignatius of Antioch in the high altar of the basilica of St. Clement in Rome. The history of this translation is evidently quite truthful, but there seems to have been no tradition with regard to the mound, which .simply looked a likely place to be a tomb. The anchor appears to be the only evi- dence of identity, but we cannot gather from the account that it belonged to the scattered bones. (See Acta SS., March, II, 20.) St. Clement is first mentioned as a martyr by Rufinus (c. 400). Pope Zozimus in a letter to Africa in 417 relates the trial and partial acquittal of the heretic Ca-lestius in the basilica of St. Clement; the pope had chosen this
church because Clement had learned the Faith from
St. Peter, and had given his life for it (Ep. ii). He
is also called a martyr by the writer known as Pra--
destinatus (c. 430) and by the Synod of Vaison in
442. Modern critics think it possible that his martyr-
dom was suggested by a confusion with his namesake,
the martyred consul. But the lack of tradition that
he was buried in Rome is in favour of his having
died in exile.
The Basilica. — The church of St. Clement at Rome lies in the valley between the Esquiline and Coelian hills, on the direct road from the Coliseum to the Lateran. It is now in the hands of the Irish Province of Dominicans. With its atrium, its choir enclosed by a wall, its ambos, it is the most perfect model of an early basilica in Rome, though it was built as late as the first years of the twelfth century by Paschal II, after the destruction of this portion of the city by the Normans under Robert Guiscard. Paschal II followed the lines of an earlier church, on a rather smaller scale, and employed some of its materials and fittings. The marble wall of the present choir is of the date of John II (533-5). In 1858 the older church was unearthed, below the present building, by the Prior, Father Mulooly.O. P. Still lower were found chambers of imperial date and walls of the Republican period. The lower church was built under Constantine (d. 337) or not much later. St. Jerome implies that it was not new in his time: "nominis eius [dementis] memoriam usque hodie Romoe exstructa ecclesia custodit" (De viris illustr., xv). It is mentioned in inscriptions of Damasus (d. 383) and Siricius (d. 398). De Rossi thought the lowest chambers belonged to the house of Clement, and that the room immediately under the altar was probably the original niemoria of the saint. These chambers communicate with a shrine of Mithras, which lies beyond the apse of the church, on the lowest level. De Rossi supposed this to be a Chris- tian chapel purposely polluted by the authorities during the last persecution. Lightfoot has suggested that the rooms may have belonged to the house of T. Flavins Clemens the consul, being later mistaken for the dwelling of the pope; but this seems quite gratuitous. In the sanctuary of Mithras a statue of the Good Shepherd was found.
II. Pseudo-Clementine Writings. — Many writ- ings have been falsely attributed to Pope St. Clem- ent I: (1) The "Second Clementine Epistle to the Corinthians", discussed under III. (2) Two "Epis- tles to Virgins", extant in Syriac in an Amster- dam MS. of 1470. Tlie Greek originals are lost. Many critics have believed them genuine, for they were known in the fourth century to St. Epiphanius (who speaks of their being read in the Churches) and to St. Jerome. But it is now ad- mitted on all hands that they cannot be by the same author as the genuine Epistle to the Corinthians. Some writers, as Hefele and Westcott, have attributed them to the second half of the second century, but the third is more probable (Harnack, Lightfoot). Ilarnack thinks the two letters were originally one. They were first edited by Wetstein, 1470, with Latin translation: reprinted by Gallandi, "Bibl. vett. Patr.", I, and Migne, P. G., I. They are found in Latin only in Mansi, "Concilia", I, and Funk, "Patres Apost.", II. See Lightfoot, "Clement of Rome" (London, ISOO), I; Bardenhewer, "Gesch. der altkirchl. Litt." (Freiburg un Br., 1002), I; Harnack in "Sitzungsber. der k. preuss. Akad. der Wiss." (Beriin, 1891), 361 and "Chronol." (1904), II, 133. (3) At the head of the Pseudo-Isidorian decretals stand five letters attributed to St. Clement. The first is the letter of Clement to James translated by Rufinus (see III); the second is another letter to James, found in many MSS. of the "Recognitions". The other three are the work of Pseudo-Isidore.
