Pope Anterus

Anterus was elected bishop of Rome on 21 November 235 and was dead by 3 January 236. He held the office forty-three days. He took it at the worst possible moment. His predecessor Pontian had just been deported to the Sardinian mines by the emperor Maximinus Thrax, along with the rival bishop Hippolytus, and had resigned so that Rome could have a functioning leader. Neither man was coming back. To accept the chair in that winter was to accept the target that had just been taken off it. The Liber Pontificalis, the later Roman book of the popes, says that Anterus had the acts of the martyrs collected by notaries and deposited in the church archive. Historians treat the attribution cautiously — the same act is credited to Fabian, who followed him, and forty-three days is a short time in which to found an archive. What is not in doubt is that the Roman church of exactly this period did begin systematically writing down what happened to its martyrs, and that the men who ordered it done were watching their own predecessors die. The same source says he was martyred for it. Whether he was killed or died of natural causes is not established; the persecution under Maximinus was real and aimed at clergy, but the record does not settle his case. What is settled is where he was buried, and that took an archaeologist to prove. In 1854 Giovanni Battista de Rossi excavated the papal crypt in the Catacomb of Callixtus on the Appian Way and found the original slabs, cut in Greek. One of them reads ANTEROS EPI — Anterus, bishop. He was the first bishop of Rome laid in that chamber, and the row of third-century popes buried around him made the crypt the most important early Christian burial site in the world. His name is Greek and he may have been of Greek origin; the Liber Pontificalis calls his father Romulus. That is nearly everything the record holds. A man took a job that had just killed the last man to hold it, spent his six weeks making sure the deaths of ordinary Christians would be written down instead of forgotten, and was buried under a stone with two words on it. Sources: Liber Pontificalis; the Depositio Episcoporum of the Chronographer of 354; G. B. de Rossi, Roma Sotterranea; the 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia, article Pope St. Anterus.