The Fisherman's Tomb. John O'Neill
The ancient temple of Rome’s patron god, Jupiter, burned, along with the Forum. The fire also reached the Subura District crowded with wooden, multistory apartment houses. The fire burned for six days and seven nights — in the end damaging or completely destroying ten of the fourteen districts of Rome.32
Reports of fires set by systematic arsonists swept through Rome. Nero claimed much of the destroyed area for his grand palace, leading Romans to suspect that Bloody Nero himself, despite his hypocritical protestations of concern for the victims, had set the Great Fire.33 To save face, Nero (like Hitler centuries later) settled upon a small, unpopular cult to blame for the fire.34 The Christians, who worshipped as God an alleged criminal executed by the Romans, were a perfect target. Nero unleashed upon the Christians an incredibly cruel persecution, even by ancient standards.35
The place of their torture and execution was Nero’s gardens and circus, built in anticipation of the grand palace, known as the Domus Aurea — the Golden House.36 He had the Christians (men and women) dipped in oil and then wrapped in flammable cloth and materials, hoisting them in the air on posts and burning them alive as human candles to light his gardens. He sewed women and children into animal skins and released dogs to tear them apart. He crucified Christians by the hundreds, sometimes upside down. Even hardened Romans like the historian Tacitus found his treatment of the Christians extraordinarily cruel.37 His cruelty apparently did not offend the large, cheering Roman crowds.
Christian tradition and later writings relate that during this persecution Nero located, condemned, and executed the two great leaders of the early Christian Church — Peter and Paul.38 These traditions hold that Peter, after long, horrible imprisonment, was crucified upside down, at his request.39 He did not consider himself worthy to die as Jesus had. Tradition further relates that the Roman executioners discarded Peter’s body on the ground on a nearby, vacant hill used as a dumping ground for waste, but that Christians secretly recovered and buried Peter’s body on that hill.40 The traditions claimed the site became almost immediately a secret place of worship for the Christians. The name of that place was Vatican Hill.
Chapter Five
Vatican Hill
Today Vatican City, measuring 110 acres, is the seat of the Catholic Church, home of the pope, and the smallest sovereign state in the world. More than half of it consists of gardens, some dating back to A.D. 1200. In addition to St. Peter’s Square and the Renaissance-era St. Peter’s Basilica, Vatican City contains perhaps the greatest collection of historical art and statuary in the world. In the Vatican Museum, the history of the West is contained in ancient statues like the Three Graces weaving, nurturing, and finally cutting the Thread of Life. The full-size statue of Caesar Augustus (Prima Porta Augustus) stares down as if frozen in the first century, while Madonnas by Titian and Raphael are mixed with Da Vinci’s St. Jerome in the Wilderness, leading to Michelangelo’s great ceiling in the Sistine Chapel.
Immediately outside the Sistine Chapel, Michelangelo executed his last great fresco, The Crucifixion of St. Peter. The image depicts Peter crucified upside down on Vatican Hill. Michelangelo even depicted himself as a sad bystander, observing Peter’s death. Little did he know that his painting would become both a clue and a confirmation in the search for Peter centuries later.
A gallery of more than three thousand stone tablets and inscriptions describes history, along with the funeral sarcophagus of Roman Empress Helena of the West (who also played a part in the story of the search for Peter). But amazingly and totally unknown to the world until the Apostle Project, the greatest historical gallery of the Vatican was not in the Vatican but under it, where the history of an age lay silent, frozen, and inviolate for almost two thousand years.
To understand the complexity of the Apostle Project undertaken by Pius XII, one must travel back almost two millennia. In fact, Vatican Hill has a complex history and structure. The hill that now boasts the enormous St. Peter’s Basilica was once a worthless, sandy hill located outside the walls of Rome. Unusable for farming, for uncounted centuries it had been used as a dumping ground for bodies of slaves, animals, and the poor. It lay west of the Tiber River and the heart of Rome. Caligula built a racetrack near the hill during his reign, and nearby were the gardens where Nero would inflict his cruelty.
Within a short time after Peter’s death, Christians began to worship secretly at a spot on Vatican Hill where they believed Peter had been buried.41 Through waves of persecution as the years went on, Christians would climb the hill to the place where they believed Peter had been buried. But the hill did not long remain vacant. Prominent pagan families began to use the area as a burial ground, and the hill gradually became a necropolis of 250 years’ worth of mostly pagan graves.
The worst of the persecutions of Christians — under the emperors Valerian and Diocletian — occurred around 250 to 313, after which the storm lifted. The persecutions largely came to an end when the Roman Emperor Constantine (c. 300–337) rose to power.42 After his 312 victory at Milvian Bridge, where he claimed to see a cross in the sky with the words, “In this sign you shall conquer,”43 he took control of the western Roman Empire and, together with the emperor of the East, published the Edict of Milan, thus granting Christians the freedom to worship.44 Later, when he gained control of the whole Roman Empire, Constantine moved the capital from Rome to Constantinople. He apparently remained a pagan for most or all of his life, but he acceded to the requests of his Christian mother, Helena, and allowed a church to be built over the site traditionally held to be Peter’s grave near the top of Vatican Hill.45
The planned church needed a level foundation, and Vatican Hill was anything but flat. Peter’s purported grave stood near, but not at the top, surrounded by the family tombs of numerous prominent families. Desecration of these burial sites would generate widespread hatred of the emperor. The Romans — perhaps history’s greatest engineers — solved the problem by filling the hill with millions of feet of fill around the numerous existing pagan tombs.46 The effect was to create a vast, hidden, underground necropolis, which would remain frozen in time and space under the new church.
Roman Family Tombs
The supreme memorial to a Roman family’s dignity and history was its family tomb, containing the ashes, busts, and portraits of generations of family members, many going back hundreds of years. In Rome, the basic social unit was the family. The pater familias — the senior male — had the power of life and death over all family members and was in turn himself responsible to the Republic for their actions. Much of the standing and dignitas of a citizen was his family’s standing. The family tomb thus became, in effect, a museum of family history (and with it the history of Rome), designed to celebrate ancestors while impressing passers-by with the family’s gravitas. The most well-known entrance to Rome — the Appian Way — was lined on either side by many of the family tombs of the great families of Roman history, such as the Julia, Scipii, Horatia, Cornelii, and Graccii families.47 It is no accident that the poet Thomas Babington Macaulay portrays the legendary Roman hero Horatius, facing certain death defending a bridge in Rome, proclaiming:
To every man upon this earth
Death cometh soon or late.
And how can man die better
Than facing fearful odds
For the ashes of his fathers
And the temples of his gods?48
Centuries of looting began with the Visigoths’ conquest and sack of Rome in 410, followed by the Vandals in 455, the Saracens in 846, and the Germans in 1527. The great family tombs of the Appian Way were reduced to ruins.49 With the barbarian invasions, the Empire died. Rome became a city of ancient ruins, the Colosseum half collapsed, the Forum and Senate House mere rubble, and famous baths and homes now merely stones and fading memories. But the family tombs under the Vatican had a different fate. As civilization in the West died to a flicker with the great barbarian