The Martyrs Rome Tried to Erase: Saints Marcellinus and Peter

There is a peculiar honor in being killed in a forest. Soldiers die on battlefields, kings die in beds, criminals die in public squares, but to be beheaded in a wood so remote that the executioners congratulate themselves on its obscurity is to receive, however unintentionally, a kind of compliment. It is to be told that you matter enough to be hidden. Marcellinus, a priest, and Peter, an exorcist, were paid this strange tribute in the reign of Diocletian. The empire would have been wiser to give them a parade.

For the Roman authorities had committed the fundamental error of all persecutors, which is to imagine that the problem of a living witness can be solved by making him a dead one, and that the problem of a dead witness can be solved by losing the body. They were wrong on both counts, as persecutors invariably are, and the manner of their wrongness is so instructive, so magnificently typical of the way God writes His stories, that it deserves to be told properly,which is to say, from the beginning.

The Year Everything Was Supposed to End

The year was 303, and the Emperor Diocletian had decided, with all the calm administrative efficiency for which Rome was justly famous, to eliminate Christianity from his empire. This was not, it should be noted, the first time such a thing had been attempted. Previous emperors had tried fire, lions, crucifixion, and the arena, all with results that would have discouraged a lesser bureaucracy. But Diocletian was nothing if not methodical. He issued not one edict but four, each more severe than the last, beginning with the destruction of churches and scriptures and culminating in the demand that every Christian in the empire offer sacrifice to the Roman gods or face imprisonment, torture, and death.

It was, on paper, a very thorough plan. The sort of plan that looks magnificent in a committee meeting and collapses spectacularly upon contact with reality. For Diocletian had failed to account for one small detail: that the people he was trying to destroy had already been promised, by rather high authority, that the gates of hell would not prevail against them. One suspects the gates of Diocletian were not considered a significant upgrade.

The Exorcist in the Cell

It was into this furnace of persecution that Peter, a Roman exorcist, was thrown. Now, the modern reader may picture an exorcist as something out of a horror film, a wild-eyed priest brandishing a crucifix at levitating furniture. But in the early Church, an exorcist occupied a recognized minor order, a man whose responsibilities included the care and preparation of those approaching baptism, and who held a particular authority over the spiritual forces that opposed the faith. He was, in a sense, a man whose daily work involved confronting invisible enemies. The Roman state, in imprisoning him, had merely provided him with visible ones, which must have seemed like something of a holiday.

Peter did in his cell what he had always done outside of it: he proclaimed Christ crucified and risen. This is the sort of behavior that drives jailers to distraction, and Peter's jailer, a man named Artemius, was no exception. Here was a prisoner who refused to behave like one. Instead of weeping or plotting escape or staring at the walls in mute despair, Peter was conducting what amounted to a small parish from his cell, preaching the Gospel to anyone who would listen and several who would rather not have.

And then something happened that changed everything, though the Roman records, with their usual talent for understatement, would probably have filed it under "incident." Artemius had a daughter named Paulina, and Paulina was afflicted by what the sources describe as demonic influence, a condition that the modern mind may interpret as it wishes, but which the ancient world took with deadly seriousness. Peter prayed for the girl, and she was freed. The jailer, confronted with the spectacle of his own daughter's liberation by the very prisoner he was paid to keep in chains, did what any reasonable man would do: he began to reconsider his position.

The Priest Who Came Running

Artemius, his wife, and his daughter all sought baptism. And here enters Marcellinus, the priest, a man described by the sources as quieter in temperament than the exorcist but no less courageous. When word reached him that converts were waiting in a Roman prison for the sacrament, he did not hesitate. He came. He baptized them. He stayed.

It is worth pausing here to consider the sheer recklessness of this act. Diocletian's edicts had specifically targeted clergy. A priest walking voluntarily into a Roman prison to baptize the jailer's family was not merely breaking the law; he was delivering himself, gift-wrapped and ribboned, to the very machinery designed to destroy him. But Marcellinus understood something that our age of careful risk assessments and calculated self-preservation has largely forgotten: that the sacraments do not wait upon convenience, and that a priest who will not go where the sheep are is no shepherd at all but a man in a costume.

Together, the priest and the exorcist made such a thorough nuisance of themselves that the conversions multiplied. Prisoners, guards, visitors, the faith spread through that jail like water through a cracked dam, and the authorities, watching their prison transform into something uncomfortably resembling a church, decided that enough was quite enough.

The Black Forest

The judge whose name history has mercifully forgotten, as it tends to forget the names of men who do the Devil's filing, ordered Marcellinus and Peter taken to a place called the silva nigra, the Black Forest. This was not the famous Black Forest of Germany, mind you, but a dense, overgrown thicket some three miles outside Rome, chosen specifically for its obscurity. The calculation was simple and, by the standards of the persecution, rather clever: if you kill them in the city, the Christians will find the bodies before the blood has dried. If you kill them in the countryside, the Christians will follow the road and search every ditch. But if you kill them in a forest so tangled and forgotten that even the local goatherds avoid it, well, then perhaps, at last, you can be rid of them.

It was, as calculations go, almost admirable in its thoroughness. It had only one flaw, which is the same flaw that afflicts every scheme devised by men who have set themselves against God: it assumed that God was not paying attention.

Marcellinus and Peter were marched into the Black Forest and given one final humiliation: they were ordered to dig their own graves. Here is a detail that the hagiographers record with restraint, but which deserves a moment of contemplation. Two men, standing in a thicket of thorns and brambles, turning the earth with their own hands, preparing the holes that would receive their bodies. It is the kind of scene that strips away all rhetoric and leaves only the bare, terrible, human reality of what it costs to follow Christ in a world that has decided it would rather not.

And yet here is the thing that baffled their executioners and has baffled every executioner since, they did it joyfully. Not with the grim stoicism of men who have resigned themselves to fate, but with the genuine, almost impolite cheerfulness of men who know something their killers do not. They cleared the ground. They dug the graves. They knelt. And they received the sword.

As far as the law was concerned, justice had been done. The bodies were covered. The soldiers departed. The forest closed over the clearing like a mouth swallowing a secret, and the empire went home satisfied.

The Women Who Would Not Allow It

But the empire had reckoned without Lucilla.

There is a pattern in the stories of the early martyrs that the modern reader may find either miraculous or maddening, depending on their disposition: whenever the state hid a body, a Christian woman found it. Sebastian was discovered by the widow Irene. Marcellinus and Peter were discovered by the matron Lucilla, who received as the sources tell us, a divine revelation informing her of the precise location of the graves. She enlisted another woman, Firmina, and together they recovered the bodies and had them reinterred in the catacombs on the Via Labicana, in a place called Ad Duas Lauros "Near the Two Laurels."

The Christians of Rome, it turns out, had developed a useful habit of recovering their dead. It was not mere sentiment, though sentiment played its part. It was something deeper: a theological conviction that the body mattered, that the flesh which had housed a faithful soul was not refuse to be discarded but sacred material to be honored. The empire treated Christian corpses as problems to be disposed of. The Church treated them as relics to be treasured. And in this small but profound disagreement about the status of the dead, we find one of the great fault lines between the pagan world and the Christian one.

For the pagans, death was the final word. The body was nothing. Throw it in a sewer, bury it in a forest, burn it on a pyre, it made no difference, because the material world was, in the end, disposable. But for the Christians, death was merely a pause in the conversation. The body was a temple. And you do not leave a temple in a ditch, no matter how many soldiers are standing between you and the shovel.

The Executioner Who Changed His Mind

And then comes the detail that elevates this story from inspiring to astonishing. Pope Damasus I, who served as the bishop of Rome from 366 to 384, composed an epitaph for the tomb of Marcellinus and Peter. In it, he revealed the source of his knowledge about their martyrdom. He had heard the story, he said, as a boy, from the executioner himself.

Let that settle for a moment. The man who swung the sword became a Christian. The hand that separated head from body was, at some later date, folded in prayer. The voice that gave the order to kneel was, in time, raised in the confession of Christ. The executioner repented, was baptized, and told his story to a boy who would grow up to be pope. It is the kind of plot twist that would be rejected by any competent editor of fiction as too convenient, too neat, too absurdly perfect. But God has never been much concerned with what competent editors consider plausible.

Here is the final irony, and it is an irony so complete that one suspects Heaven of having planned it from the beginning: the judge chose the Black Forest because he wanted the story to die with the bodies. Instead, the story was carried out of the forest by the very man he had sent to bury it. The silva nigra the Black Forest became, in Christian memory, the silva candida the White Forest because a great light was seen shining from the place of execution. The darkness that was supposed to hide the crime became the light that revealed it. The grave that was supposed to be the end became the beginning.

The Names That Will Not Be Silenced

Today, nearly seventeen centuries later, Marcellinus and Peter are named in the Roman Canon, the most ancient and venerable of the Church's Eucharistic prayers. Every time a priest celebrates Mass using the first Eucharistic Prayer, their names are spoken aloud, in churches from Pittsburgh to Manila, from São Paulo to Kraków. The judge who ordered their deaths is forgotten. The soldiers who carried out the sentence are dust. The empire that sponsored the persecution crumbled centuries ago, its ruins now serving as picturesque backdrops for tourist photographs. But Marcellinus and Peter, the priest and the exorcist who were dragged into a forest, forced to dig their own graves, and beheaded in a thicket of thorns are remembered. They are named. They are invoked.

Constantine himself built a basilica over their remains. His mother, Saint Helena, was laid to rest beside them. The catacomb that bears their name is among the most visited in Rome, its walls covered with frescoes that date to within living memory of the martyrdom itself. The empire tried to erase them, and instead they became part of the very architecture of the city that tried to forget them.

There is a lesson in this, and it is a lesson that every age needs to hear, though perhaps our age needs it most of all. We live in a time that has developed its own sophisticated methods of silencing inconvenient witnesses not with swords, perhaps, but with algorithms, with social pressure, with the quiet, suffocating consensus that certain truths are simply not to be spoken in polite company. We have our own silva nigra, our own dark forests where we bury the things we would rather not face. We have become very skilled at hiding bodies.

But the Christians of Rome had a useful habit of recovering their dead, and the Church has a useful habit of recovering her truths. What is buried is found. What is silenced speaks. What is hidden shines. The silva nigra always, always becomes the silva candida, because there is a Light in the world that darkness has never managed to overcome, not for lack of trying, mind you, but because darkness, for all its impressive credentials, has never quite understood what it is up against.

Marcellinus and Peter understood. They dug their graves with steady hands and knelt with clear eyes, because they knew something that their executioners did not, something that the empire could not stamp out no matter how many forests it requisitioned for the purpose: that the last word does not belong to the sword. It belongs to the Word. And the Word, as it happens, is still speaking.

~The Seeker's Quill