Rome (Mamertine Prison and San Clemente)

Two Roman sites carry the most concentrated archaeological memory of the apostolic and sub-apostolic generation in the city. The first is the Mamertine Prison — the Tullianum — at the foot of the Capitoline Hill, opening onto the Forum Romanum. The lower chamber, reached today by a modern staircase, is genuine Republican-period prison architecture: a roughly circular tufa cell originally accessed only through an oculus in the floor of the upper chamber, where the condemned were lowered by rope. Sallust's Catilinarian War describes the cell, and the Tullianum is named in Livy as the holding place of Jugurtha and Vercingetorix before their executions. The identification of the lower chamber as the prison of Peter and Paul under Nero is medieval Christian tradition rather than secure first-century evidence; the Christian veneration of the site is attested archaeologically from the third and fourth centuries AD, when an oratory was installed above. The architecture is genuinely first-century BC; the apostolic association is genuinely traditional. Both must be said. The second site is the Basilica of San Clemente, on the lower slopes of the Esquiline near the Colosseum. The current twelfth-century basilica stands directly over a fourth-century basilica, which stands directly over a first-century AD Roman insula — a domestic block — within which a second-century AD Mithraeum was later inserted. The lower levels were rediscovered by the Irish Dominican prior Joseph Mullooly in 1857 and have been excavated continuously since. The first-century house is traditionally identified with the home of Titus Flavius Clemens, the consul executed by Domitian in AD 95 "on a charge of atheism" (Cassius Dio 67.14) — possibly the Clement of Philippians 4:3, though the identification depends on a chain of inferences that genuine scholarship still debates. The basilica remains administered by the Pontifical Irish College and the Dominican Friars, who continue the excavation. Sources: Hugo Brandenburg, Ancient Churches of Rome from the Fourth to the Seventh Century (Brepols, 2005); Federico Guidobaldi, San Clemente: Gli edifici romani, la basilica paleocristiana (Collegio San Clemente, 1992); Filippo Coarelli, Rome and Environs: An Archaeological Guide (University of California, 2007); Sallust, Catilinarian War 55; Cassius Dio, Roman History 67.14; Acts 28:16–31.