Though I walk through
The valley of the shadow of death...
I will fear no evil.
pull it!
Your servant.
The colosseum is the roman empire
Distilled to its most basic assets.
It is a symbol of conquest.
It's a symbol of dominance.
It's a symbol of imperial power
Radiating throughout the roman world.
Now.
Any emperor had the colosseum at his disposal
To use as a tool to reassert his power and authority.
The message to the roman people
Is that life is a combat.
It was also a judicial warning.
"do not test the power of rome."
It was a death penalty offense.
If you live by the sword...
You die by the sword.
It demonstrates the power of the colosseum.
It made slaves into heroes,
Upending the power structure of rome.
The colosseum will come to symbolize
The rise and fall of rome.
It's all there, the blood, the glory,
The magnificence, and the flaws
That made rome the greatest empire
That europe has ever seen.
In 107 a.D.,
Emperor trajan celebrates an extended series of games.
When trajan succeeds the roman empire,
Rome is at its greatest.
It's vast, it's successful, it's rich,
And trajan really personifies that--
The energy, the success,
And the sophistication of this extraordinary institution.
Under his leadership,
The roman empire reaches its
Greatest territorial extent--
2 million square miles.
Stretching from britannia in the west
To syria in the east,
The 50 million subjects of rome
Believe in a wide array of different religions and gods.
But one underground spiritual movement in particular
Is gaining momentum.
The number of christians is growing.
And what started as a very small movement
Based around jerusalem
Has now spread across the empire.
Dear lord, protect our brother ignatius
From those who would do evil to him.
Amen.
Christians.
When they see a few of their high priests eaten by lions,
They'll turn to our gods.
The romans see christianity as a threat
Because of its promise
To undermine roman conceptions
Of how power and authority were supposed to work.
A prominent christian leader is brought to rome
To be killed, most likely in the city's amphitheater.
Ignatius of antioch,
He is clearly the target of trajan's anger,
Because he is arrested and brought to rome to be executed
By being fed to lions, probably in the colosseum.
If these people show disrespect to the emperor,
And the roman state.
That's sedition.
And for that, they should be killed.
Public executions were supposed to teach a lesson
To those who witnessed them.
The fate of christians who persisted in their belief
Was a capital offense.
It was a death penalty offense.
But this will be no ordinary execution.
Ignatius is convinced that he's going to die violently,
And this is okay with him,
Because ignatius wants to follow the model of christ.
Ignatius is willing to do this,
To die, just like jesus, to be martyred.
While ignatius is on his way to rome,
He is able to write seven letters.
And it's because of these letters that we know who he is.
These are first person accounts
Of what happened to him, how he feels about it,
Why he thinks it matters or might make a difference.
His long journey to rome
Starts 1,800 miles east
In the third largest city of the empire.
Well, the city of antioch had a jewish population
For a very long time.
And when the message of jesus comes,
That is one of the places where that message takes root.
The term "christian" is first used in the city of antioch.
Before that, they were called the followers of the way.
Ignatius is living around
80 years after the death of christ.
- I baptize thee. - Go and serve the lord.
At this point, ignatius has become the bishop of antioch.
And rome was noticing this tiny new religion.
The romans were beginning
To see the christians as troublemakers.
Why? Because when groups start to assemble together,
They start to grow, they start to spread new ideas.
And rome doesn't want any new ideas.
They don't want anybody challenging
The roman power structure, the roman ethic.
They have strange rituals which are,
To the romans' point of view,
Akin to human sacrifice.
They eat the body and drink the blood
Of this jesus christ.
They have the audacity to say that this same jesus christ
Is the son of god.
The roman religion, just like the greek religion,
Was based around a pantheon of gods.
The romans were very happy to worship multiple gods
And don't see any problem with that.
The romans had a god for almost every imaginable thing.
The goddess of childbed, the gods of trade,
You were going to hell.
If you had a group within society
That was actively disrupting the proper rituals,
The proper forms of behavior and honoring the gods,
Then they were a threat to the literal well-being
Of your--of your empire.
As this radical new religion continues spreading,
It reaches the capital.
It's not implausible to estimate
The population of christians in rome
At around this time in the thousands.
Mostly it's foreigners and the low born
Who don't go out of their way to advertise their presence.
But emperor trajan's advisors
Are on high alert to spot them.
- Guards, have him flogged. - No.
One of the symbols of the ancient church was a fish.
It was an acronym. It stood for jesus christ,
The son of god, the savior in greek.
The christians used that as a symbol for who they were
And how they could not be known to the authorities.
- Tell me. - What is it in your beliefs
That my friend here finds so offensive?
We only believe in love, caesar.
That is all.
You object to love, sura?
Of course not.
God's love, caesar.
Am I not divine, barber?
Of course.
So shave your divine emperor.
Yes, sir.
The emperor himself demands homage
And in some cases worship.
And christians refuse this as well.
This is a form of treason.
Trajan didn't just wanna go round them all up,
Because that would bring even more attention
To the christian movement.
He demanded that they make a profession of faith,
Of loyalty to rome and to the roman gods.
Trajan's attitude to christians
Is like "don't ask, don't-tell" sort of attitude,
A sort of tolerance.
If they show disrespect to the emperor
And to the roman state,
By all means arrest them, torture them, execute them.
But otherwise, if they keep themselves to themselves,
Leave them alone.
Then a catastrophic event
Brings christians unwelcome attention.
Around this time, there's a massive earthquake in antioch.
"well, maybe it was these christians
"who are not behaving properly towards the gods
And caused this chaos."
When some natural calamity occurred,
The romans choose as a scapegoat
This troublesome, revolutionary sect.
Especially targeted are the leaders,
Like ignatius.
After a series of earthquakes strike antioch
In the early 2nd century, authorities blame christians.
At times of disaster,
Christians who claimed that the roman gods did not exist
Represented a threat that could call down disaster
Upon the roman world.
Ignatius is arrested
And brought before the governor of the province.
We have this really interesting correspondence
Between trajan, who is the emperor,
And pliny, one of his governors.
Pliny writes to trajan, and he says,
"what do I do with these christians?"
Trajan writes back, and he says,
"well, don't go seeking them out.
"but if they do come to your attention,
"make them curse the name of christ.
"and if they won't do that,
"then you'll know that they are christians,
And you should act accordingly putting them to death."
Make your mark, and you're free to go.
Ignatius, he's one of the first people
To be confronted with that decision.
"will you bow the knee to the gods of rome,
Or will you stand firm in the convictions that you have?"
- I cannot sign this, governor. - I'm sorry.
I cannot swear loyalty to the emperor above my god.
You understand you leave me no choice.
We know from early christian trial documents
Concerning martyrs that roman administrators
Gave christians every chance to recant.
"honor the roman empire and you can go free."
But ignatius wasn't interested in doing this,
Knowing full well that it will lead
To his violent death in the colosseum in rome.
Placed in chains and escorted by armed guards,
Ignatius begins his 1,800-mile journey to rome.
Why go through all the trouble of moving ignatius
All the way up to rome?
Why wasn't ignatius put to death in antioch?
One theory could be that the roman empire seized on this
As an opportunity to kind of showcase ignatius
As a senior figure in the church.
That would serve as a really powerful example.
Ignatius' arrest coincides
With trajan's recent conquest of dacia,
An ancient kingdom in what is now modern-day romania.
To celebrate his victorious campaign in dacia,
Trajan inaugurated
123 days of celebratory games.
Capital criminals are being gathered
From throughout the empire.
Trajan basically says,
"let's do away with all of them in a big show."
To reach their final destination,
The captives must March 20 miles a day
Across rome's incredible system of roads.
Ignatius would have traveled
Along a major east-west thoroughfare
Which is known now as the via egnatia,
And that connected the cities
In the eastern half of the empire with rome.
The via egnatia is one of 372 major roads,
A network totaling 250,000 miles
That connect the empire's 40 provinces to rome.
The famous saying, "all roads lead to rome,"
Was absolutely true in the literal sense.
Roman roads are the nervous system of the empire.
It allows the legions and the traders,
The politicians to travel to the four corners of the empire.
But at the same time, it brings the people
And the ideas back to rome.
Ironically, it was this very system of roads
That allowed ignatius to write letters ahead
That actually helped the spread of christianity.
So in one way, the romans and their road system
Actually paved the way for the spread of christianity.
Helping him is a servant and scribe, burrhus.
I'm glad you're with me, burrhus.
It's an honor to accompany you.
That seems strange that somebody who's been arrested
As a criminal could travel with their scribe.
Slaves were not people. They were things.
So if you were a very high status citizen
And you were arrested as a criminal,
You could have your slave with you on that trip.
Burrhus was provided to him by the church,
And his job was to take dictation,
To write down the things that ignatius said.
Ignatius says, "I am chained up by ten soldiers,"
Then he says, "ten leopards, because they're so fierce.
They mistreat me. I'm in chains."
So he treats the soldiers
As if they are fierce wild beasts,
No doubt thinking about the wild beasts
That he will face in the colosseum.
This is a real man contemplating his own death
And asking god to give him the strength to go through with it.
As he comes into each town,
The local christians there come out to meet him.
He does become a little bit of a christian celebrity,
You might say.
Our lord has a plan for all of us.
Yours...Is to help spread my story.
Poor men and women
Are especially drawn to the christian message.
Christians are famous
For calling each other brother and sister.
And by doing this,
They're building for themselves a new society,
One that stands apart from roman patriarchy.
If you were poor, if you were disaffected or disenfranchised,
And that was, let's face it,
The majority of the population of rome,
Then christianity offered you opportunities
Which you would not have had otherwise in society.
One of the founding
And enticing principles of christianity
Is that the meek shall inherit the earth--
A message that would have resonated with the slaves
And lowborn within rome.
But to the romans themselves, the idea that the meek
Somehow would inherit the earth is ridiculous.
Hey, what's going on over here?
Who are these women?
It's the strong and the bold who are in power.
- Huh? - They were just leaving.
Ignatius' message of equality
Could turn that power on its head,
Even if it was going to cost him his life.
Making him a much bigger threat
Than romans can possibly anticipate.
After 60 days,
Ignatius is over halfway to rome.
He reaches the port of dyrrhachium
In modern-day albania.
No.
I choose to go to rome.
These chains... They're my choice.
Ignatius seemed determined
To go through with this plan to die in rome,
And nothing in his letters indicates
That he was looking for a way out.
Ignatius knows that there's tremendous power in martyrdom.
We know that along the way, there were certain christians
Who tried to put together an escape plan.
But ignatius doesn't take this opportunity.
He knows that there's far more power
In spreading the gospel
In going to rome and dying.
The idea of martyrdom,
The very public deaths
Of these early christian victims of roman law,
Was one that the christians embraced
When christians started to be executed publicly.
And of course, it came from the origin.
The death of christ itself was a sacrifice of god's own son.
And so all martyrs in a sense are tributes
Or echoes of the death of christ himself.
Ignatius' letters tell us about a man
Who's on a spiritual pilgrimage,
And that pilgrimage doesn't just mean
Spreading the gospel while you're alive.
It means using your very death
To be a martyr for christ.
Three months after leaving antioch,
Ignatius finally arrives in rome.
Halt.
Over a million people
Populate the thriving city
Recently transformed by the emperor.
Trajan is one of the great emperors of rome.
He's all about investing as much money
Into the public as possible.
This is through the creation of aqueducts,
Of roads, of public edifices.
He believes in that ideology.
You know, being roman is almost like today
You could say it's the american dream of its time.
They believed that rome truly was the light,
And trajan perpetuated that dream and believed in it.
Trajan's conquests
Meant that there was a massive delivery
To the roman people of slaves, of spoils,
Of new buildings, of new baths, of new temples,
And, of course, games in the colosseum.
Every roman emperor wanted to show off their conquests
With an arch or a column.
Titus famously put up an arch
Showing the conquest of jerusalem.
And now trajan puts up this massive column
Showing his conquest, showing his conquests of dacia,
And basically advertising himself
As an amazing conqueror.
It's delicately carved
With these incredibly detailed reliefs
Depicting prisoners coming back
From trajan's wars in dacia.
It literally freezes it in stone forever,
Reminding romans of what trajan has accomplished.
This is where we must part, bishop.
It's up to you now.
Spread the word in rome as quickly as possible.
Tell every christian what I intend to do.
Ignatius writes his seventh
And final letter in rome
To be delivered to the christian community
In secret by burrhus.
He also makes it very clear: Do not stop this process.
Do not rescue me.
Do not send in other people to spirit me away.
This is my destiny,
And if you're going to be good christians,
You're gonna watch this happen.
If you sought martyrdom,
If you sought this very public self-sacrifice,
This act of devotion, to inspire others,
What better place to do it than in the colosseum...
In front of 50,000 people?
It's a fate ignatius will face all too soon.
As ignatius spends his final days
In an underground chamber of the colosseum.
Ignatius would have been kept in a cell
In the hypogeum...
Awaiting his appearance on the arena floor.
The hypogeum is an incredibly complicated
And confusing area.
The network of underground tunnels
Was built 25 years earlier by emperor domitian.
The hypogeum was the entire area
Of the floor of the colosseum to a depth of 20 feet.
It was an entire labyrinth beneath the colosseum
And an enormous space
With which to produce these great shows.
Hypogeum literally means "under the earth."
Among those substructures are all kinds of accommodations
For moving personnel and props and sets
Onto the level of the performance space
So that lions or scenery could suddenly pop up
And surprise the spectators.
"ooh. Ah! What is going on now?"
Although ignatius' mind is on heaven,
The hypogeum is hell on earth.
The cheers of the crowd above,
Darkness and heat below.
One couldn't think of a worse place to be.
There would have been hundreds
If not a thousand people
Along with all of these animals
Cramped together in the hypogeum.
You can imagine what this would have been like
For ignatius.
Though I walk through the valley
Of the shadow of death...
I will fear no evil.
He's gotta ask himself, is he going to die with grace,
Or is he going to end up
Some grisly carcass on the colosseum floor?
Trajan's fourth months
Of nonstop entertainment
Begin with beast hunts in the morning...
Followed by a grisly halftime show--
Public executions.
Citizens of rome...
Marvel at the worst criminals
As they experience...
The true power of the empire.
The roman judicial system was class-driven.
If you were very, very high status,
You would be allowed to do it in some way
That was quick and easy and relatively painless.
If, however, you were of a lower class
Or you were a slave,
Then you were going to be killed fairly brutally.
But the most popular with the colosseum crowd
Was damnatio ad bestias...
Or condemned to the wild beasts.
So we have the expression in english,
"being thrown to the lions."
We use it sort of metaphorically, right?
But it was very literal in the roman empire.
People actually were thrown to the lions.
The executions of criminals using wild beasts
Was almost as old as rome itself.
Watching them gore unfortunate criminals to death,
This was part of the roman experience.
Of fellow humans and smiled and laughed.
I think part of the secret is that they
Compartmentalized the victims
As subhuman
Because they were a threat to roman society.
The romans think, "this is just
Human garbage to be gotten rid of."
With death lying inevitably ahead,
Some choose a different path.
No, no, no, no.
No! No! No!
Ignatius and his fellow condemned prisoners
Await their final terrifying moments in the colosseum.
No, no, no, no.
No! No! No!
They kill themselves in very imaginative ways.
One slave commits suicide in the toilet.
He takes a toilet sponge,
Which was a sponge at the end of the stick,
Which was essentially roman toilet paper,
And he shoves it down his throat.
I mean, these are really extreme ways to kill yourself,
But it's also a comment
On how extreme what they were facing was
And the limits that they pushed themselves through
To end their life rather than face
What the romans regarded as justice.
From the roman perspective, ignatius is gonna get
Exactly what he deserves at the colosseum.
But in reality, what they're doing is giving him a platform
And an audience.
They can't see it.
Dear lord, protect our brother ignatius
From those who would do evil to him.
Amen.
Ignatius is saying,
"the bigger the audience I have for my spectacular death,
The more I'll be able to broadcast the message."
Christians.
When they see a few of their high priests eaten by lions,
They'll turn to our gods.
So we have ignatius' own words because of his letters,
And they can really help us to get into his mind.
Bring on the fires,
The cross,
The hordes of wild beasts.
The whole phenomenon of christian martyrdom
Is absolutely a massive enigma,
And the roman mind cannot understand it,
Just as they cannot understand the sort of joy that they see
In the faces of the martyrs in the amphitheaters.
This would've confused trajan.
Trajan wants to see a battle.
And here's a man who's just
Standing there awaiting death.
Who does that?
Only let me attain jesus christ.
The end goal for him is something different.
It's something bigger and greater,
And that is eternity, eternal life with his lord.
Christianity if you were a good person, when you die,
You will go to a place
Of blessed contentment, heaven.
There is no poverty, no pain.
There is no sadness.
And everyone,
Anyone can achieve that.
The roman view
Of what happened after death was bleak.
It's a shadowy underworld
And then a place sort of like christian hell.
They did not want to die,
Because there was nothing for them.
The hideous tortures of the devil.
He's saying things like he wants to be torn apart
By the wild beasts.
He wants to be ground like bread
Between the teeth of the lion.
The language in it
Is extraordinarily strong and severe.
Real sense of wanting to die, wanting to suffer.
The wrenching of my bones.
The dicing of my limbs.
He knows that dying as a martyr
Is actually going to do far more
In spreading the gospel
Than just standing there and preaching.
And so when they see this martyr just stand there
And die gracefully, willingly,
They're gonna ask, "what does he believe?"
And when they find out, oh, man,
Christianity is going to begin to spread.
Ignatius' actions are a provocation to rome,
One that must be stopped.
Now.
Ignatius, a christian bishop,
Embraces death in the colosseum.
The romans plan to make an example of ignatius,
But this was about to completely backfire.
It's not touching him!
There are great stories of christians being
Thrown before the beasts, before the lions,
And instead of the lions devouring them,
The lions lie down at their feet.
Our lord is protecting him.
Who doesn't like that idea of a lion
Who's supposed to tear you apart
Instead rolling over to get a belly rub
Instead of eating you?
He held to his beliefs
And died for it.
Why?
For something he believed in,
And that must've been... Astounding to the romans.
Well, I think our point was made clear enough.
I'm not sure.
I'm not sure at all.
With his death, ignatius is able to subvert
The symbolism of the colosseum,
The pagan symbolism,
And in a sense replace it
With the heroism of the christian
Who is the victim in a roman game
But actually the victor in the long run.
Let us go.
The case of ignatius is just one of the early examples
Of a long line of christian martyrs.
One would beget more, because the power and the attraction
Of these kind of displays of devotion
Really convinced many other people...
Wait.
To convert to christianity.
I mean, what greater mark
Of devotion, of the rightness of a faith
Is that someone is willing to die for it?
Leave.
At the time that ignatius dies,
Nobody would expect christianity
To become what it is today.
In that moment, it would seem that he's defeated.
But in fact, the victory was his,
Because it was his belief system that would prevail.
Little by little, these figures like ignatius
Were the pieces that were building a mighty wall,
Something that was going to take over the empire.
Shortly after the time of ignatius,
There are an estimated 40,000 christians in the empire.
There are about 6 million 150 years later
When the emperor himself, constantine,
Converts in 312 a.D.
The colosseum, it made slaves into heroes.
And ironically christianity did the same thing,
Upending the power structure of rome
And taking marginalized people
And turning them into immortals.