The Worst Room in Rome: Paul's Last Words from the Mamertine Prison

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The Worst Room in Rome: Paul's Last Words from the Mamertine Prison There is a prison in Rome that looks like nothing from the street, and yet it is one of the most impacting places you can stand in your whole life. It began as a cistern carved into the rock, with a hole in the ceiling for the only way in and out. Cold, dark, and sitting right above the ancient sewer, it was where Rome held its condemned before execution. According to the tradition of the church, it is where both Peter and Paul spent their final days. And it is the room where Paul wrote his last letter, the book we call 2 Timothy. This week's bonus episode in our Rome series takes you down into that room, so that words you have read a hundred times start to feel true, not just in your head but in your body. What was the Mamertine Prison? The Mamertine sits at the foot of the Capitoline Hill, right beside the Roman Forum. It was not a prison the way we think of one. Under Roman practice, prison was not the punishment. It was a holding place for enemies of the state who were waiting to die. The lower chamber, the Tullianum, started life as a cistern fed by a natural spring, and prisoners were lowered or thrown in through an opening in the ceiling. The Roman historian Sallust, writing a generation before Paul, described it as a place of neglect, darkness, and stench, hideous and fearsome to behold. When the water rose, prisoners could be left sitting in it up to their necks. What happened in that room besides death? This is the part that catches your breath. There is a spring in the floor of that pit, and the water still rises today. By the tradition handed down to us, Peter led people to Jesus even down there, and used that same spring water to baptize his guards and fellow prisoners. Church tradition names two of those guards as Processus and Martinianus. So in one small room you have a spring where people were being born again, and a few feet away a dark passage that drained to the sewer and carried the bodies of the dead out to the river. New bi