Caius Presbyter of Rome

Caius — the name is also spelled Gaius — was a presbyter of the church at Rome during the episcopate of Zephyrinus, roughly 199 to 217. Eusebius calls him a very learned man and reports that he was widely respected in his own city. He is remembered for one sentence. He was arguing publicly with a Montanist teacher named Proclus, who claimed authority for the New Prophecy movement partly by pointing to the tombs of Philip's prophesying daughters at Hierapolis in Asia. Caius answered by pointing to graves of his own: I can show you the trophies of the apostles. Go to the Vatican hill, or go out along the Ostian Way, and you will find the trophies of the men who founded this church. The word he used, tropaion, meant a monument marking a victory. It is the earliest written evidence anyone has for the location of the tombs of Peter and Paul — and it is not a legend told at a distance but an invitation, from a Roman to a Roman, to walk out and look. The two sites he named are where St. Peter's Basilica and St. Paul Outside the Walls stand today. Excavations under St. Peter's in the twentieth century found a second-century monument at exactly the place Caius described. Eusebius quotes him elsewhere too. Caius accepted thirteen letters of Paul and did not count Hebrews among them, which tells us something about what the Roman church of his day read. He also, according to Eusebius, said the Montanist Cerinthus had forged revelations claiming angelic authority and promised a thousand-year kingdom of bodily pleasure after the resurrection. His Dialogue with Proclus is lost. Everything above comes from the pieces Eusebius chose to copy into his Church History a century later. Nothing at all is known of his birth, his family, his work, or his death. He was, so far as the record goes, an ordinary presbyter of a persecuted congregation, arguing in a city where his church still had no legal right to exist. And the single line of his that survived turned out to be one of the load-bearing pieces of evidence in the whole archaeology of early Christian Rome. Sources: Eusebius, Church History II.25, III.28, III.31, VI.20; the fragments of Caius (Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 5); the 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia, article Caius.