The Great Cloud of Witnesses · The Martyrs' Church
Caius Presbyter of Rome
died c. 200Early Church
The Roman presbyter who, around AD 200, told an opponent to go look at the graves of Peter and Paul.
Pictured: the era he stood in — The Christian Martyrs' Last Prayer — Jean-Léon Gérôme (1863–83), public domain
Summary
- Lived died c. 200.
- Stood in The Martyrs' Church (AD 100–313).
- Hangs on The Fathers.
- Tradition: Early Church.
The life
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.
What was happening while he lived4 moments · AD 100–313
- c. 155Polycarp of Smyrna is burned in the stadiumThe old bishop had been a disciple of the apostle John. When the governor told him to curse Christ and go free, the account written by his own congregation records his answer: "Eighty and six years have I served Him, and He never did me any injury: how then can I blaspheme my King and my Saviour?" The traditional date is 155 or 156; some scholars argue for as late as 167.
- c. 165Justin Martyr is beheaded at RomeThe philosopher who had written open letters defending Christians to two emperors was tried by the city prefect Rusticus with six companions. The court record survives as the *Acts of Justin*. Asked what teachings he held, he explained them; asked to sacrifice, he refused, and the group was scourged and beheaded.
- 177The martyrs of Lyons and VienneMob violence in Gaul turned into arrests, torture, and days in the amphitheater. The churches there wrote an account that Eusebius preserved (*Church History* 5.1). Two names stayed: Pothinus, the bishop, over ninety years old, who died in prison, and Blandina, a slave woman whose owners feared she would break first and who outlasted them all.
- c. 203Perpetua and Felicity die in the arenaVibia Perpetua, a young mother of good family in Carthage, and Felicity, a pregnant slave woman, were arrested with several companions. Perpetua kept a prison diary that survives inside *The Passion of Perpetua and Felicity*, one of the earliest firsthand writings we have from a Christian woman. Felicity gave birth in prison days before they were sent out to the beasts.
Go further
Read them yourself. Public-domain works are free to read in full; the rest open where the book can be found.
Search Caius Presbyter of Rome at the Internet Archive · every work MannaFest cites
Why this one hangs here
Around AD 200 he told an opponent to go look at the graves of Peter and Paul, which anyone in Rome could still visit.
Hangs on The Fathers: The men who carried the faith out of the apostles' hands, and wrote down what they had received.
Standing beside himThe Martyrs' Church · 40 on this stretch of wall
A 22-year-old mother who kept a diary in prison and walked into the arena at Carthage singing.
Stayed with his people through plague and persecution, then walked to his own beheading and paid the executioner.
Traced his teaching straight back to the apostle John through Polycarp, and wrote the first great takedown of the gnostics.
Kept wearing his philosopher's cloak after he met Christ, argued the faith to the emperor's face, and was beheaded for it.
Wanted to die with his martyred father as a boy, and spent the rest of his life laying six versions of the Old Testament side by side.
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The lawyer who gave the church the word Trinity and told Rome that the blood of the martyrs is seed.