June 30 is the feast of the First Martyrs of the Church of Rome, the Christians who died in the persecution of the Emperor Nero after the fire of July 64. The Roman historian Tacitus, in the Annals (15.44), records that Nero, accused of setting the fire himself, blamed the Christians, and had them executed in the gardens of the Vatican and on the Field of Mars — crucified, burned as torches, thrown to the dogs.
The feast was added to the Roman calendar in 1969, on the day after the solemnity of Sts. Peter and Paul, to commemorate the unnamed martyrs who died with Peter and Paul in the same persecution. The traditional site of their martyrdom is the Circus of Caligula, at the foot of the Vatican hill, where Peter was crucified and where the basilica of St. Peter now stands. The Catacomb of Priscilla, on the Via Salaria, holds the earliest Roman images of the Madonna and Child and of the Good Shepherd, painted in the age of the first martyrs.
From Rome, where they died in the gardens of Nero, to the churches built over their tombs in the centuries after, the June 30 feast is the feast of the "vast multitude" of Tacitus — the first Roman Christians, men and women, whose names are mostly unknown, who died as witnesses to the faith they had received from Peter and Paul.
