Ignatius, bishop of Antioch, was condemned to the beasts under Trajan and taken overland across Asia Minor to Rome for the sentence to be carried out, some time between 107 and 110. On the journey, under guard of ten soldiers he called leopards, he wrote seven letters — to the churches at Ephesus, Magnesia, Tralles, Rome, Philadelphia and Smyrna, and to Polycarp. The Church keeps his memorial on October 17.
The letters are the earliest Christian writing after the New Testament to describe a church governed by a single bishop with his presbyters and deacons, and the first to use the phrase he katholike ekklesia, the catholic Church. In the letter to the Romans he asks the Christians of the city not to intervene to save him: he is God's wheat, and will be ground by the teeth of the beasts to become the pure bread of Christ. It is the reason the Roman Church could not later claim to have rescued him.
He was killed in the amphitheatre, by tradition the Flavian amphitheatre — the Colosseum. His relics were carried back to Antioch and returned to Rome in the seventh century, where they rest beneath the high altar of the Basilica of San Clemente al Laterano, in the same church that holds the fourth- century basilica and the Mithraeum below it.
