Why was Ignatius of Antioch marched all the way to Rome to die?
Condemned Christians were normally punished where they lived. Yet the bishop of Antioch was escorted by ten soldiers across Asia Minor and the Aegean to Rome, taking a strangely roundabout route and meeting whole congregations along the way. The seven letters he dictated on that journey shaped Christian thinking about bishops.
Almost nothing is known of Ignatius apart from those letters and later legend. He called himself Theophorus, the God-bearer. Tradition makes him and Polycarp disciples of the apostle John, and Eusebius says he followed Evodius as bishop of Antioch; one story even casts him as a child Jesus held and blessed. He ranks with Clement of Rome and Polycarp among the most important Apostolic Fathers.
The journey itself puzzles historians. Stevan Davies notes no other known case from the Flavian era of anyone but citizens or prisoners of war being shipped to Rome for execution, and a citizen could not legally be chained during an appeal, as Ignatius says he was. Allen Brent thinks he was sent as a spectacle for the Colosseum. Davies finds a single prisoner a meagre gift and suggests a deputy governor, lacking authority to execute, sent him away to calm Antioch's Christians. Christine Trevett concludes simply that we do not know.
His guards went via Smyrna and Troas, sailing to Neapolis and passing through Philippi rather than taking the cheapest direct sea route, which Davies explains as soldiers travelling on other state business. Ignatius was allowed visitors and messengers, and sent six letters to churches and one to Polycarp, bishop of Smyrna. Written in evident haste, full of run-on sentences, they borrow freely from Paul, Peter and John and dwell on church order, the sacraments and the bishop's authority. They survive in short, middle and long versions, and their authenticity has been questioned.
Even the date is contested. Tradition, going back to Eusebius, puts his death under Trajan, around 98 to 117; Richard Pervo proposed 135 to 140, and Timothy Barnes the 140s, arguing he quotes a Gnostic writer active only from the 130s. His relics reportedly reached Rome's Basilica di San Clemente in 637.
Source: Ignatius of Antioch
