The Pyramid of Caius Cestius

This famous monument was erected about the year 30 B.C., and marks the spot near which St. Paul suffered martyrdom. The pyramid is built of brick, and coated with marble; is a hundred and twenty-five feet high, a hundred feet square at the base; and the old Protestant cemetery, now closed, surrounds it. In the interior is a small sepulchral chamber painted in arabesques. Two inscriptions on the exterior show that the Caius Cestius buried here was a praetor, a tribune of the people, and one of the "Epulones" appointed to provide the sacrificial feasts of the gods. Caius Cestius died about 30 B.C., leaving Agrippa as his executor.

"St. Paul was led to execution beyond the city-walls on the road to Ostia. As he issued forth from the gate, his eyes must have rested for a moment on that sepulchral pyramid which stood beside the road, and still stands unshattered amid the wreck of so many centuries upon the same spot.

"That spot was then only the burial-place of a single Roman: it is now the burial-place of many Britons.

"The mausoleum of Caius Cestius rises conspicuously among humble graves, and marks the spot where Papal Rome suffers her Protestant sojourners to bury their dead. . . . Among the works of man, that pyramid is the only surviving witness of the martyrdom of St. Paul; and we may thus regard it with yet deeper interest as a monument unconsciously erected by a pagan to the memory of a martyr."