The Road to Rome, and the Ten Leopards

The road ran west and north, out of Syria and across the wide interior of Asia Minor — the land we now call Turkey. Ignatius travelled it on foot and under guard, a prisoner among soldiers, moving from city to city toward the sea and, beyond it, Rome. He was not young, he was condemned, and he was surrounded the whole way by armed men whose task was to deliver him to the beasts.

Of those men he wrote one of his most memorable lines. Far from softening under kind treatment, he said, his guards only grew harsher. He described the whole company in a single bitter image:

From Syria even unto Rome I fight with wild beasts, being bound amid ten leopards, even a company of soldiers, who only wax worse when they are kindly treated.

Ten leopards — that is how it felt to be chained in the midst of them. The picture is exact and unsentimental. Ignatius does not hide the misery of the journey behind pious language. He was a man in real chains, guarded by real and hardened men, and he names it plainly even as he presses on toward what he believed lay at the end.

Received at Smyrna

The journey was not only hardship. As word ran ahead of him, the churches of the region sent people out to meet the famous prisoner. Along the way he was welcomed, encouraged, and cared for by Christians who counted it an honour to stand with a bishop on his way to die.

The great stop was the city of Smyrna, on the Aegean coast. There Ignatius was received by the local church and by messengers from other congregations who had come to see him. Smyrna had its own bishop, a younger man named Polycarp, who would himself die a martyr many years later and whose name is joined to Ignatius's ever after. It is fair and true to say that Ignatius was received by Polycarp and the church at Smyrna. Beyond that we should be careful: we do not have a record of their meeting word for word, and it would be inventing to imagine the embraces and speeches of a reunion. What we have is better than invention — the letters that came out of that halt.

The letters written on the road

This is the chapter that explains why the book in your hands exists at all. During his pause at Smyrna, and again at his next stop, Ignatius did a remarkable thing for a condemned man. He wrote.

From Smyrna he sent four letters. Three went back to churches whose delegates had come to greet him — the Christians at Ephesus, at Magnesia, and at Tralles — thanking them, warning them, urging them to hold together. The fourth he sent ahead of himself, to the church at Rome, the city he was travelling toward. That letter to the Romans is unlike the others, and we will come to why.

Moving on from Smyrna, Ignatius reached the port of Troas, near the site of ancient Troy, where ships crossed toward Europe. From Troas he wrote three more letters: to the church at Philadelphia, to the church back at Smyrna that had just cared for him, and a personal letter to Polycarp, its bishop. Seven letters in all — four from Smyrna, three from Troas — written in snatched hours along the way to his execution.

Think of what that means. A prisoner being marched across an empire to be thrown to beasts spent his last free weeks not in complaint but in correspondence, pouring out his heart to churches he loved, most of which he had never seen and would never see. He knew he had little time and much to say. So he wrote quickly, urgently, sometimes almost breathlessly, about the things he believed the churches most needed to hear before he was gone.

Those seven letters are the rest of this book. They are not polished treatises composed in safety. They are the words of a dying man, sent out along a hard road, and they have been read and treasured by the church ever since. Before we turn to them, it is worth pausing to hear what was in them — the heart of the message Ignatius was so desperate to leave behind.