Catiline conspirators, strangled by order of the Consul Cicero.—B.C. 55.
Vercingetorix, King of the Gauls, by order of Julius Cæsar.
Sejanus, the minister of Tiberius.—A.D. 31.
Simon, the son of Giora, the defender of Jerusalem against Vespasian.—A.D. 69.
In the centre of the upper chamber is the round aperture, covered by a grate, down which the prisoners were cast.
Juvenal says: "Happy ages of the just, happy centuries, it may be said, those which saw, formerly under the kings, as under the tribunes, Rome content with one prison."
One prison may have been enough in those times when it was against the law to confine a Roman citizen before he was tried. We have records of other prisons. Appius Claudius constructed a prison for common offenders near the Forum Olitorium, the scene of "Roman Charity." (See [page 190].) Pliny mentions "Stationes Municipiorum"—barracks of the municipal soldiers—near the Forum of Julius Cæsar. These may likewise have been prisons. In addition to these, there was the Lautumiæ.
Below the church, the Chapel of the Crucifixion occupies part of the buildings of the prison, and from the sacristy a flight of modern steps leads down into a lower cell, the Chapel of SS. Peter and Paul. The entrance and steps from the street are also modern. In this chamber, to the right of the altar, is a closed-up passage; it evidently communicated with other chambers. On the tufa, carefully guarded by iron bars, an indentation is shown which, they say, was caused by the jailers beating Peter's face against the rock. (He must have had rather a hard head!)
Another flight of modern stairs leads down into the Tullianum: the opening down which the prisoners were cast can still be seen. The iron door is the opening of a sewer leading into the Cloaca Maxima, by which means the dead bodies, &c., were taken away. This drain is of the same construction as the Cloaca Maxima, and comes from beyond the other chambers, mentioned below, with which it also communicates.