neel
and pray over the grave. And that was the beginning of Saint Peter's
Church. But Anacletus died a martyr too, and the bishops after him all
perished in the same way up to Eutichianus, whose name means something
like 'the fortunate one' in barbarous Greek-Latin, and who was indeed
fortunate, for he died a natural death. But in the mean time certain
Greeks had tried to steal the holy body, so that the Roman Christians
carried it away for nineteen months to the Catacombs of Saint Sebastian,
after which they brought it back again and laid it in its place. And
again after that, when the new circus was built by Elagabalus, they took
it once more to the same catacombs, where it remained in safety for a
long time.

Now came Constantine, in love with religion and inclined to think
Christianity best, and made a famous edict in Milan, and it is said that
he laid the deep foundations of the old Church of Saint Peter's, which
afterward stood more than eleven hundred years. He built it over the
little oratory of Anacletus, whose chapel stood where the saint's body
had lain, under the nearest left-hand pillar of the canopy that covers
the high altar, as you go up from the door. Constantine's church was
founded, on the south side, within the lines of Nero's circus, outside
of it on the north side, and parallel with its length. Most churches are
built with the apse to the east, but Constantine's, like the present
basilica, looked west, because from time immemorial the bishop of Rome,
when consecrating, stood on the farther side of the altar from the
people, facing them over it. And the church was consecrated by Pope
Sylvester the First, in the year 326.

Constantine built his church as a memorial and not as a tomb, because at
that time Saint Peter's body lay in the catacombs, where it had been
taken in the year 219, under Elagabalus. But at last, in the days of
Honorius, disestablisher of heathen worship, the body was brought back
for the last time, with great concourse and ceremony, and laid where it
or its dust still lies, in a brazen sarcophagus.

Then came Alaric and the Vandals and the Goths. But they respected the
church and the Saint's body, though they respected Rome very little. And
Odoacer extinguished the flickering light of the Western Empire, and
Dietrich of Bern, as the Goths called Theodoric of Verona, founded the
Gothic kingdom, and left his name in the Nibelungenlied and elsewhere.
At last arose Charles, who was