The life of St Clement of Rome
In time Clement served the church of Rome as one of its earliest bishops, following after Linus and Anacletus. Under the emperor Trajan he was banished from the city and sent to labor in a stone quarry near the Black Sea, and many of his disciples chose exile alongside him rather than be parted from their spiritual father.
Tradition holds that he was finally put to death there by being thrown into the sea with an anchor bound to his neck, and that for centuries afterward the sea drew back each year on the day of his death so that the faithful could venerate his body in an underwater shrine, until in the ninth century his relics were recovered and carried first to Constantinople and then to Rome and Kiev. The earliest surviving accounts of Clement's life, however, say nothing about how he died, and scholars regard the anchor and the exile as later legend built up around a man about whom very little is reliably known.
