Studio8 - Uniting the Arts

Not long after the crucifixion, Pilate was recalled to Rome, although perhaps not in the circumstances he would have wished. His copybook had been blotted by continuing poor relations with the local population, and allegations of an unnecessarily brutal suppression of an uprising in Samaria. According to some versions of the story he was exiled to Gaul where - out of remorse for his part in Jesus's death - he committed suicide in Vienne.

Another version of the story is that he died in Rome and was thrown into the River Tiber, but the waters boiled up in revolt and threw him back on the land, and the corpse was eventually carried to Vienne (where a monument to him still stands) and dropped into the Rhone. Yet again, so goes the legend, the waters rejected him, and in the end he was taken to a remote mountain lake near Lucerne in modern Switzerland, into which he sank peacefully, although, according to tradition, every Good Friday his ghost rises to wash its hands in the pure, cold water.