A Day in the Death Penalty Around the Martyrology

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The Roman martyrology distinguishes August 9 as the feast date of several minor ancient saints of questionable veracity purportedly martyred by the persecutions of Rome.

Firmus and Rusticus

The Virgin of the Rosary with Saints Firmus and Rusticus (1603) by Pietro Marone

Saints Firmus and Rusticus are two gentlemen of Bergamo who are supposed to have wound up martyred in Verona under Diocletian‘s persecutions. There’s an Acts of Firmus and Rusticus that the contemporary church does not consider authentic; it’s possible that if they really existed they might have been North African Christians whose remains were translated to Verona.

Firmus and Rusticus are not the patron saints of Romeo and Juliet‘s hometown; that honor instead goes to Zeno.

Numidicus

Much more obviously African is St. Numidicus, who under the short-reigning but heavy-persecuting emperor Decius was burned at the stake in Carthage and/or survived burning to accept ordination at the hands of St. Cyprian.

Romanus Ostiarius

August 9 is the vigil of St. Lawrence‘s martyrdom in Rome. St. Romanus is a legendary spinoff on Lawrence: a Roman guard who is supposed to have been so moved by Lawrence that he solicited baptism from the saint, and was immediately martyred for his trouble. Although his dubious historicity — one can’t but suspect outright fiction — has ushered him into the martyrology’s footnotes, he was formerly consequential enough to be sculpted for the colonnade of St. Peter’s.

There are several other martyrs also named Romanus; still, this guy in his day was the most important and the most Italian which makes me fairly confident that he also conferred his name upon the Tuscan town San Romano, and through its position amid the Florentine conflict with Siena and Lucca, to Uccello‘s triptych series The Battle of San Romano, a great pathbreaker for lance-aided linear perspective in the early Renaissance.


Noccolo Mauruzi da Tolentino unseats Bernardino della Ciarda at the Battle of San Romano, by Paolo Uccello (c. 1435-1455).

Secundian, Marcellian and Verian

At last we have St. Secundian, another Decian martyr who was supposedly a Senator or similar VIP. August 9 marks his martyrdom perhaps near Civitavecchia, along with two bookish minions — students or scholars of some sort.

On this day..

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