Saints Mark and Marcellian

Agostino Amore, writing for santiebeati, is blunt: there is no certain information about the two martyrs. ² What there is comes from the calendars. The Hieronymian Martyrology commemorates them on June 18 as buried in the cemetery of Balbina on the Via Ardeatina. ² The Gelasian and Gregorian Sacramentaries confirm the date, and so do the historical martyrologies down to the Roman. ² Butler said the same: "All the ancient Martyrologies mark their festival on the eighteenth of June." ³

The current Roman Martyrology keeps to that record. It places them at Rome in the cemetery of Balbina on the Via Ardeatina, martyrs in the persecution of the Emperor Diocletian, and adds that they were made brothers by the same martyrdom. ¹ It says nothing of their family. ¹

Their fuller story is part of the Passion of Saint Sebastian. ²³ The Catholic Encyclopedia dates those Acts probably to the beginning of the fifth century, and says of the stories in them that they "are unhistorical and not worthy of belief." ⁵ Amore calls the Passion legendary too. ² What follows is the legend, as Butler and Amore tell it.

Mark and Marcellian, Butler writes, were twin brothers of an illustrious Roman family, converted in their youth and married. ³ Arrested and condemned by Chromatius, the deputy of the prefect of Rome, they were given thirty days' respite at their friends' request and lodged in the house of Nicostratus, the public registrar. ²³ Their parents, Tranquillinus and Martia, still pagans, came with the young men's wives and their infants to beg them to give in. ³

Sebastian, an officer of the emperor's household, visited them every day and kept up their courage. ²³ In Butler's telling, the visits ended by converting their father and mother, their wives, Nicostratus, and finally Chromatius himself, who set the brothers free and retired from office. ³ Amore adds that during this time Pope Gaius ordained them deacons, and that they served the Christians with him and worked miracles. ²

Then they were betrayed. Butler says Castulus, a Christian officer of the palace, had hidden them in his own rooms, and that an apostate named Torquatus gave them away. ³ The new judge, Fabian, had them bound to two pillars with their feet nailed to them, and left them there a day and a night; the next day they were run through with lances. ³ The 1897 Martyrology tells the same death in brief: tied to a post, nails driven into their feet, and still praising the name of Christ, they were pierced through the sides with lances. ⁴

The grave is the one point on which the old sources argue. ² The Hieronymian Martyrology and a sixth-century index of the cemeteries put it in Balbina, on the Via Ardeatina, and the current Martyrology follows them. ¹² The Passion puts it on the Via Appia at the second milestone from the city, at a place called the sandpits. ² Butler, combining them, puts it in the sandpit afterward called their cemetery, two miles from Rome, between the Appian and Ardeatine roads. ³

Amore sides with the archaeologist G. B. de Rossi. The pilgrim guides of the seventh century, he writes, say the brothers' tombs were venerated under the altar of a church next to the one where Pope Damasus lay, and some way from the church of Pope Mark. ² Since the Liber Pontificalis puts Pope Mark's basilica in the cemetery of Balbina, De Rossi concluded that the martyrs lay elsewhere, in the cemetery of Basileus, which has never been identified, and that "in Balbina" is a mistake. ²

The relics are disputed as well. One tradition, Amore says, took them to the basilica of Saints Cosmas and Damian in Rome; another to the church of Saint Medard at Soissons. ²

The sources step back from the legend at different speeds. Butler, following the Acts, has them twins, and the 1897 Martyrology calls them brothers. ³⁴ The Avvenire notice on santiebeati says they were perhaps brothers in the flesh, but certainly brothers in martyrdom. ² The current Martyrology goes furthest and says only that the same martyrdom made them brothers. ¹

Their dates differ in the same way. Butler places them in 286, early in Diocletian's reign and before his edicts, when local persecutions broke out on their own. ³ santiebeati gives about 304, the height of the great persecution, and says the prefect Chromatius gave them a month to deny their faith. ² Both Martyrologies say only that they died under Diocletian. ¹⁴

The Byzantine Church remembers them too, Amore notes, though on a different day: the Synaxarion of Constantinople keeps them with other martyrs on December 18. ² The 1897 Martyrology, following the legend, keeps their father Tranquillinus as a martyr in his own right on July 6, converted by Sebastian's preaching. ⁴

No source consulted for this page names a patronage for Saints Mark and Marcellian, and none is claimed here. ¹²³

The feast of Saints Mark and Marcellian is June 18. ¹² The current Roman Martyrology commemorates them that day, and the date goes back to the Hieronymian Martyrology and the early Roman sacramentaries. ¹² Butler and the 1897 Martyrology keep them on June 18 as well. ³⁴

Very little about them is certain, and the Church's own record now says so. ¹² What has lasted is a date kept for more than a thousand years and two names said together. ²

The legend that grew up around them is about pressure from the people who love you. Their parents, their wives and their children came to plead with them, and the story turns on the month they had to decide. ³ In Butler's telling the judges take up a few lines and the pleading most of the rest. ³

In the same story, encouragement is a daily visit. Sebastian came to them every day. ³ The legend makes his visits the cause of a household's conversion; whatever the history, it knows what a friend can do in a prison. ³⁵

The current Martyrology, reducing everything else, kept one phrase: brothers made so by the same martyrdom. ¹ That is true whether or not they shared a father.