St. Sebastian

Sebastian is one of those early martyrs whose cult is enormous but whose biography is largely legendary. The core facts are few but solid: he was a Roman officer who became a Christian, was discovered, ordered shot with arrows, survived — the arrows did not kill him — nursed back to health by a Roman matron named Irene, returned to rebuke Diocletian to his face, and was then beaten to death with clubs. The legendary accretions around him must be distinguished from what the ancient sources actually say. The arrows and the recovery and the second death are in the martyrdom account; the elaborate story of Sebastian's hidden ministry, his encouragement of other martyrs in prison, and his miraculous cures are in the passio but deserve caution.

Sebastian was a real martyr of early Rome, venerated from a very early date, whose feast was old enough to be fixed in the Hieronymianum. His name was among those commemorated in the Roman canon. The military images connected to him — the soldier for Christ, the arrow-pierced body — and later the plague associations, when he became one of the great intercessors in epidemic time, say something about how the Church drew on his witness across different eras of crisis. He is primarily a Roman martyr of the Diocletian persecution: a soldier who chose Christ over Caesar, endured what would have killed most men, returned to his accusers, and was killed for it the second time.