Saint Sebastian

Saint Sebastian was a Christian from Milan who suffered martyrdom in Rome and was buried on the Appian Way. According to tradition he was an officer of the imperial guard. The Church commemorates him on January 20.

The oldest testimonies are brief. A fourth-century Roman list of martyrs known as the Depositio Martyrum records under January 20 that Sebastian was buried “at the Catacombs,” as that place on the Appian Way was then called. Toward the end of the same century Saint Ambrose, bishop of Milan, mentioned him on his feast day while explaining Psalm 118. He said that Sebastian came from Milan and set out for Rome, where persecutions were raging. There he suffered martyrdom and, as Ambrose added, in the city to which he had come as a guest he found a dwelling for eternity.

We do not know when he was born or in what year he died. Tradition links his death with the persecutions under the emperor Diocletian, at the turn of the third and fourth centuries. More is told only by an account of his martyrdom written in Rome in the fifth century. Historians see in it an edifying story whose details cannot be confirmed, yet it is the source of the image of Sebastian that has endured in devotion and in art.

According to this account Sebastian was an officer of the personal guard of the emperors Diocletian and Maximian in Rome. He did not reveal his faith, so that he could help the Christians who were awaiting death in prison: he visited them and strengthened their spirit. He also proclaimed the Gospel among soldiers, officials, and the distinguished families of Rome.

The story goes on to say that when he was denounced as a Christian, the emperor ordered him to be tied to a post and shot with arrows. The archers went away convinced that he was dead, but a Christian woman named Irene, who came to bury him, found him alive and healed his wounds. Sebastian then presented himself before the emperor and reproached him for his cruelty toward Christians. He was beaten to death, and his body was thrown into the city sewer. A Christian woman named Lucina, to whom the saint is said to have appeared in a dream, buried him on the Appian Way.

By the fourth century a basilica stood at his tomb, later called the Basilica of Saint Sebastian Outside the Walls. It is one of the seven churches that pilgrims traditionally visit in Rome, and the nearby catacombs bear the martyr’s name. Rome venerates him as its third patron, after the apostles Peter and Paul.

Sebastian was not canonized in a formal process; like other martyrs of the first centuries, he has been venerated since antiquity. For centuries he has been invoked as a protector against plague, and soldiers and archers have also taken him as their patron. The oldest images show him as a mature, bearded man; it was only Renaissance art that made him a youth pierced by arrows. On the day of his memorial the Church asks for the spirit of fortitude, so that by his example we may learn to obey God rather than men.