A Life, for their commemoration on the eleventh day of September — Friday within the Fifteenth Week after Pentecost
Dico autem vobis amicis meis: ne terreamini ab his, qui vos persequuntur. “And I say to you, my friends: Be not afraid of them who persecute you.” — Communion antiphon of the Mass Salus autem, from Luke 12:4
I. Two names on a stone
Most of the saints of the Roman Martyrology come to us through a life. These two come to us through a tomb.
On the twenty-first of March, 1845, the Jesuit archaeologist Giuseppe Marchi was working in the ruined catacomb on the old Via Salaria that the ancient pilgrim itineraries call ad Sanctam Basillam and later ages the cemetery of St. Hermes. He was following the seventh-century guidebooks, which told him that here, near the crypt of the martyr Hermes, the pilgrim would find the resting place of the brothers Protus and Hyacinth. In a small chamber, where the fallen earth of many centuries had sealed everything, he found a loculus still closed by its original slab. The inscription read:
D P III IDUS SEPTEBR YACINTHUS MARTYR
Depositus tertio Idus Septembris: Hyacinthus, martyr. Buried on the third day before the Ides of September — which is the eleventh. The date on the slab was the date in the Missal.
Inside was a small quantity of charred bone, and among the ashes threads of a gold-shot fabric in which the remains had been wrapped. The tomb had never been opened. What Marchi held was not a relic that had passed through a thousand hands and a hundred inventories, but a martyr’s body as the Christians of the third century had laid it down, and the marks on it said what no document had preserved: Hyacinth had died by fire.
A few paces away was the tomb of Protus. It was empty, and the reason was known: Pope Leo IV had translated his relics in the ninth century to the church of San Giovanni a Porta Latina, with those of Hyacinth — or so the record said. The record was in error by half. Hyacinth had stayed behind.
This is the anchor of everything that follows. Whatever we cannot know about these two, we know that they were real, that they were brothers, that they died for Christ in Rome, that one of them was burned, and that the Church has kept their day without a break from the third century to this morning.
II. What the oldest records say
The Depositio Martyrum, the Roman calendar of martyrs compiled in the year 336 and preserved in the Chronography of 354, has the entry: III Idus Septembris, Proti et Iacinti, in Basillae. The eleventh of September, Protus and Hyacinth, in the cemetery of Basilla. It is among the earliest liturgical calendars in the Church’s possession, and they are in it.
Pope St. Damasus, who spent his pontificate (366-384) seeking out the tombs of the Roman martyrs and setting over them his verses cut in the beautiful lettering of Furius Dionysius Filocalus, composed an epigram for their crypt. It names them brothers — germani fratres — and celebrates the crown that each won. The pilgrim itineraries of the seventh century, written for the northern visitors who came to Rome to pray at the tombs of the saints, direct the traveller along the Via Salaria to St. Hermes, and then to “the holy martyrs Protus and Hyacinth.”
The Martyrologium Hieronymianum keeps their day; St. Bede keeps it in his martyrology; the Sacramentaries give them a Mass; and they were, by the time the Roman calendar took the shape it has held for a thousand years, fixed in the eleventh of September as firmly as the Ides themselves.
That is the historical bedrock, and it is broader than what most martyrs of their age can claim.
III. The Acts of St. Eugenia
Above the bedrock lies a story, and the story must be told with the honesty the Church herself brings to it.
According to the Passio of St. Eugenia — a Latin and Greek romance of the fifth or sixth century, of the kind that hagiographers love and historians distrust — Protus and Hyacinth were eunuchs, slaves in the household of Philip, prefect of Egypt under the Emperor Commodus, and tutors and companions to his daughter Eugenia. They were, the Passio insists, learned men, and they read with their mistress the philosophers and then the Epistles of St. Paul. When she resolved to become a Christian, they became Christians with her; when she fled her father’s house to seek baptism, she cut her hair and dressed as a man, and the two brothers went with her, and all three were received into a monastery near Alexandria, where Eugenia — so the tale runs — rose to be abbot without her sex being known.
Her discovery, her father’s conversion, his martyrdom, the family’s removal to Rome, and Eugenia’s own martyrdom under Valerian follow in the manner of such narratives. Protus and Hyacinth, by this account, were arrested in Rome, refused to sacrifice to the gods, were beaten and beheaded, and were buried on the Via Salaria by the matron Basilla whose name the cemetery bears.
The Bollandists and the modern historians of the Roman martyrs have long concluded that the Passio of Eugenia is a religious romance, and that its Egyptian chapters were composed to give the two Roman martyrs a suitably edifying past. The internal chronology is impossible; the details are those of a story and not of a court record. It is also — and here the stone speaks against the parchment — wrong about the manner of death. The slab and the ashes say fire; the Passio says the sword.
None of this is scandal. The Church has never proposed the Acts of Eugenia as a document of faith. The Roman Martyrology in its old form kept the outline of the story; the Breviary lessons drew on it; and in doing so the Church did what she has always done with such material — she used it to honour men she knew to be real, while never staking her honour on the story’s every particular. The historian who peels away the romance does not find nothing underneath. He finds the slab.
IV. The persecution
When did they die? The Passio says under Valerian, or, in its Egyptian portions, Commodus. The archaeological setting of the tomb — the style of the loculus, the character of the cemetery, the wealth of the burial — points to the middle of the third century. The persecution of Valerian in 257 and 258 is the likeliest occasion. It was under Valerian that St. Lawrence was burned on his gridiron, that Pope St. Sixtus II was taken in the cemetery of Callistus and killed with his deacons, and that the Roman Church suffered the most searching attack it had known since Decius. A Christian burned to death in Rome in those years was in very great company.
Of their arrest, their trial, and their words before the magistrate we know nothing that can be trusted. That is not a poverty. It is the ordinary condition of the Roman martyrs of the third century, and it teaches something. The Church did not begin by keeping stories about her martyrs. She began by keeping their bodies and their days. The Depositio Martyrum is not a book of lives; it is a list of graves. The first thing the faithful wanted to know about a martyr was not what he said but where he lay, so that they might go there and pray.
V. Basilla’s field
The cemetery in which they were buried lay on the old Via Salaria, and the itineraries call it ad Sanctam Basillam — at St. Basilla’s. Basilla herself is a Roman martyr of the same period, commemorated on the twenty-second of September, and the tradition that she gave her land for the burial of the martyrs is as old as the name. Near the brothers lay the martyr Hermes, whose cult was so great in the early Middle Ages that the whole cemetery came to bear his name instead.
Over the tomb of Protus and Hyacinth a basilica was built, and Pope St. Symmachus, at the turn of the sixth century, restored it. The pilgrims came for centuries. Then the city contracted, the Gothic wars emptied the suburban cemeteries, the relics of the martyrs were carried inside the walls to save them from the Lombards and the Saracens, and the catacombs were forgotten. Leo IV, in the years around 850, opened the crypt and removed what he believed to be the bodies of both brothers to San Giovanni a Porta Latina. The workmen took Protus. Whether they missed Hyacinth’s smaller tomb, or judged the charred remains too slight to move, or simply erred, no one now can say. The record was written up as a translation of two, and the catacomb fell into silence for nearly a thousand years.
VI. The finding
It was the recovery of Christian Rome underground in the nineteenth century — the work of Marchi and, after him, of his greater pupil Giovanni Battista de Rossi — that brought them back. Marchi’s discovery of 1845 was one of the first fruits of that science and among its most decisive, because it did what the sceptical age had said could not be done: it took a name from the calendar and a date from the Missal and found them cut on a stone in the earth exactly where the seventh-century guidebooks had said they would be.
The relics of St. Hyacinth were removed with ceremony and given to the Urban College of the Propaganda Fide, the Roman seminary that trains priests for the missions, where they are venerated. It was a fitting home. The two brothers had been, in the old story, the companions of a young convert who left everything to follow Christ; in the new dispensation, Hyacinth keeps company with young men preparing to carry the same Gospel to the ends of the earth.
VII. Ne terreamini
The Mass the Church gives them is Salus autem, from the Common of Several Martyrs, and its lessons fit them with a precision that seems providential.
The Epistle (Heb. 10:32-38) bids the faithful “call to mind the former days,” in which “being illuminated, you endured a great fight of afflictions” — some “made a gazingstock by reproaches and tribulations,” others “companions of them that were used in such sort.” Companions: it is the word the Passio uses of the brothers, and it is the truest thing in the story. Whatever else they were, they were two who suffered together and were buried side by side.
The Gospel (Luke 12:1-8) is Our Lord’s instruction on fear. “Be not afraid of them who kill the body, and after that have no more that they can do.” And then the sentence which the martyr on his pyre took at its word: “Whosoever shall confess me before men, him shall the Son of man also confess before the angels of God.” St. Ambrose, commenting on this passage in his Exposition of St. Luke, observes that the Lord does not say the body is nothing, but that the body is all the persecutor can reach; the soul lies beyond the fire. St. Cyprian, who died in that same persecution of Valerian, wrote to the confessors of Africa that the martyr’s confession is not the work of a moment but the crowning of a whole life of fidelity — that one does not confess Christ on the day of trial unless one has been confessing Him every day before.
VIII. Two brothers
There is a particular grace in the martyrdom of brothers, and the Roman calendar is full of them: Marcellinus and Peter, John and Paul, Cosmas and Damian, and these two. St. Augustine, preaching on the martyrs, loved to point out that the ties of blood which the world thinks strongest are shown by the martyrs to be weaker than the tie of grace, and yet grace does not destroy them; it takes them up. Protus and Hyacinth were born of one mother and reborn of one font, and they were laid in one crypt. Damasus, who called them germani, saw that the brotherhood of nature had been perfected and not abolished by the brotherhood of the Cross.
The order of the names is itself a small sermon. Protus — Protos in the Greek, “the first” — is named first in every record from the fourth century on, and Hyacinth, whose name means the flower, is named second. But it was Hyacinth’s tomb that was found intact and his ashes that bore witness; the first was carried off and the second was left, and the second in the end told the story. So the last shall be first, and the first last.
IX. What the life teaches
Three things, chiefly.
That the Church’s memory is longer and more exact than her stories. The Passio is mostly legend; the Depositio is fact; and the slab found in 1845 vindicates the calendar against the novel. When a man tells you the saints are pious fictions, you may answer him with the eleventh of September: a date kept by the Roman Church for seventeen hundred years, cut into the stone of a tomb that no one had opened since the day it was sealed.
That the martyr is known by his wounds, not his words. We have no speech of Protus, no last testimony of Hyacinth. We have the mark of the fire. There are lives — most lives — that will leave no record but what they have suffered for Christ, and the Church says that this is enough. He who confesses Christ before men is confessed before the angels, whether or not any man wrote it down.
That companionship in suffering is itself a grace. The Epistle blesses those who were “companions of them that were used in such sort.” Few of us will be burned. All of us are given someone to stand beside — a brother, a spouse, a friend in the pit — and the standing beside is the second half of martyrdom and is not less honoured than the first.
X. The commemoration
In the traditional Roman calendar the day is kept as a commemoration: the Friday feria of the fifteenth week after Pentecost admits the memory of the two martyrs in the Collect, and their Mass may be said in place of the ferial. It is a lesser rank, and rightly; but a commemoration is not a forgetting. It is the Church’s way of saying that on this day, whatever else is being celebrated, two brothers who died for Christ on the Salarian Way must not go unnamed.
Practice
Examine. Whom has God placed beside you to suffer with? A spouse in a long trial, a friend under reproach, a family member whose burden is inconvenient to share. Have you been a companion to them, in the Apostle’s sense — or have you kept a safe distance from the fire?
Do. Say the names of the dead you are bound to pray for, aloud, today. The first thing the Roman Church did for her martyrs was to keep their names and their day. Do the same for your own dead: the eleventh of September is a fitting day for it.
Pray. The Collect of the day:
Beatorum Martyrum tuorum, Domine, Proti et Hyacinthi nos foveat pretiosa confessio: et pia iugiter intercessio tueatur.
“May the precious confession of Thy blessed Martyrs Protus and Hyacinth, O Lord, cherish us, and their loving intercession ever protect us.”
Devote. The Sorrowful Mysteries, with attention to the Crucifixion, on which every martyrdom is a commentary; and, in memory of the fire, a short act of contrition said slowly, that we may be purified here rather than hereafter.
If you wish to go deeper: the Church History path treats the persecution of Valerian and the world of the Roman catacombs from which these two come, and the recovery of Christian Rome by de Rossi in the nineteenth century. The Lives of the Saints path continues with the brother-martyrs of the Roman calendar — Marcellinus and Peter, John and Paul, Cosmas and Damian — and with what the martyrs teach about confessing Christ before men.
Sancti Prote et Hyacinthe, martyres Christi, orate pro nobis.
Sources consulted: the Catholic Encyclopedia (1910), s.v. “Sts. Protus and Hyacinth” and “St. Eugenia”; the Roman Martyrology; the Depositio Martyrum of the Chronography of 354; the Damasan epigrams as edited by Ferrua; the Bollandists’ notes in the Acta Sanctorum for September; and the accounts of Marchi’s excavation of 1845 as summarized by de Rossi and in modern studies of the catacomb of St. Hermes. The Egyptian narrative of the Passio S. Eugeniae is reported as legend, not as history.