Constantius

Several early Christian figures bore the name Constantius, and the surviving evidence does not always permit them to be distinguished with certainty. In the Latin West the name most often denotes the martyr-bishop commemorated on 29 January in the Roman Martyrology: at Perugia, Saint Constantius, bishop and martyr, who with his companions received the crown of martyrdom for the faith of Christ under the emperor Marcus Aurelius. That brief entry is the only statement that can be called official. It places the saint at Perugia, gives him episcopal rank, associates him with unnamed companions, and situates his death in the reign of Marcus Aurelius (161–180). No contemporary inscription, letter, or civic record confirms these particulars.

Later medieval Passiones embroidered the notice into a full legend. Constantius is there presented as a native of the Perugian countryside who was chosen as the city’s first bishop. Arrested in a persecution, he is said to have been taken to Foligno, subjected to prolonged torture, and at last beheaded. Some recensions locate the execution at Foligno and the subsequent translation of the body to Perugia; others place both martyrdom and burial at Perugia itself. None of these narrative details can be verified. Modern hagiographers regard the Passio as a late composition, typical of the Italian legendary cycles that supplied early bishops and founding martyrs to cities whose authentic origins had been forgotten. That an early Christian community existed at Perugia and that it may have had a bishop who suffered in one of the second- or third-century persecutions remains possible; the precise date, the emperor, and the episodes of torture do not.

The cult, whatever its historical kernel, became one of the defining religious traditions of Perugia. Constantius is honoured as a principal patron of the city, alongside Saint Herculanus of Perugia and Saint Lawrence. A church dedicated to him, the Chiesa di San Costanzo, stands just outside the medieval walls near the Porta San Costanzo; the present nineteenth-century building occupies a site long connected with his veneration and is traditionally regarded as the resting place of his relics. On 29 January the people of Perugia visit the church, and local custom has associated the saint with betrothal: rings are blessed, and a ring-shaped sweet bread called the torcolo di San Costanzo is baked and given as a gift. These practices illustrate the later popular overlay on an ancient cult rather than any documented fact of the saint’s own life.

Nothing reliable is known of Constantius’s birth, family, education, or marital status. He belonged to no religious order. He was never Bishop of Rome nor patriarch of any Eastern see, and he was not the subject of a formal canonization process of the kind that developed in the later Middle Ages; his cult is of the ancient type later termed equivalent or pre-congregation canonization, resting on immemorial public veneration and martyrological inscription. Other holy men of the same name should not be confused with him: Constantius of Aquino, a sixth-century bishop of that see whom Pope Gregory the Great praised for holiness and wonder-working, and Blessed Constantius of Fabriano, a fifteenth-century Dominican known for prophecy and an austere life. In the absence of further identifying information, the Perugian martyr remains the figure whom Western liturgical books ordinarily intend by the simple name Constantius.