Nicomede the Priest

Saint Nicomedes, known in some traditions as Nicomede the Priest, was a Christian priest martyred in Rome and subsequently venerated as a saint by the Roman Church. Virtually nothing about his life can be established from contemporary documents. The principal evidence for his historical existence is topographical and liturgical: a church or oratory dedicated to him stood on the Via Nomentana outside the Aurelian Walls, and this shrine is recorded in the seventh-century itineraries that guided pilgrims to the tombs of the Roman martyrs. The Roman Martyrology commemorates him on 15 September as a priest who suffered death by beating with leaded whips for the sake of the Christian faith.

The only narrative of his passion that has come down to us is embedded in the legendary Acts of Saints Nereus and Achilleus, a text of relatively late composition that also treats Saints Petronilla and Felicula. In that account Nicomedes, a priest, recovered the body of the virgin Felicula after she had been martyred for refusing to marry a pagan, and gave her Christian burial. Discovered in this act of charity, he was arrested and commanded to sacrifice to the gods. Upon his refusal he was scourged to death with plumbatae, or lead-weighted whips. His corpse was thrown into the Tiber, later recovered by a disciple named Justus, and buried in a cemetery on the Via Nomentana. Hagiographical scholarship regards this story as largely fictitious, a pious expansion designed to furnish a biography for a martyr whose true history had been lost.

The cult of Nicomedes is nevertheless of considerable antiquity. Seventh-century pilgrim itineraries that list the tombs of the Roman martyrs already mention a church of Saint Nicomedes on the Via Nomentana. Medieval calendars sometimes recorded a feast on 1 June, generally understood as the anniversary of the dedication of that church rather than a second feast of the martyr. The date of 15 September remained the principal liturgical commemoration and was retained in the Roman Martyrology after the Council of Trent. No reliable ancient source names the emperor under whom Nicomedes died; proposed dates ranging from the first century to the era of the later imperial persecutions rest on the legendary acts or on later conjecture and cannot be verified.

No information that meets historical standards survives concerning the place or date of Nicomedes’ birth, his family, or any possible marriage or children. He is not recorded as having held episcopal or patriarchal office, nor as having belonged to a later religious order; the sources describe him simply as a priest of the Roman church. Later centuries saw the translation of relics attributed to him to churches inside the city of Rome and, according to medieval notices, to certain churches north of the Alps, but the authenticity and precise itinerary of those relics cannot be confirmed from early evidence. Saint Nicomedes therefore stands as one of the many Roman martyrs whose names and tombs were remembered by the local church even after the details of their lives had faded from historical record.