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Biography

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Saint Marcellinus was a priest of the Church of Rome who was put to death for the Christian faith in the early fourth century, during the persecution initiated by the emperor Diocletian. He is commemorated together with Saint Peter, a Roman exorcist, and the two are among the martyrs named in the ancient Roman Canon of the Mass. No contemporary document records Marcellinus’s parentage, place of birth, or the year in which he was born; what can be known of him rests on the Roman liturgical tradition, on an epitaph by Pope Damasus I, and on later passion literature. By the middle of the fourth century their cult was already established in the city, as shown by the Depositio Martyrum in the Chronography of 354, which lists the burial of Marcellinus and Peter on the Via Labicana. The year of death is given in later martyrologies and standard hagiographical works as 304, during the height of the Diocletianic persecution in the West, though no dated contemporary act of martyrdom survives.

The traditional account of their passion, reflected in Damasus’s verses and in a later passio, holds that the two clerics were imprisoned in Rome and that they converted their jailer and members of his household. They were then led out of the city in secret and beheaded in a wooded spot known as the Silva Nigra (sometimes identified with Silva Candida) beside the Via Labicana, the concealment being intended to prevent Christians from recovering the bodies for public honor. Two women of the Roman church, named in the legend as Lucilla and Firmina, are said to have discovered the place of execution and to have given the martyrs honorable burial. Damasus, who was pope from 366 to 384, claimed in his metrical epitaph that he had learned these circumstances from the executioner himself, which, if accepted, would mean that an eyewitness report still circulated in Rome within living memory of the persecution.

The cemetery ad duas lauros on the Via Labicana became known as the Catacombs of Marcellinus and Peter. A basilica was erected there in the fourth century and was associated in later tradition with the Constantinian family; the site remained a major focus of Roman pilgrimage. The names of Marcellinus and Peter were inserted among the apostles and martyrs in the Communicantes of the Roman Canon, a liturgical honor reserved for the most venerable local saints of Rome. Their feast is celebrated on 2 June in the Roman Martyrology and the General Roman Calendar. In the early ninth century the Frankish scholar Einhard obtained relics of the two martyrs and translated them to Seligenstadt, creating a secondary center of their cult north of the Alps. Medieval retellings added miracles, dialogue, and novelistic detail that cannot be controlled by the earliest evidence.

Historians generally accept that a priest named Marcellinus and an exorcist named Peter were martyred at Rome in the Diocletianic persecution and were buried on the Via Labicana, while treating many narrative particulars of the later passio as hagiographic expansion. Marcellinus is not recorded as a member of a later religious order, nor as bishop of Rome or as a patriarch. No reliable source attributes to him a spouse or children. His historical profile remains that of an otherwise obscure Roman priest whose memory was preserved because of his martyrdom and the antiquity of his tomb cult.

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