Valerian

Saint Valerian is commemorated in the Western church as a Roman martyr of the early Christian centuries and is known above all as the husband of Saint Cecilia in the famous passio that circulated under her name. That narrative, which appears to have been composed in Italy in the fifth century, presents Valerian as a young pagan of distinguished Roman family, contracted in marriage to Cecilia. Cecilia, already a Christian, is said to have told him on the wedding day that she was guarded by an angel and that she had vowed her virginity to God. Valerian, according to the story, agreed to be baptized; he was sent to Pope Urban, who was hiding among the tombs on the Appian Way, and after baptism he returned to find the angel at Cecilia’s side. The angel placed crowns of roses and lilies on both their heads. Valerian then converted his brother Tiburtius, who received baptism from the same pope.

The Acts continue that the two brothers made it their work to seek out and bury the bodies of executed Christians. They were denounced, arrested, and brought before a prefect named Almachius, who ordered them to offer sacrifice to the gods. On their refusal they were scourged and beheaded at a site associated with the fourth milestone of the Via Appia. A prison officer or official named Maximus, moved by their example, professed the faith and was beaten to death. Cecilia herself was arrested later, confined in her own bathhouse in an attempt to suffocate her, and finally struck in the neck with a sword; she is said to have survived three days. Tradition places the burial of Valerian, Tiburtius, and Maximus in the Catacomb of Praetextatus, while Cecilia was buried in the Catacomb of Callistus on the same Appian Way.

The cult of these martyrs is older than the romantic details of the passio. Pope Damasus I in the later fourth century composed verses for martyrs honored in the cemetery of Praetextatus, and the names Valerian, Tiburtius, and Maximus appear in early Roman liturgical books. The Martyrologium Hieronymianum and, later, the Roman Martyrology record the three companions on 14 April, with the notice that they suffered at Rome; Cecilia is kept on 22 November. Relics attributed to Valerian and his companions were in due course enshrined in the basilica of Santa Cecilia in Trastevere, the church that grew up over the house believed to have belonged to Cecilia, and they have been venerated there together with hers. No formal process of beatification or canonization in the later medieval or modern sense is recorded; their status is that of ancient martyrs whose cult was received by the Church of Rome.

Beyond this liturgical and legendary dossier almost nothing can be established with historical certainty. The passio contains a prefect otherwise unknown, a chronology that sits uneasily with the authentic list of third-century popes, and literary motifs common to many late antique martyr romances. Scholars therefore treat the wedding, the angel, the roses, and the precise circumstances of the execution as hagiographical elaboration rather than recoverable biography. It is reasonable to hold that Roman martyrs named Valerian, Tiburtius, and Maximus were honored from at least the fourth century, that their memory was localized on the Appian Way, and that by the fifth century their story had been woven into the Cecilia cycle. Valerian’s year of birth is unknown; the year of death is not securely documented and should not be supplied from the legendary setting under Alexander Severus. He is not known to have held the papacy or a patriarchate, or to have belonged to a religious order. The same tradition that marries him to Cecilia insists that the marriage was never consummated and that they had no children. He is not the patron of a well-defined list of places or causes independent of the joint cult with Cecilia and the two fellow martyrs.