rcus and Marcellianus were nailed
by the feet to a post, and having remained in that torment twenty-four
hours, were shot to death with arrows.

St. Sebastian, having sent so many martyrs to heaven before him, was
himself impeached before the emperor Dioclesian; who, having grievously
reproached him with ingratitude, delivered him over to certain archers
of Mauritania, to be shot to death. His body was covered with arrows,
and he left for dead. Irene, the widow of St. Castulus, going to bury
him, found him still alive, and took him to her lodgings, where, by
care, he recovered of his wounds, but refused to fly, and even placed
himself one day by a staircase where the emperor was to pass, whom he
first accosted, reproaching {185} him for his unjust cruelties against
the Christians. This freedom of speech, and from a person, too, whom he
supposed to have been dead, greatly astonished the emperor; but
recovering from his surprise, he gave orders for his being seized and
beat to death with cudgels, and his body thrown into the common sewer. A
pious lady called Lucina, admonished by the martyr in a vision, got it
privately removed, and buried it in the catacombs,[3] at the entrance of
the cemetery of Calixtus. A church was afterwards built over his relies
by pope Damasus, which is one of the seven ancient stationary churches
at Rome, but not one of the seven principal churches of that city, as
some moderns mistake; it neither being one of the five patriarchal
churches, nor one of the seventy-two old churches which give titles to
cardinals. Vandelbert, St. Ado, Eginard, Sigebert, and other
contemporary authors relate, that in the reign of Louis Debonnaire, pope
Eugenius II. gave the body of St. Sebastian to Hilduin, abbot of St.
Denys, who brought it into France, and it was deposited at St. Medard's,
at Soissons, on the 9th of December, in 826; with it is said to have
been brought a considerable portion of the relics of St. Gregory the
Great. The rich shrines of SS. Sebastian, Gregory, and Medard, were
plundered by the Calvinists, in 1564, and the sacred bones thrown into a
ditch, in which there was water. Upon the declaration of two
eye-witnesses, they were afterwards found by the Catholics; and in 1578,
enclosed in three new shrines, though the bones of the three saints
could not be distinguished from each other.[4] The head of this martyr,
which was given to St. Willibrord by pope Sergius, is kept at Esternach,
in the duch