What distinguishes Sebastian's legend from most Roman martyr accounts is that the arrows do not end the story. A Christian widow named Irene, coming to recover his body for burial, is said to have found him still breathing and nursed him back to health in her own house. Rather than escaping Rome once recovered, Sebastian is said to have deliberately positioned himself where Diocletian would pass and confronted the emperor directly, denouncing the persecution of Christians to his face. Diocletian, astonished that the man he believed already executed stood before him, ordered him beaten to death with clubs and his body thrown into Rome's main sewer, the Cloaca Maxima, to prevent Christians from recovering it as a relic, a detail later legend says was thwarted when another Christian recovered the body after it was revealed to her in a vision.
This second, successful execution is the one the church actually commemorates as his martyrdom, with the arrows functioning in the story as a trial survived rather than the death itself, an unusual structure that later medieval and Renaissance art largely ignored in favor of the far more paintable first scene, a young man bound and pierced with arrows, which became one of the most frequently painted subjects in European religious art from the fifteenth century onward.
The arrow imagery also drove his patronage against plague, since plague was popularly imagined in the period as a rain of arrows sent by an angry God, making a saint who had visibly survived being shot with arrows a natural intercessor against the disease; his patronage extended from this to soldiers and athletes more generally, for the endurance his ordeal was read to represent.