Sebastian

The traditional account, preserved mainly through later hagiography such as the Golden Legend and earlier Passio texts of uncertain date, presents Sebastian as an officer in the emperor Diocletian's guard, trusted enough to move freely among the court while concealing his Christian faith. He is said to have used this access to visit and encourage imprisoned Christians awaiting execution during the persecution, at one point converting the prison guard and his household, and even the Roman prefect Chromatius, according to the fuller versions of the story, though these later conversions are treated by historians as pious embellishment rather than confirmed fact.

When his faith was discovered, Diocletian, who is said to have valued him personally and felt betrayed by the concealment, ordered him bound to a stake or tree and shot by a company of archers, a punishment carried out by soldiers who had presumably served alongside him. The archers, according to the legend, left him for dead once he was covered with arrows and departed.

Sebastian's traditional dating places his death during Diocletian's persecution of Christians, though hagiographic sources vary on the exact year, some placing it as early as 288, which would put it before the emperor's formal empire-wide edicts against Christians began in 303. This atlas notes the tension rather than resolving it, since the surviving accounts are devotional narratives compiled well after the events rather than contemporary records.

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.