Emilian of Trevi

From Armenia to Spoleto

The four are Armenians. Emilian and his brothers Dionysius and Hermippus lost their parents while young, and were brought up by their tutor Hilarion, who is named in the calendar as a saint beside them. Together the four left the East and came into Italy, settling at Spoleto in Umbria — a journey which, in the late third century, is entirely credible: Armenians and Syrians moved along the trade and army roads of the empire in numbers, and the Christian communities of central Italy were thoroughly cosmopolitan.

At Spoleto Emilian's manner of life drew notice. The tradition holds that he was ordained bishop by Pope Marcellinus (296–304) and sent to the small town of Trebiae — modern Trevi, on its hill above the Clitunno valley three miles from Spoleto — of which he is remembered as the first bishop. What the passion emphasises of his episcopate is exactly what one would expect of a missionary bishop in a still largely pagan countryside: preaching, an austere personal life, and conversions in quantity.

Before Maximian: the paralytic

The persecution reached Umbria, and Emilian was brought before the emperor Maximian (co-Augustus 286–305, whose reign the Greek notice gives as 284–305). The passion sets the confrontation as a contest of powers. A man long paralysed was brought in; the priests of the idols prayed over him and nothing happened; Emilian prayed, and the man rose and walked. The crowd was moved, but the emperor's counsellors gave the customary answer of the persecutions — that it was sorcery — and the trial went on.

The tortures, and the thousand

There followed the sequence of ordeals which the passion recounts with the frankly miraculous confidence of its genre: he was bound to the wheel, which broke; heated metal was applied and did not burn him; he was thrown into water and did not drown; he was exposed to wild beasts in the arena and they would not touch him. The tradition adds that some thousand of those who watched confessed Christ on the spot and were themselves put to death — a round number, and to be read as such, but a real memory that the case was public and that its effect on the crowd was what the authorities most feared.

The governor then had Emilian shut up with his companions. Hilarion, Dionysius and Hermippus were led out and beheaded. When Emilian's turn came, the executioner's sword bent and went soft as wax in his hand; the soldiers who saw it confessed Christ, and it was a second executioner who at last struck off his head, about the year 300 — the Latin tradition dates the martyrdom precisely to 28 January 304, at Bovara, on the plain below Trevi. From the wounds, the passion says, there flowed not blood but a white liquid like milk, and many pagans who saw it believed. The detail is a commonplace of the martyr-acts — it is told of St Paul, of Catherine, of others — and stands here for the purity of the witness rather than as a report.

Trevi and the relics

The town of Trevi has kept him as its patron without interruption. Its principal church, the Duomo di Sant'Emiliano, bears his name and is one of the notable Romanesque buildings of Umbria; the church of the Madonna delle Lacrime and the pieve at Bovara mark the traditional site of the execution. His relics were carried at some point to Spoleto, and were rediscovered in the cathedral there in 1660 during building works, where they remain. Trevi still keeps the eve of his Latin feast with the great night procession called the Illuminata on 27 January.