Januarius of Benevento

Origins and episcopate

Nothing certain survives of Januarius's family or early years. The surviving Acts are late and legendary — the two principal recensions are conventionally called the Acta Bononiensia (the Bologna acts, epitomised by St Bede in his martyrology about the year 733) and the Acta Vaticana — and they agree only on the outline. Later Campanian tradition makes him a native of Benevento or of Naples, born in the third century of a family of standing, and raised to the see of Benevento, the chief city of inland Campania, while still a young man. The office he held is the one point on which the whole tradition, Eastern and Western, is unanimous: he was a bishop, and it is as a bishop that the Greek books style him hieromartyr.

The arrest of the company

The persecution under Diocletian and Maximian reached Campania in the first years of the fourth century. According to the Acts, the chain of arrests began not with Januarius but with Sossius, deacon of the church of Misenum, seized and imprisoned at Puteoli (Pozzuoli). Januarius, hearing of it, came to visit and encourage the confessor — an act of pastoral courage that made him a marked man. With Sossius in prison, or arrested soon after, were Proculus, deacon of the church of Puteoli, and two laymen of that city, Eutychius and Acutius. Januarius was taken with the two clerics of his own household who had accompanied him: his deacon Festus and his lector Desiderius.

The transmitted roll therefore falls into two natural groups — the bishop of Benevento with his deacon and reader, and the Puteolan and Misenate confessors — and this is one reason critics have suspected that the Acts have fused what were originally distinct martyrdoms into a single company. Sossius and Proculus each kept an independent cultus in their own cities, and Sossius is honoured on his own day (September 23) in the Latin books. The Byzantine synaxaria transmit the group as a single company, with the members' names varying between manuscripts.

Trial and martyrdom

The Acts set the trial before the governor of Campania. The Bologna recension names him Timotheus, praeses of Campania; the recension followed by the Slavonic and Greek synaxaria and by the Russian Lives calls him Menignus — one of the many small divergences that mark the tradition as late.

The narrative that follows is built of the standard elements of the Diocletianic passions, and is best reported as the Church has received it rather than pressed as history. Januarius, refusing to sacrifice, was cast into a fiery furnace and came out untouched, his very garments unsinged. He was then scourged with iron rods until his bones showed. The Christians who had gathered and confessed Christ at the sight were arrested with him. The whole company was next exposed in the amphitheatre at Puteoli — the great Flavian amphitheatre whose ruins still stand — but the beasts loosed against them lay down at the martyrs' feet and would not touch them. The governor, declaring the wonder to be magic, was at that moment struck blind; Januarius prayed, and his sight was restored. The Breviary tradition adds that some five thousand of the onlookers believed. The judge was unmoved by his own healing, and ordered the company beheaded outside the walls — by Neapolitan tradition at the sulphurous volcanic field of the Solfatara, between Pozzuoli and Naples, where a shrine has stood since the Middle Ages. The year is given as about 305; some accounts place the martyrdom a year or two earlier, in 303 or 304, at the opening of the persecution.

Relics and translations

The faithful gathered the bodies of the martyrs and buried each company in its own city. The relics of Januarius were carried into Naples, and laid in the cemetery on the hill of Capodimonte which has borne his name ever since — the Catacombs of San Gennaro, whose galleries preserve some of the earliest surviving painted and mosaic portraits of a saint in the West. The translation is traditionally ascribed to John I, bishop of Naples, in the first half of the fifth century.

The relics travelled repeatedly thereafter. About 831 the Lombard prince Sico of Benevento, having raided the Neapolitan territory, carried the body off to Benevento — though the head was kept at Naples, and remains there. After Benevento was sacked in the twelfth century the relics were hidden in the Benedictine sanctuary of Montevergine, where they were lost sight of and rediscovered in 1480. In 1497 they were brought back to Naples at the instance of Cardinal Oliviero Carafa, who built beneath the high altar of the cathedral the crypt called the Succorpo (completed about 1506) to receive them, and so reunited body, head, and blood in one place.

The relic of the blood

Naples preserves, in a silver reliquary of two sealed glass ampoules, a dark substance venerated as the blood of the martyr, which a later legend attributes to a pious woman — named Eusebia in the developed form of the story — who is said to have gathered it at the place of beheading. At certain seasons the mass in the ampoules becomes liquid, and often bright, when the reliquary is exposed near the reliquary of the head.

The first securely dated record of a liquefaction is 1389; the earlier history of the relic is undocumented, and older claims that the phenomenon was first noticed in 1456 have been superseded. Naples now looks for it three times a year: on the Saturday before the first Sunday of May, keeping the translation of the relics into the city; on September 19, the Western feast of the martyrdom; and on December 16, kept since the eruption of Vesuvius in 1631 in thanksgiving for the city's deliverance. Failure of the liquefaction has long been read at Naples as an omen of calamity. Repeated attempts to account for the change physically — thixotropy of a gel, a low-melting compound, an iron-salt suspension — remain inconclusive, chiefly because the relic cannot be opened.

Orthodox usage should be clear on the point: the veneration of Januarius in the East is older than any record of the blood-wonder and does not rest on it. The Greek synaxaria commemorate a bishop martyred with his companions; the Neapolitan phenomenon belongs to the later Western history of his relics, and is reported here as part of the record rather than as an article of his cultus.

Patron of Naples against the mountain

Januarius's patronage of Naples was fixed above all by Vesuvius. The tradition attaches his first great intervention to a fifth-century eruption — the eruption of 472, or in the version received by the Slavonic and OCA Lives, about 431 — when the citizens processed and prayed and the lava is said to have halted short of the city. After the catastrophic eruption of 1631 he was proclaimed the city's chief protector by formal act, and the December commemoration was established. He is invoked to this day against volcanic eruption, and — from the relic of the blood — as patron of blood donors and of those who suffer haemorrhage.

Veneration in the East

The reception of a Campanian martyr into the Byzantine calendar is easily explained: Naples and its duchy were imperial territory under Constantinople from the sixth century until well into the eighth, with a Greek-speaking clerical and monastic presence, and the Italo-Greek monasteries of southern Italy carried Campanian and Sicilian saints into the Greek synaxaria. The Synaxarion of Constantinople commemorates "Januarius the hieromartyr and those with him" on April 21, and the Greek and Slavonic books have kept him there ever since; the day's canon in the printed Menaion is his. The Antiochian Archdiocese lists him on April 21 as "Januarius the Hieromartyr and those with him," together with the martyr Theodore of Perge and the patriarch Maximian.