Marcellus of Rome

The vacant see

The Roman church emerged from Diocletian's persecution without a head. The lists put the death of Marcellinus in 304; the next name, Marcellus, is not established in the see until about 308, and the fourth-century Roman catalogue gives him a pontificate of about a year and seven or eight months. The gap of nearly four years is real, and it is the measure of what the persecution had done: the clergy imprisoned or exiled or dead, the churches and cemeteries confiscated, the community fractured between those who had held out and those who had handed over books or offered incense and now wished to come back.

Marcellus's brief tenure is remembered for two things, and both are administrative in form and pastoral in substance. First, he reorganised the city: the Liber Pontificalis credits him with dividing Rome among twenty-five tituli, the parish churches, each entrusted to a presbyter, for the baptism of converts, the burial of the martyrs and the keeping of the records — the ancestor of the Roman parish system, and an act of reconstruction after the confiscations. Second, he held the line on the lapsed: he required a penance of those who had complied, and the demand was resented. The verse inscription of Pope Damasus set up in his honour in the following century says as much in so many words — that he was reckoned a wicked enemy by "all the lapsed," that the resulting quarrel led to riots and bloodshed, and that the tyrant on that account drove him out of the Church. That inscription is early, is set up by a bishop of Rome who had the archives, and is the best evidence for him.

The stable of the catabulum

The developed Roman Acts fill the outline in with a scene that fixed his memory. The emperor Maxentius, holding the city, refused to let Marcellus be a bishop and ordered him to renounce his office; when he would not, the church of the matron Lucina in which he had gathered the faithful — his titular church, later San Marcello al Corso — was confiscated and turned into a public stable and station for the beasts of the imperial post, the catabulum, and the bishop himself was condemned to serve in it as a groom among the animals. There he lived, the account says, in filth and forced labour, keeping the fast and the prayers, until his strength failed and he died — in the tradition's phrase, exhausted by his labours and by the ill-usage he received, about 309 or 310. Christians of the city afterwards recovered his body and buried it in the cemetery of Priscilla on the Via Salaria, where his predecessor also lay.

The mode of his death is what gives him his double title. He was not executed and shed no blood, so that strictly he is a confessor; but he died in custody, under sentence, for refusing to give up his office, and both the Latin and the Byzantine traditions came to call him a martyr — the Byzantine style being hieromartyr.

Marcellus and the martyrs of the prisons

In the Roman Acts Marcellus is not a solitary figure but the centre of a network of relief work among the imprisoned, and it is in that capacity that the Byzantine calendar commemorates him: his notice on June 7 is inseparable from the notice of the deacons Sisinius and Cyriacus and their large company, whose story is given under Sisinius, Cyriacus and the Martyrs of Rome. In that narrative the wealthy Christian Thrason funds the feeding and ransoming of prisoners; Sisinius and Cyriacus distribute it and are ordained deacons for the work; Marcellus baptises and communicates the converts they make in prison, among them the jailer Apronian; and when the company is destroyed Marcellus is left to bury them and to die in the stable himself. It is also Marcellus who, in the notice of his predecessor, is granted the vision of the Apostle Peter telling him to bury the body of Marcellinus that had lain thirty-six days in the open.