Nazarius, Gervasius, Protasius and Celsius

The traditional account

The narrative transmitted by the synaxaria and the Slavic Lives runs thus. Nazarius was born at Rome, the son of Africanus, a Jew, and of the Christian Perpetua — whom the Roman tradition makes a convert of the apostle Peter himself — and was baptized by Linus, Peter's successor in the Roman see. He resolved from youth to give his life to preaching Christ and to the care of persecuted Christians, and with this intent left Rome for Mediolanum (Milan).

Gervasius and Protasius were twin brothers of Milan, sons of the wealthy Roman citizens Vitalis and Valeria — themselves venerated as martyrs in the Western tradition, and Vitalis in the Byzantine calendar also, on July 23; this parentage belongs to the same passio and is traditional rather than established. On inheriting their parents' estate they distributed it to the poor, freed their slaves, and gave themselves to fasting and prayer, for which they were denounced as Christians and imprisoned. Nazarius, visiting the confessors in the Milan prison, came to love the twins and desired to suffer with them; for his ministry to the prisoners he was beaten with rods and driven from the city.

He went on into Gaul and preached with great success. At Cemelium (the tradition's "Kimel," the ancient town by modern Nice), a Christian woman brought him her son Celsius to be baptized and entrusted the child to him; Nazarius raised the boy in piety and gained in him a disciple and fellow-labourer. Seized in the persecution, master and disciple were thrown to wild beasts, which would not touch them, and then cast into the sea, upon which — the Acts relate — they walked as on dry land, so that the soldiers charged with the execution believed and released them. Returning at last to Milan, they visited Gervasius and Protasius in prison, were arrested, and were brought before Nero, at whose command Nazarius and Celsius were beheaded; soon afterwards the twin brothers were executed in Milan. A Christian named Philip recovered the bodies and buried them privately — in his house, says the account the OCA transmits; in his garden, the Western tradition — where they lay hidden for three centuries.

The uncovering of the relics under Ambrose

Here legend gives way to some of the best-documented events of the fourth-century Church. In June 386, when Ambrose was about to consecrate his new basilica at Milan and the people asked for relics, he had excavations made in the church of Felix and Nabor and uncovered two skeletons of great size with the head separated — identified as the martyrs Gervasius and Protasius, whose names the Milanese church remembered though nothing else was known of them. As the relics were borne to the Ambrosian basilica, a blind butcher named Severus touched the pall with a kerchief and received his sight — a miracle recounted by Ambrose himself in his letter to his sister Marcellina, and confirmed by Augustine, then present in Milan, in the Confessions and the City of God. Ambrose laid the relics beneath the altar with the words that victims of Christ belong where Christ the Victim is offered — a moment that did much to fix the enduring practice of enshrining martyrs' relics in altars. The discovery, coming at the height of Ambrose's confrontation with the Arian court, was received as a divine vindication of the Nicene cause.

About 395, in the reign of Arcadius and Honorius, Ambrose likewise uncovered the bodies of Nazarius and Celsius in a garden outside the city; his biographer Paulinus, an eyewitness, records that the martyr's blood was found still fresh in the tomb. Ambrose translated Nazarius's relics to the Basilica of the Apostles. From Milan the cultus of the four spread through the West — Gervasius and Protasius became patrons of countless churches in Italy and Gaul — and to the East: the canon of the Byzantine service sings that "Rome of old proclaims thy contests, O Nazarius, and Constantinople, holding thy sacred relic in faith, sings thy wonders."