Gordianus and Epimachus

Saints Gordianus and Epimachus were Roman martyrs, who were killed during the reign of Julian the Apostate, 362, commemorated on 10 May.

Legend

Gordianus was a Roman judge but was so moved by the sanctity and sufferings of Januarius, he converted to Christianity with many of his household. Being accused before his successor, or as some say before the prefect of the city, Apronianus, he was cruelly tortured and finally beheaded. His body was carried off by the Christians, and laid in a crypt on the Latin Way beside the body of St. Epimachus, who had been recently interred there. The two saints gave their name to the cemetery, and have ever since been joined together in the veneration of the Church. Some time later his remains were moved to the Cyriaca cemetery and there they lay until the 17th Century when Brother Ambrose of the Order of St Augustin removed them and gave them to Fr Christopher Anderson, a Jesuit priest in the 1670s. The remains were transferred to the Jesuit College of St. Omer; when the College moved to Stonyhurst, the remains travelled to England where they have remained since, interred below the altar of the Sodality Chapel.^[1]

Other Saint Gordianuses

• There is another Gordianus who suffered martyrdom (place uncertain) with two companions, and commemorated 17 September (Acta Sanctorum, XLV, 483).
• A third Gordinaus is commemorated on 13 September, who with several companions was martyred in Pontus or Galatia (Acta SS XLIV, 55).

Other Saint Epimachuses

There are also several martyrs named Epimachus, and, owing to the meagreness of the information possessed concerning them less careful writers have confounded them greatly while the greater hagiologists are unable to agree as to their number or identity. The Bollandists mention five saints of this name:

• Epimachus whose body with that of St. Gordianus, is honoured at Rome on 10 May. Most of the great writers have denied the existence of an Epimachus martyred at Rome, and account for the relics honoured there by asserting that the body of the Alexandrian Epimachus was transported thither shortly before the martyrdom of St. Gordianus. Remi de Buck, the learned Bollandist, however, maintains that the evidence for the Roman Epimachus is too strong to be doubted, while he rejects the pretended translation of the relics of Epimachus of Alexandria.
• A martyr commemorated by the Orthodox on 6 July, (Acta SS., XXIX, 280)
• Epimachus and Azirianus, martyrs venerated by the Copts and Ethiopians on 31 October (Acta SS., LXI, 684)
• Epimachus of Pelusium in Egypt, venerated by the Eastern Orthodox on 31 October and by the Copts on 14 Pashons (Acta SS., LXI, 704)
• Epimachus and Alexander, martyred at Alexandria in the persecution of Decius, commemorated in the Latin Church on 12 Dec.[1]

References

• "Sts. Gordianus and Epimachus". Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: Robert Appleton Company. 1913. http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/06649a.htm. 

 This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Herbermann, Charles, ed (1913). Catholic Encyclopedia. Robert Appleton Company.