Celsus

Holy Martyr Celsus was, according to tradition, a young martyr of Milan, the companion of Saint Nazarius; the sources available place him in the first century, in the time of the emperor Nero (he died around the year 56 or 64), not in the year 304.

According to a tradition going back to Saint Ambrose, Celsus was the child of a notable of Cemenelum (today Cimiez, near Nice). When Nazarius passed through to preach, Celsus's mother, who had been converted, entrusted him to be his disciple. From then on the two never parted. The zeal of Nazarius displeased the governor of Cimiez, who threw them both in prison, and they would have paid with their lives had the governor's wife not intervened. Driven out of the city, they went on: they reached Embrun, where Nazarius founded the first community of Christians, then, along the Isère valley, Geneva, Autun and even Trier. Later they were arrested and condemned to exile by order of Nero, who ordered them thrown into the Tyrrhenian Sea. But a storm threatened the guards, and the condemned came back to them as the wind died down, so that the guards were moved to convert. They landed near Genoa, at Albaro, where they overthrew the pagan statues of a temple and preached; many received baptism. Then they went to Milan, where the prefect Anolinus imprisoned them, tried them and condemned them to be beheaded.

According to Paulinus of Nola, in the Life of Saint Ambrose, Ambrose of Milan received in 395 the revelation of the place where the two had been buried, in a garden outside the city. The bodies were found intact. Ambrose carried Nazarius to the basilica of the Apostles and laid Celsus in a small church that he had built near the spot. Their commemoration is kept on 28 July in the Catholic Church and on 14 October in the Orthodox Church, together with Nazarius, Gervasius and Protasius. They are saints of the undivided Church.