Exuperius of Agaunum

Saint Exuperius was the standard-⁠bearer of the Theban Legion and a companion in martyrdom of Saint Maurice. According to tradition he was put to death around the year 286 at Agaunum, in present-⁠day Switzerland. The Church remembers him together with the other Christian soldiers of the legion who chose death over denying their faith.

The Theban Legion

The legion had been raised by conscription at Thebes in Egypt, in the far south of the Empire, where many Christians lived at the time. Under the pagan emperor Maximian, who ruled from 285 to 305, it was sent north to the Rhine frontier to put down a revolt of the Bagaudae. There the Christians of the legion refused to offer sacrifice to the emperor; other accounts say they simply refused to fight. For this they were executed by beheading.

According to tradition, at the time of the executions the legion was on the march from Milan to Cologne across the Alps, its units strung out along the road at great distances from one another. Saint Maurice, whom the old lives regard as the commander of the legion, and part of his companions were killed in the military camp at Agaunum, in the canton of Valais, where Maximian himself had come, in 286 or around 290.

Veneration

Exuperius is counted in the hagiographic tradition among the officers of the legion, together with Candidus and Innocent. The Orthodox synaxaria commemorate Maurice and the seventy soldiers who suffered with him on 22 February by the old calendar, and name as his companions Photinus, his son, along with Theodore and Philip. The names of Exuperius, Candidus and Innocent come from the Western tradition.

On the place of their martyrdom the Abbey of Saint Maurice was founded in the early Middle Ages, and the town of the same name grew up beside it. In the tenth century the relics of Exuperius were translated to the abbey of Gembloux by its founder, Saint Guibert, who dedicated the monastery to Saint Peter and Saint Exuperius. The saint was especially honoured there, and Sigebert of Gembloux wrote a long poem on the martyrdom of the Theban Legion. The abbey buildings, largely preserved, now house the agronomical university of Gembloux.

Exuperius is usually shown as a soldier in armour and is patron of the Swiss canton of Appenzell Innerrhoden. His image appears, among other places, in the cathedrals of Strasbourg and Konstanz.