Januarius

Saint Januarius of Antioch was, according to his passio, a priest of Syrian origin living at Rome, at the title church of Saint Pudentiana, and a grammarian of renown, around whom many disciples gathered. The passio, still unedited, is preserved in a fourteenth-⁠century manuscript in the chapter library of the cathedral of Benevento. Through the pagan grammarian Potemtius he came into contact with Julian; the advice he gave the emperor did not spare him from being brought before the vicar of Rome, Jordan. Jordan, with his wife and fifty-⁠three others of his household, received baptism from the hands of Januarius, and all died as martyrs.

Januarius was beheaded in the Campus Martius, between the Via Praenestina and the Via Tiburtina. A monk, Crescentianus, buried him there in a sandstone crypt on 26 September, in an unknown year. His name does not appear, on this date or any other, in the official books of the Roman Church; our source regards him as a saint and martyr, and the story should be taken as a late tradition.