Juventinus and Maximinus

The Holy Martyrs Juventinus and Maximinus were soldiers of the guard of the emperor Julian the Apostate, who confessed their faith in Christ and were put to death in the year 363. Juventinus is sometimes called Juventius, and Maximinus Maximus or Maximos. Their death is placed on 29 January 363, and their commemoration in our sources on 25 January.

Before setting out on the campaign against the Sassanid Empire, Julian issued an edict forbidding the veneration of relics in Antioch. He also ordered that all the foodstuffs in the marketplace and the water of the wells be sprinkled with blood offered to idols. At a banquet, Juventinus and his comrade Maximinus let fall a few words about the emperor's laws against the Christians, saying that life made no sense in those days, that all things holy were defiled, that faith in the Lord of creation was treated with contempt and shame, that wherever one was one breathed the ugly smell of animal fat and sacrificial meat, and that nowhere could one find fresh air.

Informed of this, the emperor summoned them but could not persuade them to retract their words or to sacrifice to the gods. According to the Roman Martyrology, Julian had them stripped of their property, beaten and beheaded. Saint John Chrysostom wrote a panegyric about them. He points out that they were executed in the middle of the night on a charge of high treason, because Julian did not want to make martyrs of them by letting it be thought they died for their faith. The Roman historian Ammianus Marcellinus makes no mention of Juventinus and Maximinus, nor do Gregory of Nazianzus or the church historian Socrates of Constantinople.

The Italian scholar Pio Franchi de' Cavalieri has put forward that the Passion of Sergius and Bacchus was based on an earlier, lost passion of Juventinus and Maximinus. According to him the author took material from the stories of the martyrs of Julian's time, not from that of Galerius, under whom Sergius and Bacchus were said to have been martyred.