Primus and Felician

The Holy Martyrs Primus and Felician were two brothers put to death for Christ around 297, in the persecution of Diocletian. The Hieronymian Martyrology gives their names under 9 June, with their burial at the fourteenth milestone of the Via Nomentana, near Nomentum (now Mentana); it appears that they came from there.

According to their Acts they were brothers and patricians who had converted to Christianity and devoted themselves to the care of the poor and of prisoners. Arrested, they refused to sacrifice to the gods of the city, were imprisoned and scourged. The judge Promotus brought them before him separately, tortured them and tried to deceive each by saying that the other had apostatised, without result. They were beheaded under Diocletian at Nomentum; Primus was eighty years old. A church was built over their tombs on the Via Nomentana.

They seem to be the first martyrs recorded as having their bodies reburied within the walls of Rome: in 648 Pope Theodore I moved their bones, with the remains of his own father, to the church of Santo Stefano Rotondo, under an altar in their honour. The chapel of Saints Primus and Felician has mosaics from the seventh century in which the two stand on either side of a jewelled cross. They are also depicted in St Mark's Basilica in Venice and in the Cappella Palatina in Palermo.

A Bavarian tradition holds that they were Roman legionaries and missionaries in the Chiemgau, where Primus found a healing spring in a forest; at Adelholzen, where this fountain is, stands a chapel of 1615 dedicated to them. They are commemorated on 9 June, as saints of the West before the Great Schism (saints of the undivided Church), by the New Calendar.