Secundianus, Marcellianus and Verianus

Holy Martyrs Secundian, Marcellian and Verian (Secondianus, Marcellianus, Verianus) were three Christians put to death in the year 250, in the persecution of Decius, near Civitavecchia or Santa Marinella in Italy. They are commemorated on 9 August. Our sources call them saints of Rome and show no separate Orthodox glorification; their names are in the Hieronymian Martyrology.

Secundian was a senator or some other prominent official, and Marcellian and Verian were scholars or students. A fifteenth-⁠century account says that, under Decius, the three had first been zealous persecutors of Christians, but upon reading the fourth Eclogue of Virgil, like Statius in the Divine Comedy, they became Christians.

According to one version, they were baptized by a priest named Timothy and confirmed by Pope Sixtus II. By order of Decius they were arrested by the prefect Valerian and beheaded at Civitavecchia, and their bodies were thrown into the sea. In a second account the place of martyrdom is called Coloniacum, that is to say Colonia, apparently Colonia Iulia Castrum Novum on the via Aurelia, near Santa Marinella; the Echternach Codex places it in Tuscia, and the Weissenburg Codex gives the name Colonia, not necessarily Cologne. Their bodies are said to have been collected by a man named Deodatus and buried there. According to a third version, their cult was centred in the basilica of Saint Peter at Tuscania.

The Acts of Saints Felinus and Gratian were composed on the model of the acts of Secundian and his companions. Sabine Baring-⁠Gould writes that the so-⁠called Acts of Saints Gratian and Felinus, read at Arona, are extracted from the acts of Saint Florentinus and his companions, martyrs at Perugia commemorated on the same day, but that these in turn are not genuine and are in fact the acts of Secundian and his companions.