The Saints Who Would Not Carve the Idol — Christian Stonecutters of Pannonia, Soldiers of Rome, Martyrs of the Reign of Diocletian (d. c. 305)
The Job They Would Not Do
Everyone who works for a living will eventually be handed a task that is not quite right. Not a task that is clearly evil, which is easy to refuse, but one that sits on the edge: a bit of paperwork that bends the truth, a design that serves a bad purpose, a product that harms people a little, a favor for a powerful client. You do the job because everyone does, because you need the money, and because saying no costs more than you can afford.
The Four Crowned Martyrs are the saints for that moment. In their oldest and best-attested form, they were five skilled craftsmen, sculptors in a quarry in the Roman province of Pannonia, who had no trouble with most of what their emperor asked of them. They carved whatever the commission required. But when Diocletian wanted a statue of the god Aesculapius for a pagan temple, they put down their tools. They had made other kinds of images. This one was an idol, and they would not make it.
They were put in lead coffins and thrown into a river.
Their story has been tangled with another, from Rome, about four Christian soldiers who also refused to honor Aesculapius. Over the centuries, these two stories became one cult, one church, and one feast. The names have been mixed up. The facts are partly lost. And the Church, in its honesty, has told us so. But what has survived through all the confusion is the heart of it: ordinary working people who found the point where their faith and their work could not go together, and chose faith.
An Honest Word About a Tangled Story
Before we tell it, we should be clear about what we know and what we do not, because this is one of the most complicated cases in the Church's memory of the martyrs, and it would be a disservice to flatten it.
There are really two groups of martyrs here, and a third group that attached itself to them.
The first group is the five sculptors of Pannonia: Claudius, Nicostratus, Symphorian (also written Simpronian), Castorius, and Simplicius. Their story is told in a set of Acts written, probably in the fourth century, by a revenue officer named Porphyrius. The Catholic Encyclopedia judges the account of their martyrdom to be substantially authentic.
The second group is a set of four martyrs who were buried and venerated in the catacomb of Saints Peter and Marcellinus on the Via Labicana in Rome. They were called the Quattuor Coronati, the Four Crowned Ones. Their real names, and the real circumstances of their deaths, have not been preserved. Later legend supplied a story: that they were four Christian soldiers who refused to offer incense to an image of Aesculapius and were scourged to death. It also supplied names, but different names at different times.
The third group is a set of four martyrs buried at Albano, near Rome, named Secundus (or Severus), Severian, Carpophorus, and Victorinus. Their feast was recorded under August 7 or 8 in the Roman calendar of 354. At some point, the names of these Albano martyrs were attached to the unnamed Roman Four.
The old Catholic Encyclopedia puts it plainly. Of the Four Crowned Martyrs of Rome, we know only that they suffered death for the Faith, and the place where they were buried. A report that the pope had ordered their feast kept under the names of the sculptors, it says, has no historic foundation. It is merely a tentative explanation for a name given to a group of really authenticated martyrs whose origin, in the end, is not known.
We tell the story, then, in layers. The sculptors we can know with some confidence. The Roman soldiers we can know only through a legend that grew around a real tomb. And the unity of the cult we can know as a fact of the Church's life: for more than sixteen centuries, Christians have honored these martyrs together, on one day, in one church.
The World They Lived In
The Roman Empire at the end of the third century had been through a long season of crisis, and Diocletian, who became emperor in 284, was the man who put it back together. He divided the administration, reorganized the army, reformed the currency, and restored the old Roman religion as a pillar of the state.
For most of his reign, Christians were left alone. The Church had grown in the decades of peace. There were Christians in the army, in the civil service, and in every trade. They worshiped openly in buildings of their own. In many cities, the bishop was a respected figure.
Then, in 303, everything changed. A series of edicts ordered the destruction of churches, the burning of Scripture, the arrest of clergy, and, eventually, a requirement that every subject of the empire offer sacrifice to the gods. The persecution that followed was the last and one of the worst the Church endured under Rome. It fell hard on Christians in sensitive positions, especially soldiers and officials, who were suddenly forced to choose between their careers and their consciences.
Pannonia was a Roman province along the Danube, in the region of modern Hungary, Croatia, and Serbia. It was a frontier land of army camps, mines, and quarries, rich in stone. And the stone had to be cut by skilled hands. Sculptors and masons were valuable men in the empire. They carved the statues of the gods, the monuments of the emperors, the decorations of temples and public buildings. A skilled stonecutter in a Roman quarry was a craftsman who could make a decent living by doing what the empire needed.
Some of those craftsmen were Christians.
Craftsmen With a Line
According to the Acts, the five sculptors were men who worked in the quarries and who had been commissioned to carve images for the emperor's use. What is striking is what the Acts say they were willing to do.
They raised no objection to carving what the old account calls profane images: figures of Victory, of Cupid, of the Chariot of the Sun. To a strict reader, these were still the stuff of pagan art. And yet the sculptors did not treat them as idols to be worshiped. They were decorations, ornaments, scenes from a shared culture. A Christian craftsman in the Roman world had to live in that culture, and could not refuse every commission that mentioned a pagan name.
This is an important detail, because it tells us that the sculptors were not fanatics who refused all contact with the world. They were practical men with a working conscience. They had worked out, over years of living in a pagan empire, where the line fell. Some images were art. Some were idols. And they knew the difference.
The line they drew was at Aesculapius.
Aesculapius, the Roman form of the Greek Asclepius, was the god of healing. His temples were among the most visited in the ancient world. The sick came to them to pray, to sleep in the sanctuary hoping for a healing dream, and to leave offerings for cures. There was real pathos in this, and a modern reader can feel it. Here were the suffering, reaching for relief wherever they thought they might find it. And the Christians, who also tended the sick and prayed for the sick, knew that the healing the pagan temple promised did not come from the statue.
The emperor wanted a statue of this god for a temple. The sculptors would not make it. To carve it, in their view, was to take part in the worship of a false god. It was a different thing from carving a Cupid.
The Refusal
We should pause on what the refusal cost, because it is easy to read it as a neat moral decision. It was not neat. These were men who did the work for a living. Refusing a commission from the emperor was dangerous in any year, and in the year of the great persecution, it was a statement.
The Acts tell us that they were condemned as Christians. The charge was not that they had failed at their craft or insulted the emperor personally. It was that they had refused to honor the gods the empire required its subjects to honor. In a legal climate where every person was required to offer sacrifice, refusing the statue was close to refusing the sacrifice.
They had a choice, and that choice was available until the last moment. The old traditions of the Roman martyrs repeatedly show officials offering a way out: a small act of incense, a formal gesture, a face-saving formula. Nothing in the surviving account suggests the sculptors were offered a way out that they could have taken with a clear conscience. But the possibility of compromise hangs over every such story. They could have carved the statue.
They did not.
The Lead Coffins
The punishment the Acts describe is one of the most disturbing in all the martyrdom literature: the five men were sealed into lead caskets and drowned in the River Save, which runs through the Pannonian country. The Catholic Encyclopedia dates this to near the end of 305.
The central image is stark: living men, shut inside heavy metal, lowered into deep water.
It is hard to think about this for long. It is a death by slow suffocation in the dark, under water, with the weight of the river pressing in. And it was the empire's answer to craftsmen who had put down their chisels.
But the Church did not forget them. Their relics were kept, and in time they were brought to Rome. The Church has always understood the relics of the martyrs as a precious trust, and in this case the trust was kept.
The Soldiers of Rome
At Rome, the story took another shape.
A later legend, which the Catholic Encyclopedia treats with caution, told of four Christian soldiers serving under Diocletian: men of the rank called cornicularii, officers who acted as aides and clerks to senior commanders. According to the legend, Diocletian ordered the building of a temple to Aesculapius in Rome. When the temple was finished, the army was commanded to offer incense before the image of the god.
Four Christian soldiers refused. The legend gives their names, in its later versions, as Severus, Severian, Carpophorus, and Victorinus. For this, they were scourged to death with whips weighted with lead.
This second story echoes the first so closely that it is hard not to see a connection. The same god. The same emperor. The same refusal. In both cases, the martyrs were men who held ordinary positions in a Roman world, a quarry and a barracks, and who were asked to perform one small act of reverence toward an idol.
The legend then supplies a practical detail. The bodies of the four soldiers, it says, were buried by Saint Sebastian and Pope Miltiades (also spelled Melchiades), in a sandpit at the third milestone on the Via Labicana, in a place where others who had died for the Faith already lay. It was in this very area, in the catacomb of Saints Peter and Marcellinus, that pilgrims were later found worshiping at the grave of the Four Crowned Ones.
The legend goes on. Because the names of the four soldiers could not be known, the story says, Pope Miltiades ordered that they should be remembered under the names of the five Pannonian sculptors, whose death anniversary was the same day, November 8. The Church's historians have been clear that this explanation cannot be traced to any reliable source. It reads like a tidy answer to an old puzzle: why do these Roman martyrs go by the names of men who died in another country?
The probable truth is less tidy. A group of Roman martyrs were buried in that catacomb. People venerated them from very early on, but their names and story were forgotten. The memory that remained was that there were "four crowned ones." And as time passed, Christians reached for the names that seemed to fit.
Why "Crowned"?
The name itself is worth a moment. Quattuor Coronati means the Four Crowned Ones. In the language of the early Church, the "crown" is the martyr's crown, the prize promised to those who remain faithful unto death. The Book of Revelation promises the crown of life to the one who is faithful until death. Saint Paul speaks of the crown of righteousness. The Church took the image and made it part of her vocabulary for the martyrs: they have run the race, and they have been crowned.
The name tells us something about the way these martyrs were remembered. Not by biography, not by miracle stories, not by the details of a long career. By one image: they are the ones who were crowned. Even when the Church forgot who they were, she remembered what had happened to them.
There is a quiet beauty in that. Many of the saints we know best are known because someone took the trouble to write their lives. The Four Crowned Ones are a reminder that the Church has always honored people whose names she lost. God knows them. Their crowns do not depend on whether we can spell their names.
The Church on the Hill
The cult of the Four Crowned Ones was alive in Rome by the fourth and fifth centuries. At that time, a basilica was built and dedicated to them on the Caelian Hill, probably near the place where tradition said they were executed. It became one of the titular churches of Rome, the churches that give their names to the cardinals of the Roman Church. It is first mentioned among the signatures of a Roman council in the year 595.
The church went through hard times. It was restored several times over the centuries, and it stands today, rebuilt after damage in the Middle Ages, on its hill near the Colosseum.
About the year 850, Pope Leo IV ordered the relics of the Four Crowned Martyrs removed from their old resting place on the Via Labicana, and brought into the church that bore their name. At the same time, the relics of the five Pannonian martyrs, which had been brought to Rome at some period now unknown, were placed with them. The two groups, whose stories had already become one in the memory of the faithful, were now buried together.
This is the physical shape of the cult: nine martyrs, or four, or five, depending on how you count, resting under one altar, honored on one feast, in one church on a Roman hill. Whatever confusion exists in the history, there is no confusion in the devotion.
The Albano martyrs, whose names were attached to the Roman Four, are kept on their own day. The Roman Martyrology lists Secundus, Carpophorus, Victorinus, and Severian on August 8. On November 8, it names Claudius, Nicostratus, Symphorian, Castorius, and Simplicius, the sculptors. The Church has kept the two memorials, because she knows the two traditions are older than any attempt to reconcile them.
The Patrons of Honest Work
The martyrs have been honored throughout history by those who share their trade. In the Middle Ages, they were especially popular among the guilds of stonemasons, who saw in the Pannonian sculptors the patrons of their own craft. It was an easy association. These were men who worked in stone, who were killed for refusing to use their skill against their conscience, and who were remembered by the Church as martyrs. A mason could not ask for a better patron.
So the patronages come straight out of the story, and each one can be explained.
Stonemasons, sculptors, and stonecutters. The five Pannonian martyrs were exactly this: skilled workers in stone, in a quarry, doing the work of their hands. The Church's memory of them has always attached to the workshop and the building site.
Those asked to use their skill against their conscience. This is not an official patronage, but it is the heart of their meaning. The martyrs did not refuse to work. They refused one particular job. Anyone who has stood at that line, a designer, an accountant, an engineer, a lawyer, a nurse, a soldier, can find in them a companion. They show that there is such a thing as a line, and that it is possible to know where it is.
Their witness also holds a lesson that is easy to miss. The sculptors did not say that all pagan art was sinful or that a Christian could have no part in the culture around him. They drew a precise line at a precise point, at the idol, and no earlier. This kind of discernment is one of the hardest and most necessary things in the Christian life: to know what you can do in good conscience, and what you cannot, and not to confuse the two. Refusing too much can be as much a failure as refusing too little.
What We Keep
We do not have a clean biography of the Four Crowned Martyrs. We do not have their last words, and we do not have a faithful list of their names that every scholar would accept. What we have is a handful of tested facts and a long memory.
We have the fact that five sculptors in Pannonia were put to death for refusing to carve a pagan god, and that the Church remembered them. We have the fact that a group of Roman martyrs lay in a catacomb on the Via Labicana, venerated by pilgrims, though their stories were lost. We have the fact that a basilica rose on the Caelian Hill in their honor, and that a pope gathered their relics into it. And we have the fact that, on November 8, for more than a thousand years, Christians have gathered in their name.
There is a lesson in that. Most of the faithful who have ever lived will not have a detailed life written about them. Most of us will be remembered for a short time by a few people, and then not at all. The Four Crowned Martyrs show what the Church believes about that. Being forgotten by the world is not the same as being forgotten by God. The crown does not depend on a good biography.
Prayer
O God, who crowned your servants with the glory of martyrdom, and who give strength to every worker who is asked to betray the truth: grant that we may know where the line is, and that we may hold it. Through the prayers of the Holy Crowned Martyrs, protect all who labor with their hands, defend them from every compromise of conscience, and bring us, with all the faithful, to the crown of life. Through Christ our Lord. Amen.
Holy Crowned Martyrs, Pray for us.
Sources: Johann Peter Kirsch, "Four Crowned Martyrs," The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 6 (1909); the Roman Martyrology, November 8 and August 8
