Sebastian

Life and Ministry

Sebastian was born in Narbonne in southern Gaul to a family that had served in the Roman military, and he himself rose through the ranks to become a captain in the Praetorian Guard under Diocletian. The fourth-century Passion of Sebastian, preserved in a recension by Ambrose of Milan, describes him as a secret Christian who used his place at court to encourage prisoners awaiting execution and to convert members of the imperial household. The historical core is straightforward — a soldier in the elite imperial guard discovered to be a Christian under Diocletian — and the story was already old by the time Ambrose preserved it in the late fourth century.

Circumstances of Death

Around AD 288, when Sebastian's faith was reported to Diocletian, the emperor took it as a personal betrayal. He sentenced Sebastian to be tied to a stake on the parade ground of the Palatine and shot to death by his own fellow Mauretanian archers. Pierced by many arrows, Sebastian was left for dead. Christian women came at night to recover his body and discovered he was still alive; they nursed him back to strength. As soon as he could walk, Sebastian returned to the imperial palace and confronted Diocletian publicly with the injustice of the persecution. The emperor ordered him to be clubbed to death and his body thrown into the Cloaca Maxima to prevent Christian veneration.

Legacy

Sebastian became one of the most widely depicted figures in Christian iconography — first as a bearded older soldier, in late medieval and Renaissance art as the youthful nude pierced by arrows that anchored countless commissions from Botticelli to Mantegna to El Greco. His refusal to take exemption from the persecution by virtue of his rank, and his deliberate return to confront the emperor a second time, gave the Western church a model of Christian witness from inside the structures of imperial power. The Basilica of San Sebastiano fuori le Mura on the Appian Way was built over his tomb in the fourth century.