MAURITIUS, EXUPERIUS, CANDIDUS, VICTOR, INNOCENT and VITALIS, Saints, Martyrs. - They are commemorated in the Hieronymian Martyrology on 22 September together with 6,666 companions, all belonging to the Theban Legion. The history of their martyrdom is highly controversial. St. Eucherius, bishop of Lyon (d. 450), speaks of it first, in a sermo of his, where Innocent and Vitalis are not mentioned. During the persecution of Diocletian an entire legion, composed wholly of Christians and called the "Theban," of which M., Exuperius and Candidus were officers, was massacred in its entirety at Agaunum (v.), after having been decimated twice for refusing to take part in the persecution against the Christians of Gaul. According to a Passio of the 7th century, however, the event would have occurred in 286 during the campaign conducted by Maximian against the Bagaudae: the Theban Legion, stationed at Agaunum, before beginning the fighting was summoned to Octodurum for sacrifices and to swear a special oath; the soldiers refused; they were therefore first decimated and then all massacred.
The two accounts certainly present implausibilities and anachronisms.
Since the oldest source is St. Eucherius, it is to it that one must turn in order to reconstruct the facts with the greatest likelihood. St. Eucherius, in the first half of the 5th century, visited, like so many other pilgrims of the time, the basilica of the martyrs erected as early as the 4th century; and, since no account of the martyrdom of the saints yet existed, he questioned people of the place about it, who said they had heard it from Bishop Isaac of Geneva, who in turn had learned it from Bishop Theodore of Octodurum (d. after 381), founder of the basilica, and who had thus handed it down to posterity. These are therefore oral traditions collected, after about a century and a half from the events, by the one who had found the bodies of the martyrs and built the basilica in their honor. As happens in such cases, at a century and a half's distance the oral tradition could very well have been altered with a wealth of details and precisions unknown in the original, without absolutely excluding alterations or false interpretations from the very beginning. It is therefore difficult to say how much truth there is in the account of St. Eucherius, especially when one considers that it is a writing elaborated to supply a lack. It seems, then, that the massacre of an entire legion at Agaunum during the persecution of Diocletian must be excluded; Gallo-Roman writers of the 6th century, such as Avitus of Vienne, Gregory of Tours, Fortunatus, although speaking of the Basilica and of the veneration that the martyrs there enjoyed, know nothing of this legion, and their language is rather generic and rhetorical. From the fact that St. Eucherius mentions only four names, one might suspect that they alone are the authentic local martyrs, perhaps soldiers, whose discovery, occurring in unspecified circumstances, probably in an ancient Christian cemetery, would have given rise to the idea that all those bodies were of martyrs and of soldiers, slain likewise in the same per-
Passio of the 7th century. This indeed has every appearance of correcting the incongruities of the Eucherian writing, but does not always succeed. Probably it must have been a local episode, restricted to a few Christian soldiers, occurring during the military phase of the persecution of Diocletian. Over their bodies Bishop Theodore, in the second half of the 4th century, built the Basilica, soon famous in the region (v. AGAUNUM).
In iconography he is represented as a knight, sometimes under the appearance of a Moor. - See plate XXIX.
Bibliography13 works
Agostino Amore