Mark and Marcellian, Saints, Martyrs

MARK AND MARCELLIAN, Saints, Martyrs. - They are commemorated in the Hieronymian Martyrology on June 18. On the same date their Mass is found in the Gelasian and Gregorian Sacramentaries. The Itineraries of the 7th century remember them on the Via Ardeatina, and lying beneath the altar of an above-ground basilica; the Salzburg Itinerary adds that they were twins and deacons.

It has been claimed that their tomb has been identified, but none of the hypotheses advanced can be considered certain. The few notices that concern their martyrdom are given by that romance and hagiographic work which is the Passio s. Sebastiani: one can therefore say that nothing positive is known about them.

The Hieronymian Martyrology indicates their tombs in the cemetery of Balbina on the Via Ardeatina, while the catalogue of cemeteries places them in a cemetery of Basilius on the Via Ardeatina, which is entirely unknown.

In 1903 G. Wilpert believed he could identify the cemetery discovered near what was then the monastery of the Trappists, today the Istituto S. Tarcisio, on the Via Appia, as the cemetery of Mark, Marcellian and Damasus mentioned in the Lib. Pont. for the works carried out by Pope John VII (705-707); but at that time the expression coemeterium stands for basilica; the two martyrs are indicated as buried on the Via Ardeatina in the cemetery of Balbina, not yet identified; the pilgrims of the 7th century visited their tomb in an above-ground basilica and not in an underground cubiculum, in which instead O. Marucchi wished to recognize the tomb of the «confessores sancti quos Graecia misit» whom Damasus counts in the group of St. Callixtus.

The cemetery discovered in 1903 was in part already known to De Rossi; it consists of an above-ground area and an underground region which inscriptions, sarcophagi and paintings assign to the 4th century.

Agostino Amore