MAURICE, EXSUPERIUS, CANDIDUS, VICTOR, INNOCENT, and VITALIS, Saints, Martyrs. — They are commemorated in the Martyrologium Hieronymianum on September 22 together with 6,666 companions, all belonging to the Theban Legion. The history of their martyrdom is highly controversial. The first to mention them is St. Eucherius, Bishop of Lyon (d. 450), in a sermon where Innocent and Vitalis are not recalled. During the persecution of Diocletian, an entire legion, composed entirely of Christians and called "Theban," of which Maurice, Exsuperius, and Candidus were officers, was massacred at Agaunum (see), after having been twice decimated for refusing to participate in the persecution against the Christians of Gaul. According to a Passion from the 7th century, however, the event would have occurred in 286 during the campaign led by Maximian against the Bagaudae: the Theban Legion, stationed at Agaunum, before beginning the battles was summoned to Octodurum for sacrifices and to take a special oath; the soldiers refused; they were therefore first decimated and then all massacred.
The two accounts certainly contain improbabilities and anachronisms.
Since the oldest source is St. Eucherius, one must rely on it to reconstruct the events with the greatest likelihood. St. Eucherius, in the first half of the 5th century, visited, like many other pilgrims of the time, the basilica of the martyrs built as early as the 4th century; and, since there was still no account of the martyrdom of the saints, he inquired locally and was told that 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 had thus transmitted it to posterity. It is therefore a matter of oral traditions collected, after about a century and a half from the events, by the man who had found the bodies of the martyrs and built the basilica in their honor. As often happens in such cases, after a century and a half oral tradition could well have been enriched with details and precision unknown at the origin, without absolutely excluding alterations or false interpretations from the beginning. It is therefore difficult to say how much truth there is in St. Eucherius' account, especially when one considers that it is a work elaborated to supply a deficiency. It therefore seems that one must exclude the massacre of an entire legion at Agaunum during the persecution of Diocletian; Gallo-Roman writers of the 6th century, such as Avitus of Vienne, Gregory of Tours, Fortunatus, while speaking of the Basilica and the veneration paid there to the martyrs, know nothing of this legion, and their language is rather general and rhetorical. From the fact that St. Eucherius recalls only four names, one might suspect that only these are the authentic local martyrs, perhaps soldiers, whose discovery, which took place in unspecified circumstances, probably in an ancient Christian cemetery, would have given rise to the idea that all those bodies were of martyrs and soldiers, also slaughtered in the same persecution: hence the idea of the massacre of the entire Theban Legion. Events of this kind are not rare or unusual in ancient hagiography.
It is impossible to accept the reason for the massacre given by St. Eucherius, namely that the slaughter would have occurred because the soldiers refused to take part in the general persecution, just as it is not free from difficulties to accept the other reason given by the latest tradition, which places the event during the military phase of the persecution of Diocletian. Over their bodies Bishop Theodore, in the 4th century, built the Basilica, soon famous in the region (see AGAUNUM).
In iconography he is represented as a knight, sometimes under the guise of a Moor. — See pl. XXIX.