TARSICIO, saint, martyr. — He suffered martyrdom probably in the second half of the 3rd century or at the beginning of the 4th.
The oldest document that speaks of him is the poem that Pope Damasus placed on his tomb, in which he relates that T., surprised by a group of pagans while carrying the Eucharist, preferred to be killed rather than expose the Holy Species to profanation.
His tomb was in the Cemetery of Callistus on the Via Appia; pilgrims of the 7th century venerated him together with Pope Zephyrinus (De locis), whose tomb stood above ground (Notitia ecclesiarum), but originally T. must have been buried in a gallery of the cemetery, since Pope Damasus does not mention the proximity of the two Saints. Brief accounts of his martyrdom are found in an appendix to the Passio s. Stephani papae (BHL, 7845), in which he is called an acolyte, but this account depends on the Damasian poem. The inaccuracies of the Passio derive from the fact that its author, writing in the 6th century, when in Rome it was customary to send the fermentum to the presbyters of the various titular churches through the acolytes (v. letter of Pope Innocent I to Decentius of Gubbio: Jaffé-Wattenbach, 311), and reading the name of Stephen in the Damasian poem, believed that he was the bishop of Rome and T. his acolyte. In all likelihood, however, T. was a deacon: Damasus in fact places him in relation to the protomartyr deacon Stephen, and it is known that during the persecutions the deacons were entrusted with carrying the Eucharist to those absent from the liturgical assemblies and to confessors (St. Justin, I Apol., 65; St. Cyprian, De lapsis, 13). It cannot nevertheless be ruled out that he was also an ordinary member of the faithful, since in the first centuries Christians used to take the Eucharist home in order to receive Communion daily (Tertullian, Ad uxorem, 2); the Damasian comparison would then be limited to the kind of death suffered by both Stephen and T., namely stoning. In the Roman Martyrology he is commemorated on 15 August.