The chief of the plague

People familiar with world art know well the image of Saint Sebastian, a Christian in disguise who served as a soldier in the army of the most anti-Christian of Roman emperors. Interestingly, Diocletian spent his old age peacefully growing cabbages in Dalmatia.iDiocletian was a Roman emperor who reigned from 284 to 305. An informant betrayed Sebastian to the authorities, and he was sentenced to death.

The depiction of his execution by bow and arrows became one of the most popular subjects even in secular art. A beautiful, nearly naked young man, bound, suffering, pierced with arrows, paradoxically became a kind of sex symbol.

Many are unaware that Sebastian did not die in that execution attempt. When he was untied from the execution post, he was found to be severely wounded, but Christians, especially a devout woman named Irene, took care of him and Sebastian soon recovered. However, after recovering, instead of fleeing to distant provinces and disappearing, he returned to his military unit as if nothing had happened. This time, his comrades joyfully beat him to death and threw him into the Cloaca Maxima, Rome's main sewer.

After his death, Sebastian appeared in a vision to another devout woman, Lucina, and told her that his remains should be found and placed in the catacombs on the Appian Way. Since then, and to this day, the Catacombs of Saint Sebastian have been one of the earliest and most important Christian sanctuaries in Rome.

In very ancient times—no later than the end of the seventh century—the image of Saint Sebastian began to be associated with deliverance from all kinds of illnesses, primarily the plague, or what we now call the plague. What the ancient pestilentia, or contagion, was exactly is not always clear from an epidemiological point of view.

The fact remains that since antiquity, contagious diseases were closely associated with gods who wielded arrows.isuch as Artemis and Apollo Angered gods would strike disobedient mortals with invisible poisoned arrows, causing terrible epidemics, and protection from these disasters was sought from the very same gods. The era of Apollonian deities passed, but the needs of the supplicants remained the same, and thus, the symbol of the arrow as a protection from plague found itself a new embodiment.

During outbreaks of plague in Rome and Pavia, the Benedictine1¹Benedictine Benedictine monasticism is one of the oldest monastic traditions of the West, named after Saint Benedict of Nursia, who died in 547. monk and historian Paul the DeaconiPaul the Deacon died in 799. had a revelation. He was told, in what was presumably a vision, the epidemic would not cease until an altar to Saint Sebastian the Martyr was erected in the Church of Saint Peter in Chains in Pavia.

Around the same time, a mosaic depicting Saint Sebastian was installed in the Church of Saint Peter in Chains in Rome, the same place where Michelangelo's Horned Moses resides. However, in this mosaic, Sebastian is yet far from being a sex symbol: he is dressed from head to toe, old, and gray-haired.