June 18 -- Feast of Saints Mark and Marcellian

I find it encouraging that a damnatio memoriae won't work. Well, it may work for some of us who live in enough obscurity that our vestiges are lost over a century or two, but the big, political excisions from history are doomed. Chiseling names from every stone marker, scrubbing their faces from every frescoe, striking them from all public records -- it still won't work. In fact, enemies are sometimes instrumental in keeping the record alive, as in the case of Maximian Hercules.

Maximian Hercules was co-emperor (Augustus) with Diocletian in the late third century. While the record shows that Maximian was a little more eager to hunt down Christians than Diocletian (and Galerius, a junior emperor or Caesar, was even more eager), Diocletian gets most of the rap as the lead emperor of the era. Today's saints, Mark and Marcellian, were twin Roman polytheists who converted to Christianity, most likely in the early adulthood. Both married men, they were arrested and condemned by Maximian, but got a 30-day stay while they contemplated apostasy. Their family was pretty unequivocal about the need o burn a little incense, eat a lamb chop, and save their skins. Saint Sebastian, still a military officer whose own martyrdom was but a few years away, was equally adamant about their need to give up their lives to save their souls. At the end of the month, they opted for salvation. They were nailed to a post and then pierced with a lance.

Maximian later found retirement a little dull. He raised not one but two rebellions in an attempt to cling to power. Having backed his own son Maximian and then quarreled with him, he turned to the co-emperor Constantine, (he who would legalize Christianity a few years later) for shelter. Once he was safe, he rebelled again, leading Constantine to recommend suicide as the honorable way out. Out of friends and options, Maximian hanged himself. Or maybe he had a little help. But either way, Constantine then imposed a damnatio memoriae on him. Did I mention, and does it matter, that Constantine was Maximian's son-in-law?

There were bound to be records that included Maximian, of course. There were even bound to be surviving statues, though some (like this one) would suffer the damnatio. But even if the whole official Roman world had agreed to remove references to him, his victims would still recount the evil that he had done. The Christian records were written in documents that were only circulated privately inscribed onto the walls of catacombs (literally an underground record); they too referred to Maximian, and they were beyond the reach of Constantine or any emperor.