Icône orientale représentant Serge et Bacchus à cheval.
Saints Sergius and Bacchus were third century Roman soldiers who are commemorated as martyrs by the Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox churches. Their feast day is October 7. According to their hagiography, Sergius and Bacchus were officers in Caesar Galerius Maximianus's army, and were held high in his favor until they were exposed as secret Christians. They were then severely punished, with Bacchus dying during torture, and Sergius eventually beheaded. However, due to its inconsistencies and historical anachronisms, the hagiography is considered ahistorical. Sergius and Bacchus were very popular throughout Late Antiquity, and churches in their honor were built in several cities, including Constantinople and Rome. The close friendship between the two is strongly emphasized in their hagiographies and traditions, making them one of the most famous examples of paired saints. This closeness led the historian John Boswell to suggest that their relationship was a romantic one; though other historians have widely rejected this theory, it has led to popular veneration of Sergius and Bacchus in the gay Christian community. Legend The saints' story is told in the Greek text known as The Passion of Sergius and Bacchus. The story is ostensibly set during the reign of Roman Emperor Galerius (305 to 311), though it contains a number of contradictions and anachronisms that make dating difficult. The work itself may date to the mid-5th century. According to the text, Sergius and Bacchus were Roman citizens and high-ranking officers of the Roman Army, but their covert Christianity was discovered when they attempted to avoid accompanying a Roman official into a pagan temple with the rest of his bodyguard. After they persisted in refusing to sacrifice to Jupiter in the company of the emperor Galerius, they were publicly humiliated by being chained and dressed in female attire and paraded around town. Galerius then sent them to Barbalissos in Mesopotamia to be tried by Antiochus, the military commander there and an old friend of Sergius. Antiochus could not convince them to give up their faith, however, and Bacchus was beaten to death. The next day Bacchus' spirit appeared to Sergius and encouraged him to remain strong so they could be together forever. Over the next days, Sergius was also brutally tortured and finally executed at Resafa, where his death was marked by miraculous happenings. The Passion, replete with supernatural occurrences and historical anachronisms, has been dismissed as an unreliable historical source. The work has been dated to mid-5th century, and there is no other evidence for the cult of Sergius and Bacchus before about 425, over a century after they are said to have died. As such there is considerable doubt about their historicity. There is no firm evidence for Sergius and Bacchus' schola gentilium having been used by Galerius or any other emperor before Constantine I, and given that persecution of Christians had begun in the army considerably before the overall persecutions of the early 4th century, it is very unlikely that even secret Christians could have risen through the ranks of the imperial bodyguard. Finally, there is no evidence to support the existence of monks, such as the ones said in the Passion to have recovered Bacchus' body, living near the Euphrates during the 4th century. Instead, the Italian scholar Pio Franchi de Cavalieri has argued that The Passion of Sergius and Bacchus was based on an earlier lost passion of Juventinus and Maximinus, two saints martyred under Emperor Julian the Apostate in 363. He noted especially that the punishment of being paraded around in women's clothes reflected the treatment of Christian soldiers by Julian. Historian David Woods further notes that Zosimus' Historia Nova includes a description of Julian punishing cavalry deserters in just such a manner, further strengthening the argument that the author of The Passion of Sergius and Bacchus took material from the stories of martyrs of Julian's time rather than that of Galerius. Woods argues that the tradition of the saints' martyrdom is a later development that became attached to otherwise obscure relics in the 5th century, and that the Passion is a fiction composed after their cult had become popular. He concludes that "the martyrs Sergius and Bacchus did not exist as such".