Saint Darius

Darius, Zosimus, Paul and Secundus are four martyrs who died in Nicaea, in Bithynia, in the fourth century, and they are remembered together on December 19. Nothing else is known about them. The old Roman Martyrology listed them; the Martyrology revised after the Second Vatican Council removed them, precisely because of the lack of historical information. It’s worth pausing on this for a moment, because it happens often and it’s almost never talked about. In the first centuries, when a community remembered its dead, for some it kept the story and for others only the name and the day. Then, over the centuries, those names passed from one list to another, and sometimes a story grew up around them — invented to fill a gap that bothered people. That didn’t happen here: four names and a city are what remain, and nobody added anything. In Italy the name Dario is common mostly in the North, and it’s one of those very ancient names — it was the name of the Persian kings — that have come through everything without wearing out. If your name is Darius, today is your name day.