Saint Marcellus I

When the Roman church finally elected a bishop in 308, nearly four years after Marcellinus's death, it chose the presbyter who had served under him and, the Donatists later said, lapsed with him. Marcellus set about rebuilding. The Liber Pontificalis credits him with organizing twenty-five titular churches in the city as centers for baptism and penance, and it is the penance that undid him. Thousands of Romans had sacrificed in 303 and wanted back in; Marcellus required them to do public penance first, and the lapsed, many of them wealthy, rioted.

The story is told on his tomb. Damasus, who as a boy had lived through it, wrote the epitaph: the true shepherd, "because he required the lapsed to weep for their crime," was hated by all the wretched; "hence fury, hatred, discord, sedition, slaughter," and the tyrant, seeing the city in uproar, drove out the bishop who had caused it. The tyrant was Maxentius, who ruled Rome from 306 and had no interest in persecuting Christians, only in quiet streets. Marcellus went into exile and died there on 16 January 309, after a reign of less than a year.

His body was brought back and buried in the cemetery of Priscilla. Because the sources for Marcellinus and Marcellus are so thin and the names so close, some ancient lists ran them together as one man; the Liberian Catalogue keeps them apart, and so does this timeline.