14/07/2026
🙏🏼🏳️🌈
Around the year 300, two Roman officers were stripped of their rank and tortured for refusing to renounce their god. The oldest surviving account of their deaths calls them not friends, but lovers.
Sergius and Bacchus were high-ranking soldiers in the Roman army, close companions and secret Christians. When they were exposed, Bacchus was beaten to death. According to the account, he appeared to Sergius in a vision that night, promising they would soon be reunited, and Sergius was beheaded not long after.
The early church made them saints. For centuries the two men were venerated together as patrons of soldiers, their images always showing them side by side.
More than a thousand years later, the historian John Boswell pointed to that oldest text, which describes them as "erastai," lovers, and argued they had been joined in an early Christian rite uniting two men. Scholars still argue over how far that reading holds.
What isn't disputed: two men who refused to give each other up have been honored by the church for over 1,600 years, and their icon now leads Pride parades.
