Erasmus, a bishop of Formia in the Campania region of Italy, is venerated as a confessor and martyr who suffered during the persecution of the emperor Diocletian. In the Western tradition he is widely known as St Elmo — a name that arose as an Italian corruption of Erasmus by way of the form Sant' Ermo — and under that name he became the patron of sailors. He is commemorated in the Orthodox calendar on May 4, while Western usage keeps his feast on June 2.
The surviving accounts of his life are largely legendary, and the synaxarion-style acta preserve few details that can be verified historically. By tradition he abandoned his diocese to escape the persecution and withdrew to Mount Lebanon, where he lived for a number of years in prayer and penance and, the legend relates, was miraculously fed by a raven until an angel directed his return. He is said to have been brought before Diocletian, to have endured fierce tortures, and to have been freed from his chains by angelic aid before continuing to confess Christ.
The most prominent feature of his later legend is the manner of his martyrdom: he is described as being put to death by disembowelment, his intestines wound out upon a windlass. From this account he came to be invoked against abdominal and intestinal afflictions, and in the West he was numbered among the Fourteen Holy Helpers, a group of saints venerated especially as intercessors. The relics of Erasmus were recorded at the cathedral of Formia by Pope Gregory the Great in the sixth century; after the old city of Formiae was destroyed by Saracen raiders in 842, his veneration was transferred to Gaeta, of which he remains a patron.
