Primus and Felician were brothers and lived in Rome many years. They lived for the poor and often spent both nights and days with the confessors in their dungeons or at the places of their torments and execution. They had escaped the dangers of many bloody persecutions and were grown old in the heroic exercise of virtue when it pleased God to crown their labors with a glorious martyrdom. The pagans raised so great an outcry against them that by a joint order of Diocletian and Maximian Herculius they were both apprehended and put in chains in 286. They were beheaded after terrible torments. Their relics are at the church of St. Stephen on the Coelian Hill.