Career
He died in 389 AD, and in 863 AD The count of Flanders Baldwin I transferred his relics to the Church Saint-Agricol de Reims at Bruges, where his cult is still active. He is revered as a saint and his feast day is celebrated locally on 14 October. A legend has it that he was thrown as a child into a river, where a holy man took five candles and placed them on a water wheel which showed where the child had gone, and he was able to recover the child.
Saint Donatien is represented holding a wheel bearing candles.
Saint Donatian ad Saint Rogatian were it seems the sons of the first magistrate of the city. The family property, a Gallo-Roman villa, also home to the first Christian church built in Nantes, stood on the site of the Basilica of Saint Donatien-et-Saint-Rogatien, built according to tradition at the location of their graves, which was according to custom, in their home.
When they refused, they were tortured and spend their last night praying together. They were pierced by the spear of a lictor and then beheaded on the morning of 24 May 304.
According to tradition, in a place outside the city walls, at Number.
63 rue Dufour on the old road from Paris, near the Eugene-Livet High School and not far from the basilica dedicated to them. They are remembered throughout the Loire Valley, as far as Orleans, where their relics were displaced at the time of the Norman invasions, and then deposited in the ninth or tenth century in Saint-Donatien Basilica in a reliquary of gold. These relics were scattered during the French Revolution, a wooden shrine replacing the previous reliquary.
Both have statue on either side of the main gate, in the narthex of the Cathedral Saint-Pierre and Saint-Paul de Nantes, as is a painting by Théophile Vauchelet.