The Greek root that leads to modern Western lexicalizations of "martyrdom" is itself a witness to a history of semantic shifts. This paper explores how the concept of voluntary death has been expanded in modern Italian from a merely religious perspective to a more general form of voluntary sacrifice that can happen for reasons of ideology, politics, or class belonging. This semantic expansion, that leads to figurative meanings and decontextualisations, will be explored in a selection of literary sources from the XIX century Italian context, in relation to the Biblical and/or exegetical heritage that might have been triggering the semantic shift.