CASTULO, saint. — He is commemorated in the Hieronymian Martyrology on 12 January and 26 March. A marginal note added to the De locis sanctis martyrum states that between the Via Prenestina and the Casilina there stood the church of SS. Stratonico and C., whose bodies lay underground. In the Tours sylloge there is a votive poem to C. The accounts of C.’s martyrdom derive from the legendary Passio of St. Sebastiano, whose author claims to know that C. was Diocletian’s chamberlain and sheltered Christians in his residence on the Palatine; but, betrayed by a certain Torquato, he was supposedly thrown into a pit on the Via Labicana and buried alive beneath a mass of sand.
The cemetery was rediscovered near the aqueducts in 1672, visited by Fabretti, mentioned by Mabillon, and emptied especially in the time of Boldetti, who declares it to have been exceedingly rich (cf. Osservazioni sopra i cimiteri dei ss. Martiri, Roma 1720, p. 563). Many of its galleries were destroyed during the construction of the Roma–Civitavecchia railway in 1864, but De Rossi observes that they were not intact. The bombing of August 1943 brought several cemetery galleries to light along the railway embankment, but they were in very poor condition and all devastated.
Among the archaeological material from the cemetery, the inscription naming the marture domnu Castulu, the catibabicu secundu, and the staircase is considered spurious; this epigraph is reproduced in all the manuals. An inscription from the area above ground provides the date of the year 527; some fragments of a Christian sarcophagus were published by Bartoli in 1908.