The bodies of the martyrs were buried in the cemetery of Santi Marcellino e Pietro on the fourth mile of the Via Labicana by Pope Miltiades and Saint Sebastian (whose skull is preserved in the church).

[1] According to the Catholic Encyclopedia, [T]he Acts of these martyrs, written by a revenue officer named Porphyrius probably in the fourth century, relates of the five sculptors that, although they raised no objections to executing such profane images as Victoria, Cupid, and the Chariot of the Sun, they refused to make a statue of Æsculapius for a heathen temple.

Mons Porphyrites was quarried to supply the rare and expensive imperial porphyry for the emperor's building works and statuary, for which it was exclusively set aside.

[1] The bodies of the first group were interred by St. Sebastian and Pope Melchiades (Miltiades) at the fourth milestone on the Via Labicana, in a sandpit where there rested the remains of other executed Christians.

The rather confusing story of the four crowned martyrs was well known in Renaissance Florence, principally as told in the thirteenth-century Golden Legend by Jacopo da Voragine.

Due to their profession as sculptors, the five early Christian martyrs were an obvious choice for the guild of stonemasons, but their number seems often to have been understood to be four, as in this case.

[8] In the fourth and fifth centuries a basilica was erected and dedicated in honor of these martyrs on the Caelian Hill, probably in the general area where tradition located their execution.

One of the scholarly journals of English Freemasons is called Ars Quatuor Coronatorum,[5] and the Stonemasons of Germany adopted them as patron saints of "Operative Masonry.

"[9] The translation of the Four Crowned Martyrs to the church on the Caelian Hill is recorded in the Liber Pontificalis among the acts of Pope Leo IV (847–855).

The main biographical source is the Latin Passio sanctorum quatuor coronatorum (Passion of the Four Crowned Martyrs), mentioned in the martyrology of Ado of Vienne (d. 875) and then in the more concise version of Usuard (d.

[10] In the 10th century, Archbishop of Naples Peter published a Passio which was historically remarkable for a similar structure and textual style, and for some differences with regard to the content.

The Abbacy of Saint Mary of Grottaferrata preserved a Greek manuscript of the Passio which had some concerns with the Neapolitan document.

In 1910, the Jesuit philologist Hippolyte Delehaye published a commentary of the Four Crowned Martyrs' Passio in the work entitled Acta Sanctorum.