Castrimoenium
CASTRIMOE´NIUMa town of Latium, at the foot of the Alban hills about 12 miles from Rome, now called Marino.It does not appear to have been in ancient times a place of importance, but we learn from the Liber Coloniarum that it received a colony under Sulla, and that its territory was again assigned to military occupants by Nero. (Lib. Colon. p. 233.) Pliny also mentions the Castrimoienses among the Latin towns still existing in his time (3.5. s. 9.63); but it seems probable that the Munienses enumerated by him among the extinct populiof Latium (lb. § 69), are the same people, and that we should read Moenienses. If this be so, the name was probably changed when the colony of Sulla was established there, at which time we are told that the city was fortified (oppidum lege Sullana est munitum, Lib. Colon. l. c. ). The form Castrimonium is found both in Pliny and the Liber Colon.; but we learn the correct name to have been Castrimoenium from inscriptions, which also attest its municipal rank under the Roman Empire. (Gruter, Inscr. p. 397. 3; Orelli, Inscr. 1393). The discovery of these inscriptions near the modern city of Marino, renders it almost certain that this occupies the site of Castrimoenium: it stands on a nearly isolated knoll, connected with the Alban hills, about 3 miles from Albano, on the road to Frascati. (Nibby, Dintorni, vol. 2. p. 315; Gell, Top. of Rome, p. 310.)
[E.H.B]A municipium near Marino on the N slope of the crater that encloses Lago d'Albano, perhaps a resettlement of the site of the ancient Latins called Munienses, which had disappeared before Pliny's time. It flourished from the time of Augustus to that of Marcus Aurelius, as the epigraphical record shows; it is mentioned only by Pliny (HN 3.69) and the Liber coloniarum (233). Finds in the vicinity range from a prehistoric necropolis to a number of fine Roman villas, notably that of Q. Volconius Pollio excavated in 1884, sculptures from which are now in the Museo delle Terme and the Vatican (Braccio Nuovo), but nothing of the ancient town is visible today.
Below the site, toward the floor of the campagna, are great quarries of peperino (lapis albanus), both ancient and modern.
BIBLIOGRAPHYR. Lanciani, BullComm 12 (1884) 141-71; T. Ashby, PBSR 4 (1907) 147-53; G. & F. Tomassetti, La campagna romana 4 (1926) 173-279.
L. RICHARDSON, JR.