Eutychian (Greek Eutychianos, 'fortunate') was elected Bishop of Rome in early 275 — the choice of the Roman clergy and the people falling on a man originally from the small Tuscan town of Luni at the northern end of the Apennine arc. His nearly nine-year pontificate (275–283) coincided with the relatively peaceful reigns of Tacitus, Probus, and Carus — a period of brief reprieve from systematic empire-wide persecution before the catastrophic Great Persecution that would begin under Diocletian in 303.
Eutychian is recorded by the Liber Pontificalis as the personal collector and burial-coordinator of 342 Christian martyrs across his pontificate — partly the active executions of the brief Aurelian persecution of the early 270s, partly the systematic gathering and translation of bodies of earlier martyrs from peripheral burial sites to the great Roman catacombs of San Callisto, Sant'Agnese, and Santa Priscilla. He is the foundational Roman papal figure of the great early-Catholic cult-of-the-martyrs that would explode in the post-Constantinian 4th century.
He was the last pope buried in the Crypt of the Popes at the Catacombs of San Callisto — after his pontificate the popes were buried at the new papal-cemetery at San Sebastiano on the Via Appia, until Constantine in the 320s shifted the papal burials to the new basilica of St. Peter at the Vatican.