San Callisto: The Slave Who Became Pope
Why is it significant?
Turn in through the gate and start up the long avenue of cypresses, with olive groves and open fields on either side. It feels like a country estate, and in a sense it is one... laid over the top of a vast underground city of the dead.
Key Facts
| Place | San Callisto: The Slave Who Became Pope |
|---|---|
| Address | Via Appia Antica 110, 00179 Roma RM, Italy |
| Geo Coordinates | 41.86250, 12.50800 |
| Part of Walk | Queen of Roads: Rome's Appian Way from the Baths of Caracalla to the Catacombs |
| Generated | Generated |
Turn in through the gate and start up the long avenue of cypresses, with olive groves and open fields on either side. It feels like a country estate, and in a sense it is one... laid over the top of a vast underground city of the dead.
The estate bears the name of a man with one of the most colourful careers in early Church history. Our main source is his bitter enemy, the theologian Hippolytus, so take what follows with a pinch of salt. Callixtus, he says, was a slave who ran a bank for his Christian master, lost the depositors' money, tried to escape by ship, threw himself into the sea when he was caught, and was later sent to the mines of Sardinia after causing a disturbance in a synagogue.
And yet. Freed from the mines, Callixtus came back to Rome, and around the year 200 Pope Zephyrinus put him in charge of the Christian cemetery here on the Appian Way. He ran it so well that in 217 he was elected bishop of Rome himself. Hippolytus never forgave him and set himself up as a rival bishop, often called the first antipope. The ironic ending: Callixtus is not buried in the catacomb that bears his name. He lies in another cemetery, on the Via Aurelia, on the far side of the city.
Under the fields around you run galleries estimated at about twenty kilometres, on as many as four levels, with hundreds of thousands of burials. Forget the films: Christians did not hide or live down there. These were legal cemeteries, dug into soft volcanic tuff outside the walls, because Roman law forbade burial inside the city. Poor families paid for a simple shelf cut into the rock, sealed with tiles, a name painted or scratched beside a fish, an anchor or a dove.
Those little symbols were a quiet code of hope in a world that buried its dead without much of it. Keep walking up the avenue through the trees to the cluster of low buildings and a small brick chapel with three rounded apses. Close beneath it lies the most sacred room in the catacomb.