CALEPODIUS. — No liturgical or topographical document bears witness to the cult rendered to C. as a martyr apart from the Passio s. Callisti, which affirms his status as a priest of the Roman Church and states that he was thrown into the Tiber and buried by the same pontiff Callistus in the cemetery bearing his name, on the Via Aurelia. The same Passio, certainly not genuine, is also the earliest source attesting his cult among the Roman martyrs. In the same Passio and in the Lib. Pont.,
the cemetery of C. is called the one where Pope Callistus was deposited; whereas in the depositio episcoporum and in the Liberian Catalogue, the cemetery of Callistus is identified as the one at the third milestone of the Via Aurelia, in which the popes Callistus and Julius were buried. But it is certain that his martyrdom was unknown in the early centuries.
The small cemetery of C. lies at the third milestone on the Via Aurelia, in the Armellini estate (formerly Lamperini), opposite the farmhouse of s. Pio V. s. Pancratius, and was also called that of Callistus, because of the tomb of this Pope, over which, in due course, Julius I built a basilica, where he himself was buried. In 1881 E. Stevenson discovered the remains of the apse of the basilica, near which there is an entrance to the cemetery, today very badly damaged, with its galleries filled with rubble.