tified, the door and apse of the
church of S. Stephen, to which a powerful convent had once been
attached. Stranger still is the total destruction of the portico, two
thousand yards long, which connected the city gate--the Porta
Ostiensis--with the basilica. This portico was supported by marble
columns, one thousand at least, and its roof was covered with sheets
of lead. Halfway between the gate and S. Paul's, it was intersected by
a church, dedicated to an Egyptian martyr, S. Menna. The church of S.
Menna, the portico, its thousand columns, even its foundation walls,
have been totally destroyed. A document discovered by Armellini in the
archives of the Vatican says that some faint traces of the building
(_vestigia et parietes_) could be still recognized in the time of
Urban VI. This is the last mention made by an eye-witness.

Here, also, we find the evidence of the gigantic work of destruction
pursued for centuries by the Romans themselves, which we have been in
the habit of attributing to the barbarians alone. The barbarians have
their share of responsibility in causing the abandonment and the
desolation of the Campagna; they may have looted and damaged some
edifices, from which there was hope of a booty; they may have profaned
churches and oratories erected over the tombs of martyrs; but the
wholesale destruction, the obliteration of classical and mediaeval
monuments, is the work of the Romans and of their successive rulers.
To them, more than to the barbarians, we owe the present condition of
the Campagna, in the midst of which Rome remains like an oasis in a
barren solitude.

S. Paul was executed on the Via Laurentina, near some springs called
_Aquae Salviae_, where a memorial chapel was raised in the fifth
century. Its foundations were discovered in 1867, under the present
church of S. Paolo alle Tre Fontane (erected in the seventeenth
century by Cardinal Aldobrandini) together with historical
inscriptions written in Latin and Armenian. I have also to mention
another curious discovery. The apocryphal Greek Acts of S. Paul,
edited by Tischendorff,[89] assert that the apostle was beheaded near
these springs under a stone pine. In 1875, while the Trappists, who
are now intrusted with the care of the Abbey of the Tre Fontane, were
excavating for the foundations of a water-tank behind the chapel, they
found a mass of coins of Nero, together with several pine-cones
fossilized by age, and by the pressure of the earth.