of wealth, ... the traditions of
the Christian tomb-architects sank into utter insignificance, and the
expanse of the wasted Campagna now offered room enough to bury the few
bodies, without having to descend as once far down below the surface of
the earth." The earliest account of the catacombs, that of St Jerome
narrating his visits to them when a schoolboy at Rome, about A.D. 354,
shows that interment in them was even then rare if it had not been
altogether discontinued; and the poet Prudentius's description of the
tomb of the Christian martyr Hippolytus, and the cemetery in which it
stood, leads us to the same conclusion. With the latter part of the 4th
century a new epoch in the history of the catacombs arose--that of
religious reverence. In the time of Pope Damasus, A.D. 366-384, the
catacombs had begun to be regarded with special devotion, and had become
the resort of large bands of pilgrims, for whose guidance catalogues of
the chief burial-places and the holy men buried in them were drawn up.
Some of these lists are still extant.[1] Pope Damasus himself displayed
great zeal in adapting the catacombs to their new purpose, restoring the
works of art on the walls, and renewing the epitaphs over the graves of
the martyrs. In this latter work he employed an engraver named Furius
Philocalus, the exquisite beauty of whose characters enables the
smallest fragment of his work to be recognized at a glance. This gave
rise to extensive alterations in their construction and decoration,
which has much lessened their value as authentic memorials of the
religious art of the 2nd and 3rd centuries. Subsequent popes manifested
equal ardour, with the same damaging results, in the repair and
adornment of the catacombs, and many of the paintings covering their
walls, which have been assigned to the period of their original
construction, are really the work of these later times. The catacombs
shared in the devastation of Rome by the Goths under Vitiges in the 6th
century and by the Lombards at a later period; and partly through the
spoliation of these barbarian invaders, partly through the neglect of
those who should have been their guardians, they sank into such a state
of decay and pollution that, as the only means of preserving the holy
remains they enshrined from further desecration, Pope Paul I., in the
latter part of the 8th century, and Pope Paschal, at the beginning of
the 9th, entered upon the work of the translation of the re