Pope Damasus (for it is he of whom we are speaking) sought diligently for all the tombs of historical note that had been hidden in days of persecution and not yet recovered. He had no means, indeed, nor apparently any desire, to crown them with basilicas of royal grandeur such as Constantine had built; but he did what he could, and what he thought necessary, both for the avoidance of scandal and danger among the innumerable pilgrims who now flocked from all parts of the world to visit the tombs of the martyrs, and also to preserve their memory to future generations. First, therefore, he made new staircases and additional shafts to the upper world to admit more light and air; he blocked up certain passages, so as to check indiscriminate rambles in the subterranean labyrinth, and to guide the pilgrims perforce to those particular shrines where they wished to pay their homage. He strengthened the friable tufa walls of some of the galleries which needed support by means of arches of brick and stone work. He enlarged some of the chambers, and ornamented many more; sometimes encasing their walls from top to bottom with marble; sometimes—“not content with Parian marble,” as Prudentius says—even using much solid silver for the ornamentation of very special shrines. Finally, he composed short sets of verses in honour of some of the heroes he desired to honour—verses in which he either relates some interesting circumstance of their history which would otherwise have been lost, or records the repairs or ornaments which had been his own work. These inscriptions have been of the utmost service in fixing the geography of the cemeteries, and so in reconstructing their history. They are all exquisitely engraved on marble, and set up at the spots to which they severally belong; engraved, too, invariably by the same hand, the hand of an accomplished artist, Furius Dionysius Filocalus, who devoted himself to this work out of special love, as it would seem, to the Pontiff whom he so ably served.