The devotion of Pope Damasus to the Catacombs was as intelligent as it was ardent. He longed, as he himself tells us, to be buried in them, in a chamber where many of his martyred predecessors and other saints already lay; but he respected too much the integrity of their tombs, and prepared his place of burial therefore elsewhere. He built a place for the purpose aboveground, in which himself, his mother, and sister, were all buried. It would have been a happy thing for Christian archæology if others had been equally scrupulous; but numerous epitaphs tell us of men and women who had secured for themselves by purchase the right of a grave “behind the saints” (_retro sanctos_) or “near” (_ad_) such and such a saint, _i.e._, near his tomb; and many a subterranean chapel still testifies, by the destruction of its original decorations, to the frequent gratification of this natural desire. It is not improbable that Pope Damasus forbade its indulgence to others, as he certainly denied it to himself. Anyhow, there was a rapid decline in the number of those who were buried in any part of the Catacombs during the latter part of his Pontificate. Then came the fatal year 410, the year in which Rome was taken by Alaric,—the year in which, as St. Jerome says, “the most beautiful light of the world was put out: the Roman Empire was decapitated, and, to sum up all in one word, in the destruction of one city the whole world perished.” In this year, the use of the Catacombs as Christian cemeteries came to an end, and it was never again resumed. Here and there, at rare intervals, a few exceptions may be found, even down to the middle of the fifth century; but, speaking generally, it may be said that they now ceased to be places of burial, and were only henceforth places of pilgrimage. In 557, much mischief was done in them by the Goths, attracted, perhaps, by some report of the Parian marble and solid silver of which Prudentius had written with such enthusiasm. The mischief was repaired in part by the generosity of the people, in part by the care of the Popes. Pope Vigilius (A.D. 550) restored some of the monumental inscriptions of Pope Damasus which had been broken. It must be acknowledged that his restorations were not very successful; but this was not through any fault of his. Those were days of continual alarm and violence, and literature and the fine arts do not flourish in such an atmosphere. The artists, therefore, whom Vigilius had at his command were not worthy successors of Filocalus; they were both ignorant and unskilful. Sometimes they do not seem to have known the Latin words they had to reproduce, and, when they knew them, often they could not spell them. They committed many offences against the laws both of prosody and of orthography. Nevertheless, we owe the Pope a debt of gratitude for having done what he could, for he has preserved to us some valuable records which would otherwise have perished.