When Saint Augustine worshiped in Ostia, the city was already in full decline. The Emperor Constantine had revoked its municipal status, and assigned it to the village called Portus which had grown up around Trajan’s harbor. The cemetery of Portus, on Isola Sacra, the island between the Fiumicino and the principal mouth of the Tiber, contains a few Christian burials. It is chiefly noteworthy for the class distinctions it reveals between the wealthy in their fine vaulted brick tombs, embellished with paintings and mosaics (very like those found in the cemetery under St. Peter’s), and the poor, whose ashes rest in the miserable amphorae stuck in the low-lying ground. By the end of the fourth century, burials in this cemetery ceased, mute and pathetic evidence of the decline of Portus itself. Ostia proper agonized on to its end. The flat slabs of inscriptions are re-used as shop-counters, or to mend pavements. Architectural marbles are sawed up into latrine-seats. Statues are reduced to lime or used, whole or decapitated, to repair breaches in the city wall. The water-pipes break and are not repaired, fallen house-walls are left lying, rubble piles up forty feet deep. Sacked by the barbarian, decimated by malaria, Ostia by the fifth century was desolate, and the road to Rome overgrown with trees. Only a Christian chapel by the theater, marking the spot where a Christian was martyred, was left to mark the spot. * * * * * Besides embellishing the Forum at Ostia with its basilica and council-house, Trajan, through his architect, the Syrian Apollodorus of Damascus, adorned Rome with the last, largest, and finest of the Imperial Fora (see Figs. 5.13 and 9.4). We know from an inscribed record, the _Fasti Ostienses_, found in re-use to repair a floor in an ancient private house in Ostia, that its dedication day was May 18, A.D. 113. Its general plan has been known since the French excavations of 1812. Its inspiration is the porticoes of Caesar’s Forum and the apses and the Hall of Fame of Augustus’. In conception it is axially symmetric and tripartite: the Forum proper, the basilica, and the famous Column behind, flanked by a pair of libraries. Hadrian added the Temple of the Deified Trajan, now destroyed, which closed the vista to the west. The Forum proper lay at right angles to the Forum of Augustus, its façade bowed slightly out, like the _Forum Transitorium_. Its entrance was through a triumphal arch, added in A.D. 117, after Trajan’s death. In the middle of the great porticoed square, over 620 feet wide, with apses on either side, was placed a great equestrian statue of Trajan; the Romans used to say that never did a horse have such a stable.