crown at their feet, and implores Heaven, through their
intercession, to deliver him from all evil and to enable
him to triumph over his enemies.
The deacon (who afterwards became Pope) Damasus wrote their epitaphs in verses which have become famous to all time ; while the poet Prudentius composed in their honour his poem on Their Crowns.
This devotion, as I have said before, was specially dear to the Christians of Kome, and for a very good reason ; there was scarcely a single Christian family in that city of martyrs who had not one near and dear to them among those valiant and glorious dead who lined the long galleries of the Catacombs. They were entered with an emotion and a respect which even in these days is shared by those who visit them. St. Jerome has related the attraction which drew him every Sunday into these holy retreats with some of his favourite companions, when he was a student at Eome, about the time of Paula s birth.[1]
Paula herself was constantly taken there by her parents. She loved to traverse the long galleries where the faith, now triumphant, had so long hidden itself from the world; to venerate the still recent traces of the martyrs sufferings and deaths; to breathe, as it were, the perfume of their tombs; to examine the quaint pictures, the pious symbols, in which we still find the thoughts of the early Christians, their hopes of immortality, and all the expressions of the faith for which they were persecuted even to the death. And when, leaving this sacred spot, she returned homewards and saw close by the cemetery of St. Cecilia on the Appian Way[2] the
