Note 127 — CHRISTMAS HYMN.
Reading edition
St. Damasus was of Spanish extraction. He was elected pope in the year 366, being then sixty years old. During the latter years of his life the celebrated St. Jerome acted as his secretary, and mentions him in his epistles as "an incomparable person and a learned doctor." He is classed by writers with Basil, Athanasius, Ambrose, and such like men, who have been eminent for their zeal, learning, and holy lives.
Through his care many valuable public works were executed. He repaired and beautified the church of St. Laurence near Pompey's Pillar, and the paintings with which he decorated it were admirable four hundred years afterward. He also drained some of the impure springs of the Vatican, and repaired and adorned with epitaphs in verse many of the tombs of the martyrs interred in the Catacombs. A collection of nearly forty of those epitaphs is still extant, and justifies the praises which St. Jerome bestows on his poetical genius. He is also known as the author of many longer poems.
After a life of humility, benevolence, and purity, he died in the year 384, having filled the papal throne eighteen years. He was buried in a small oratory near the Ardeatine Way, and his tomb was identified and described in 1736.
A further interest is thrown around this prelate and poet by recent investigations. In 1851, Pope Pius IX. employed the distinguished Chevalier G. B. de Rossi to prepare a work illustrating the cemeteries which underlie the vineyards of the Via Appia, on each side of which are some of the most extensive and most important. M. de Rossi found here in fragments, which he put together, an inscription in honor of Eusebius, the authorship of which is distinctly ascribed to Damasus—Damasus Episcopus fecit Eusebio Episcopo et Martyri.
The slab of marble on which this was engraved had been used (as was seen by marks on the other side) for some public monument in honor of the Emperor Caracalla.