at the land."]

The city of Ravenna at this time would seem to have been full of
churches. Its first bishop, S. Apollinaris, had been the friend of S.
Peter who, as it was believed, had appointed him to the see of
Ravenna. That was in the earliest days of the Christian Church. But we
find the tradition still living in the fourth century when Severus,
bishop of Ravenna, miraculously chosen to fill the see, sat in the
council of Sardica in 344 and refused to make any alteration in the
Nicene Creed. About the end of the century Ursus had been bishop and
had built the great cathedral church, the Basilica Ursiana, dedicated
in honour of the Resurrection, with its five naves and fifty-six
columns of marble, its _schola cantorum_ in the midst, and its
mosaics, all of which were finally and utterly destroyed in 1733.
There was too the baptistery which remains and the church of S. Agata
and many others which have perished.

With the church of S. Agata we connect one of the great bishops of the
fifth century, Joannes Angeloptes, who was there served at Mass by an
angel. While with the beautiful little chapel in the bishop's palace,
which still, in some sort at least, remains to us, we connect perhaps
the greatest bishop Ravenna can boast of, S. Peter Chrysologus, for he
built it.

Nor was Placidia herself slow to add to the ecclesiastical splendour
of her city. We have already seen that she built S. Giovanni
Evangelista, rebuilt in the thirteenth century, in fulfilment of her
vow and in memory of her salvation from shipwreck. Close to her palace
she built another church in honour of the Holy Cross, and attached to
it she erected her mausoleum, which remains perhaps the most precious