Appendix I
APPENDIX I At the time of his second visit to Rome, in that year, there was already established on the Aventine
Mount a community of women, presided over by Albina and her daughter Marcella, leading a form of conventual life, the first impulse to which at Rome had been given many years before by Athanasius,1 the famous opponent of Arianism, who had been driven from his see at Alexandria about 341 and spent some years in exile at Rome.
He and two Egyptian monks who accompanied him, Isidore 2 and Ammon, had been welcomed and entertained by Albina, a noble and rich widow, at her palace on the Aventine, and her daughter Marcella, though only a child, w ras deeply impressed by the personalities of the Eastern bishop and his companions and by their tales of the wonderful lives led by the hermits and cenobites, men and women, who already peopled the deserts of Syria and Egypt.
When Athanasius departed he left with the child as a parting gift his life of St. Antony, the study of which inspired her with a deep admiration and desire for the monastic life.
Marcella grew up and married, but when her husband died, after only seven months of married life, leaving her a childless widow, she refused all further offers of marriage, and, while continuing to transact the necessary business connected with her household and property, she henceforth tried to lead, though staying at home with her mother,
1 Letter CXXVII. 5.
2 Probably the monk of Nitria referred to in Letter XXII.
33.
When Paula visited Alexandria in 385 he was governor of the pilgrims' hospice there; later he was involved in the quarrel between Jerome and John, Bishop of Jerusalem, and died, a very old man, in 403.
APPENDIX I the kind of life for which she had always longed.
She wore the plainest of clothes, fasted often and devoted most of her time to prayer and study of the scriptures.
Gradually she collected around her a number of like-minded women, virgins and widows, who all lived together and looked up to Albina as a common mother.
Among these was Marcellina, the sister of Ambrose, Bishop of Milan, who wrote for her his famous treatises on virginity.
She had received the veil from Pope Liberius in 352, but lived for many years after with her own mother, and only after her death joined Marcella's community.
Other members of the household, Sophronia, Felicita and another Marcella, are known to us by name only, but of Asella more is told.
She was perhaps a sister 1 of Marcella, perhaps only a kinswoman, but when a mere child of ten she vowed herself to a life of virginity, and when her mother refused to buy her the plain brown dress worn by those dedicated to the religious life, Jerome tells us how the child sold her gold chain and bought the clothing for herself.
Thenceforward she lived a life of fasting and of prayer, hardly seeing her own sister, only going out to visit the martyrs' shrines, and making for herself a hermitage in the midst of the busy life of Rome. 2
Such solitude and austerity were exceptional, and Marcella herself kept in touch with the world and welcomed as visitors at her home women whose tastes and interests were the same as her own.
One of these friends was Lea,3 a widow, who was at the head of another community
Letter XLV. 7.
2 Letter XXIV.
Cf. Letter XXIII.
APPENDIX I of women ; others, such as Titiana and her daughter Furia, were still living their normal life in the Roman society of the day . 1
Another member of the circle was Fabiola, who had married young and unhappily, and after divorcing her first husband had married again.
Strictly speaking the Church did not recognize such a union, but legally it was valid, and no slur seems to have rested upon her.
After her second husband's death, however, Fabiola's conscience troubled her for having contracted the marriage, and she astounded the world of Rome by publicly appearing as a penitent to expiate the sin of her second marriage.
After receiving absolution she devoted her life and fortune to the care of the sick and poor, not only at Rome, but throughout Italy . 2
Rut of all Marcella's circle, the most famous was her kinswoman the rich patrician Paula .3
Her parents, Rogatus and Blesilla, were probably both 1 Letter LIV.
2 Cf.
Letter LXXVII.
The date of this public penance is uncertain.
Jerome's account seems to make it clear that it took place before her visit to Palestine in 394, and it is tempting to place it during, or soon after, Jerome's stay in Rome (382-5) and to ascribe it to his influence.
The description of the ceremony suggests the public act of penance which Bishop Ambrose exacted from the Emperor Theodosius in 392 and it may have been inspired by that.
M. Thierry ( Life of S. Jerome, II. p. 20 If.) thinks it took place after Fabiola's visit to Palestine and connects it with a letter (LV.) written by Jerome to the priest Amandus in 394 in answer to a query about the validity of such a marriage as Fabiola's.
3 For Paula and her family cf. Gibbon, Chs. XXXI. and XXXVII.: also Letter CVIIL 1.
Gracchorum stirps, suboles scipionum, Pauli heres, cuius vocabulum trahit, maeciae Papiriae, matris Africani, vera et germana progenies.
APPENDIX I Christians, but her husband Toxotius had been a pagan.1
The marriage was apparently a very happy one in spite of the difference of religion, and during his lifetime she had led the usual life of a Roman matron of high rank, but after his death in 379 she tried to find consolation in a life of the strictest asceticism, and she spent so much money on charity that she was reproached for squandering her children's inheritance. 2
Jerome draws a vivid picture of the austerities which she practised and contrasts them with her previous life of luxury,3 but she still maintained her household on a scale that enabled her to offer hospitality to Bishop Epiphanius during his stay in Rome in 382. 4
The family life of Paula illustrates the struggle between Christianity and paganism in the Roman society of the day. 5
Her four daughters were all Christians.
Blesilla, the eldest of them, had married Furius, a son of the devout Titiana, and had been left a widow before she was twenty, but as yet she was indifferent to her religion and enjoyed to the full the life of gay luxury which her wealth and position offered to her.
Julia or Eustochium, the third daughter, had wished from a child to take the veil and much of her time had been spent with
Cf. Letter CVIII. 3 ff.
2 Letter CVIII. 5.
3 Letter CVIII. 4.
Cf. Letter CVIII. 15.
Cf. Letter CVIII. 6.
5 In Marcella's own family there was a similar division; Albina had been a Christian for many years, but her kinsman
Albinus was not only a pagan, but a pontiff of Jupiter, though his wife and daughter were both Christians, and it was only years later that his Christian grandchild finally converted the old man (Letter CVII. 1-4).
APPENDIX I Marcella, whose instruction and example had confirmed her natural bent.
Paula sympathised with this desire, but it was strongly opposed by the child's uncle Hymetius, her father's brother.
He had been a favourite of the Emperor Julian and he and his wife Praetextata held fast to the old religion, and their influence and authority kept Paula's only son, the young Toxotius, at this time a child of nine or ten, from becoming a Christian.
They invited Eustochium to visit them, and by dressing her in fine clothes and giving her a glimpse of the social life in which she would naturally take part, they tried to detach her from opinions which to them seemed fanatical and unnatural.
To modern minds the scheme seems but a natural attempt to let the child—she was only fourteen or fifteen—see something of the world which she was so determined to abjure, but Jerome, writing of the incident twenty years later, exults in its failure and denounced the wickedness of the worldly uncle and aunt, whose death, which occurred soon after, he ascribes to the direct judgment of Heaven for this attempt to turn the young virgin from her chosen path. 1
Marcella and her circle were not only all wealthy and well born, but they were also women of cultivated intellect, and the visit of the Eastern bishops 2 with whom Jerome came to Rome in 382 was an event of great interest to them.
Jerome at first, as he tells us himself, avoided the society of women, but Marcella and her friends longed to meet and to be
1 Letter CVII. 5.
2 Paulinus of Antioch (cf. Introd.* p. viii) and Epiphanius of Salamis in Cyprus.
Cf. Letter CVIII. 6.