Baring-Gould’s sources: Roman Martyrology, introduced from the Greek Menaea. Authorities: — A Life by Metaphrastes; and one in the 11 Lives of the Fathers of the Desert” She is mentioned also by S. Paulinus of Nola and S. Augustine.] Melania, daughter of a consul, mother of a praetor, belonged to the illustrious family of Marcellinus, of Spanish origin. She was related to S. Paulinus of Nola, and was second to none in Aquitaine and Spain for wealth and nobility. She was bom at Rome in 342 or 343, about two years after the consulate of Marcellinus, whose granddaughter she was.

Melania was married to a man in high office, whose name 1 Metaphrastes gives a long story of Sylvester withstanding in argument a Jew named Zambres, and of his raising a dead bull to life, at sight of which miracle S. Helena asked for baptism.

k beaucoup de monde par Finfection de son haleine.” — Guerin et Giry. is, however, not recorded; and she bore him three children. He died and left her a widow when she was only twentythree. She lost two of her children, and there remained to her only a son, Publicola. She then placed her child with guardians, and started on a pilgrimage to the East with Rufinus, priest of Aquileja. She arrived in Alexandria in 372, the last year of the life of S. Athanasius [bishop of Alexandria (d. 373), great defender of the Nicene faith]. She saw the great bishop of Alexandria, and received from his hands a relic of the Thebaid [the desert region of Upper (southern) Egypt], a sheepskin which he had received from the holy abbot Macarius. She also met the priest Isidore the Hospitaller, who had attended S. Athanasius to Rome during the consulate of her grandfather, Marcellinus. She also visited the virgin Alexandra. This maiden was a slave girl, who, fearing her own beauty, and in pity for the poor soul of him who loved her, had buried herself alive in an empty tomb, and remained ten years without permitting any one to see her face.

Isidore had been brought up among the solitaries of Nitria [a desert monastic settlement west of the Nile Delta], and as he spoke of their virtues to Melania, she resolved to visit the desert where they dwelt, and there she saw and conversed with S. Pambo and other illustrious anchorites.

On the death of S. Athanasius, the Arians [followers of Arius, who taught that the Son is a created being, not fully God], protected by the emperor Valens, persecuted the Catholics in Egypt. Many bishops, priests, and hermits were banished. Melania used her fortune to relieve their necessities. This S. Paulinus relates in a letter to Sulpicius Severus. He says that she fed during three days 5,000 solitaries who were in concealment, at great risk to herself. Melania followed 126 exiled bishops and hermits to Diocaesarea in Palestine, and supported them from her private fortune. As the guards were forbidden to allow their friends to visit them, Melania disguised herself as a slave, and carried them every evening their food. She was arrested by the governor, and put in prison. Dec 3x.] S. Melania the Younger.

She sent the consular magistrate this message: “I am the daughter of a consul. I have been the wife of a man illustrious in his generation; now I am the servant of Christ. Despise me not because of my mean dress, for I can attain a higher rank if I will; and I have sufficient credit to keep me from fearing you, and to hinder you from touching my goods. But lest you should do wrong by ignorance, I have thought fit to let you know who I am.” And she added, “ We must make head against fools, setting our pride against their insolence, as we loose a hound or a falcon against the deer.”

When the magistrate heard who she was, and to what a powerful and wealthy family she belonged, he precipitately threw open the prison doors, showed her the most profound respect, and gave her full liberty to visit the exiles. She founded a monastery at Jerusalem, in which she placed fifty virgins. For twenty-five years she devoted to the relief of the poor, and the entertainment of the bishops, monks, and pilgrims of every description, who came in swarms to the holy places, her own services, and the revenues drawn from her lands in Spain and Aquitaine, wrung from the hardworking labourers. She was guided and seconded by Rufinus, who inhabited a cell on the Mount of Olives, and who was at that period the old and tender friend of S. Jerome [translator of the Bible into Latin (d. 420)]. A dispute afterwards took place between Rufinus and Jerome, as related in the life of the latter, occasioned by the doctrines of Origen. Their rupture long agitated the durch, and drew from them melancholy invectives against each other. Melania naturally sided with her guide Rufinus, and for having countenanced Origenist errors, has been excluded from the Martyrology of the Latin Church and the Menaeas of the East. She is called Melania the Elder.

In the meantime her son Publicola had grown up, and married Albina, daughter of Albinus and sister of Volusianus, praefect of Rome, whose family was one of the most illustrious in the empire.

From this marriage issued S. Melania the Younger. She was bom about 382, and was brought up from infancy with the example of her grandmother held up to her as deserving of imitation. At the age of fourteen she was married to Pinianus, son of Severus, praefect of Italy and Africa; her husband was only seventeen. She became the mother of a daughter, whom she dedicated from her cradle to virginity. She had no taste for, or a religious prejudice against, conjugal union, and she besought her husband to let them separate. He refused till Melania was being confined a second time, when, in his alarm for her life, he vowed to yield She gave birth to a child, which was baptized, and died immediately after. Her daughter also did not survive infancy. Accordingly, so soon as Melania was well, in 401, when she was aged twenty, and he twenty-four, it was arranged between them that they should separate. When Melania the Elder heard in Palestine of the determination of her granddaughter, nothing could exceed her enthusiasm and gratification. Although aged sixty, she at once started for Rome to encourage her granddaughter in her resolution, and by her presence prevent a foolish or sinful weakness from overcoming Melania, and drawing her back to the arms of the husband whom she had sworn to love and cherish so long as life should last Albina, mother of the young Melania, disapproved of her conduct, but Melania the Elder was able to overcome this disapproval, and convert it into approval, and persuade her also to desert her husband, and join her in the exercises of the religious, as opposed to the family, life. The brother of Pinianus, and his father Severus, were naturally incensed; and finding that Melania, without protest from her husband, was, as they thought, squandering his j£ gi S. Melania the Younger.

fortune on beggars and hermits, they seized on his estates and administered them for him. But Melania complained to the empress, her relative, and by her influence Honorius relieved Melania and her husband from all inconvenience from the relations of the latter. They sold their estates in Rome, Italy, Aquitaine, Spain, and Britain, and the result of this sale produced such a sum that it was thought that none but the emperor possessed more. The father and brother of Pinianus beheld this dispersion of the family estates with mingled emotions of rage and contempt; but they were unable to oppose the emperor, who had sanctioned it. The only estates not disposed of were some in Campania, Sicily, and Africa, which belonged to Melania herself, and of which she could not dispose till her father's death. The money obtained by the sales was spent in founding monasteries, feeding the idle and the indigent, and adorning churches with vessels of gold and silver. She emancipated her slaves, but many of them would not receive their freedom, and passed to the service of her brother Publicola. She sent messengers to Egypt, Antioch, and Jerusalem laden with money for the use of hermits and monks. The two * Melanias and Albina, who now lived together almost inseparably, often visited S. Paulinus of Nola, their kinsman, and received from him warm encouragement. Palladius, bishop of Helenopolis in Bithynia, like Rufinus, the panegyrist of the desert dwellers, came to Rome in 404 or 405, and remained there till the beginning of 406, and was received by the three ladies with much honour and affection. “ When we were in Rome," he says, “ they received us with every demonstration of respect, and made us the best cheer, rendering themselves worthy, by their hospitality and their holy manner of life, of participating in the eternal life of our Lord Jesus Christ."

Publicola, father of the younger Melania and son of the elder of that name, would not allow his daughter and mother and wife to leave Rome, and give themselves up to all the extravagant asceticism of their highly enthusiastic desires. But on his death, in 407, Albina and Melania the Younger were free. The elder Melania was then in Africa, visiting and consoling the hermits in the desert. The younger Melania and Albina went to S. Paulinus for his advice, and Pinianus was consigned to cabbage-gardening with thirty solitaries.

Pinianus offered for sale his palace in Rome, but it was so splendid that no one could bid for it a worthy price till after 410, when Rome had been entered by the Goths [Germanic peoples who invaded the Roman Empire, many of them Arian Christians], or the palace had been fired and plundered, by which its value was reduced. But before Alaric came to Rome at the head of his Goths, Melania, Albina, and Pinianus had taken refuge in Sicily with their treasures. Melania the Elder went on to Jerusalem, and there died, forty days after her arrival Melania the Younger, drawing in her train her mother and husband, now left Sicily for Africa, that she might refresh her soul by a contemplation of the ascetic lives of the anchorites of the desert, of whom she had heard so much, and in the hope that their example would inspire Pinianus with ambition to settle in the wastes of Scete or Nitria among them, and disembarrass her of his somewhat burdensome society. On their way they landed at Malta, and found the inhabitants suffering from a visit of barbarians, who threatened to pillage them and bum their houses unless they paid a heavy ransom. Melania and her husband gave large alms to the bishop, and he paid it to the Vandal freebooters, who thereupon left the island without further molestation. Thence Melania and her party went to Africa and visited Tagaste, where Alypius, the friend of S. Augustine, was bishop. They gave costly ornaments to his church, and endowed and built two monasteries there: one for eighty monks, the other Doc.3x.] S. Melania the Younger. < 423 for 130 virgins. They were unable to see S. Augustine at Tagaste, for he was at Hippo; they therefore visited him in his see, and gave liberal presents to the poor and to the Church. Pinianus was fearful of being chosen by the people to be priest at Hippo, for the sake of his wealth, and he extracted from S. Augustine a promise that he would not ordain him.

One day the people began to clamour for Pinianus as their priest, S. Augustine then told them of the promise he had made. The crowd thereupon broke into abuse of S. Alypius, who, they thought, wanted the wealthy man as priest for one of his churches; and they would not be pacified till Pinianus swore solemnly that he would be ordained priest nowhere else but at Hippo.

Albina, who had remained behind at Tagaste, on hearing what had taken place wrote a letter full of feminine scolding to S. Augustine: “ As for the people of Hippo,” she said, " all they wanted was a man of fortune who could throw away money among them.” Augustine wrote to pacify her and to give a better colour to the motives of his people. After seven years stay at Tagaste and Hippo, Melania carried her mother and husband with her to the Holy Land, a.d. 417, visiting S. Cyril on the way, at Alexandria. In Palestine they met Pelagius, and were thrown into some doubt as to the soundness of his doctrines. They wrote to S. Augustine about them, and he sent to them in reply his two books on “ The Grace of Jesus Christ ” and on “ Original Sin,” which he addressed to them in 418. From Palestine Melania took her husband into Egypt to visit the solitaries of Nitria, but they returned before 419; for S. Jerome in writing to S. Augustine in that year, saluted him on their part and that of Albina, whose age had prevented her accompanying Melania and Pinianus to Egypt. Whilst Melania was absent, S. Jerome prepared for her a cell on the Mount of Olives, and on her return she shut herself up in it, and saw no one but her mother, her husband, and a cousin, who were allowed to visit her once every five days.

Melania passed fourteen years in this cell, and only left it to pay her last duties to her mother, who died in 432. Then she went into another cell, but left it after a year, to place herself with a community of virgins in a convent she built to receive them.

Pinianus died about the end of the year 435. The brother of Albina was Volusianus, who was a heathen; indeed the conduct of his sister and his niece had probably seemed so foolish and offensive in his eyes, that he had been hardened in his disgust at Christianity. But Volusianus may have seen that the days of the old religion of Rome were ended past revival, and that it was in vain to hope for its restoration. He therefore bowed to the inevitable, and prepared to give in his submission to the religion of the emperors. He sent for Melania, and she hastened to Constantinople, and found him prostrated by an accident. She had the satisfaction of seeing him baptized before he died.

She returned full of joy in the winter to Jerusalem. She then built another monastery, and the Empress Eudoxia visited Jerusalem whilst it was being built. Eudoxia put her ankle out of joint on that visit; Melania replaced it with skill, and, as the empress said with Oriental courtesy and exaggeration, without really hinting her at alL Four years after the death of her husband, Melania made a visit to Bethlehem at Christmas, and then hastened to Jerusalem. She caught a chill whilst praying in the church of S. Stephen, and died on the last day of the year, apparently that following the year 439, in which Eudoxia came to Jerusalem.