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One of several Roman noblewomen who supported the work of the scholar Jerome, Paula became his fast friend and colleague. As part of her Christian commitment, she changed her lifestyle from Roman richness to strict asceticism. Noted historian Nancy Hardesty details Paula’s devotion.

“She was squalid with dirt; she mourned and she fasted … her eyes were dim with weeping … the Psalms were her only songs; the gospel her whole speech; continence her one indulgence; fasting the staple of her life.” Thus Jerome (347–420, in Letter 45) describes the piety of his close friend and most generous benefactor: Paula (347–404).

Jerome first met Paula in Rome in about 382. She was one of a group of high-born women who devoted themselves to strict asceticism and benevolent service. The leader of the group was Marcella (325–410), an ardent student of the Bible to whom Jerome referred questions from bishops and presbyters after he left the city. With her friend Principia, she opened the first convent for women. The group included Ascella, Albina, Marcellina, Felicitas and Fabiola.

Formerly these women had devoted their lives to family and fashion. Since it was the custom for older men to marry much younger women, most of them had been widowed at an early age. Before becoming Christians, they had dressed in silks, Chinese fleeces and gold brocades. They rouged their faces, darkened their eyes with kohl, plaited blonde hair pieces into their own dark hair, wore gold shoes, and were carried everywhere on litters borne by eunuchs.

But when they became Christians they forsook all that, and adopted simple brown cassocks. They no longer ate meat or sweets, but took only bread and a little oil. Many drank no wine, only water.

Their lives came to revolve around charity—blankets for the poor, money and food for the bed-ridden, burial for the paupers. With the help of Paula’s widowed son-in-law, Pammachius, Fabiola founded Rome’s first hospital.

Paula was the daughter of Blesilla, a descendant of the Scipios and Gracchi families, and of Rogatus, whose Greek family was said to descend from the Greek king Agamemnon. At 17 she married a senator, Toxotius, whose most—famous relatives were Aeneas and Julius Caesar. Together they had four daughters—Blesilla, Paulina, Eustochium and Rufina—and one son, Toxotius, who was just an infant when his father died in 380. Shortly thereafter, through the witness of Marcella, Paula became a Christian.

When the bishops of the Western church gathered in Rome in 382 to determine their response to the Eastern church’s 381 Council of Constantinople, Paula hosted Epiphanius, the bishop of Salamis in Cyprus. Later during the council she met Jerome, who had also attended the Constantinople conference.

She and the other noblewomen studied the Scriptures with Jerome, and adopted the austerities being popularized by Paul the Hermit (whose biography Jerome had written), by Anthony, by the two Melanias, Elder and Younger, and by the others who were fleeing into the deserts of North Africa to devote themselves to God. Paula’s daughter Blesilla, having been recently widowed after just seven months of marriage, began rigorous fasting and other austerities. Within three months she was dead. Some said that the public reaction to her death, directed against Jerome, hastened his departure from the city in 385.

He urged Paula to follow him, and soon thereafter she and her daughter Eustochium sailed for the East, leaving on the shore her daughter Rufina sobbing and little Toxotius stretching out his hands in entreaty. Jerome notes that while “no mother… ever loved her children so dearly,” Paula “overcame her love for her children by her love for God.”

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