The Elder Melania’s Missing Decade

Abstract

Sources contemporary with Melania the Elder contain several clues for reconstructing a timeline of her life. Out of a morass of confusion in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century scholarship, Eduard Schwartz and F.X. Murphy finally set this timeline on a solid foundation. The consensus forged by these two scholars, however, has been a tenuous one and has come under periodic attack. The following article answers the objections of the critics and, through an examination of one universally misunderstood passage in Palladius’ Lausiac History, finally puts the timeline beyond dispute. This chronological study also generates new insights into the biographies of Melania and her son Publicola: Melania resided in Spain until being widowed in her early twenties; it was only at this point that she moved to Rome; she was her husband’s heir and de facto guardian of Publicola for more than a decade; she delayed her departure for the Holy Land until he was already a teenager and launched on his senatorial career; this included the funding of his quaestorian and praetorian games in Rome.

“Like a safe tower on a steady rock”. Widows, wives and mothers in the ascetic elites of Late Antiquity

“…In the first months of her pilgrimage to Egypt, Melania travelled to Alexandria and its environs, to the mountain of Nitria and the adjacent deserts, where she visited the numerous anachoretes and "living holy people", who dwelled there in cells or caves (Palladius c. 46;Elm 1994: 253-282, 283-310;Leyerle 1999: 345-378;Wilkinson 2002;Dietz 2005: 107-153). In Jerusalem, at the Mount of Olives, she established a convent for women, where she stayed for almost three decades from 374 to 399 (Palladius c. 46; Brown 2012: 276-277).…”