Melania the Elder

Saint Melania the Elder or Maior (325–417) was a Desert Mother who was an influential figure in the Christian ascetic movement (the Desert Fathers and Mothers) that sprang up in the generation after the Emperor Constantine made Christianity a legal religion of the Roman Empire. She was a contemporary of, and well known to, Abba Macarius and other Desert Fathers in Egypt, Saint Jerome, Saint Augustine of Hippo, Saint Paulinus of Nola (her cousin or cousin-in-law; he gives a colorful description of her visit to Nola in his Letters), and Evagrius of Pontus, and she founded a religious community on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem.

Melania the Elder (325-410), one of the wealthiest citizens of the empire, was born in Spain, and was related to Paulinus of Nola. Her father, Marcellinus, was of consular rank. She married at fourteen, and moved with her husband, Valerius Maximus Basilius Proconsul of Achaea and a Praefectus Urbi, to the suburbs of Rome. Her husband and two out of three sons had died by the time she was twenty-two. She became a Christian in Rome and, leaving her son, Valerius Publicola, with a guardian, set off to Alexandria, accompanied by her servants, to join other Christian ascetics to visit the monks at Nitria.

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