Page:Wives and mothers in the olden time.djvu/23

Rh Such was the saint whose history we are about to relate.

She was born at Eome towards the middle of the fourth century, on May 5, 347, under the reign of Constant, son of Constantine, ten years after the death of that Emperor, and when the Pope Julian sat on the throne of St. Peter. Through her mother, Blesilla (as St. Jerome told us above), she was related to the most eminent and illustrious of the Roman patricians those noble families of Scipios and Gracchi to whom Rome owed all her greatest men, whether at home or in the field. And as if these honours were not enough, and that Providence wished to crown this child s birth with all earthly glories, the purest blood of Greece was mingled in her veins with the purest blood of Rome. In this period of history nothing was more usual than an alliance between Roman and Greek families, as the constant recurrence of Greek names in Roman genealogies proves. The father of St. Paula, Rogatus, sprang from one of the oldest of the Hellenic races; and with a pretension common enough in those days, and against which no Greek remonstrated, he even traced his descent from the ancient kings of Mycene, and included Agamem non among his ancestors. Paula therefore came from what was most noble in those two most noble races in the world; and the influence of this double origin was to be traced in the moral qualities as well as in the destiny of this noble woman, so grave in character, so brilliant in mind, so grand in soul; and whose existence, begun under an Italian sky, was to be perfected and closed under an Eastern sun.