SHE IS styled by St. Jerom the glory of the Roman ladies. Having lost
her husband in the seventh month of her marriage, she rejected the suit
of Cerealis the consul, uncle of Gallus Caesar, and resolved to imitate
the lives of the ascetics of the East. She abstained from wine and
flesh, employed all her time in pious reading, prayer, and visiting the
churches of the apostles and martyrs, and never spoke with any man
alone. Her example was followed by many virgins of the first quality,
who put themselves under her direction, and Rome was in a short time
filled with monasteries. We have eleven letters of St. Jerom to her in
answer to her religious queries. The Goths under Alaric plundered Rome
in 410. St. Marcella was scourged by them for the treasures which she
had long before distributed among the poor. All that time she trembled
only for her dear spiritual pupil, Principia (not her daughter, as some
have reputed her by mistake,) and falling at the feet of the cruel
soldiers, she begged, with many tears, that they would offer her no
insult. God moved them to compassion. They conducted them both to the
church of St. Paul, to which Alaric had granted the right of sanctuary
with that of St. Peter. St. Marcella, who survived this but a short
time, which she spent in tears, prayers, and thanksgiving, closed her
eyes by a happy death, in the arms of St. Principia, about the end of
August, in 410, but her name occurs in the Roman Martyrology on the 31st
of January. See St. Jerom, Ep. 96, ol. 16, ad Principiam, t. 4, p. 778.
Ed. Ben. Baronius ad ann. 410, and Bollandus, t. 2, p. 1105.