Fabiola
Overview
Date of Death1. c400; 2. after 422Biography
There are two wealthy and aristocratic Christian Romans, both named Fabiola, both correspondents of Jerome and perhaps also of Augustine, both presumably from the same family, the gens Fabia, though their relation to each other is unknown. The first Fabiola had been married to a man notorious for his vices whom she divorced, then she married someone else though her first husband was still living. After the second husband died, she did public penance for the fact of that marriage, and then devoted herself and her wealth to caring for the poor and the sick. She made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land in 394 in the company of a relative, Oceanus, who was also a friend of Jerome’s, and stayed until the threatened invasion of the Huns sent her back to Rome, where she and Pammachius founded a hospice (at Portus). She asked Jerome many questions during her visit and continued to ask them by letter after her return, but we have only two of his responses. Much of what we know about Fabiola is derived from the eulogy of her Jerome wrote for Oceanus after her death in 400. She left her fortune for the care of monks.
The second Fabiola, who was still alive in 422 when Augustine wrote her a long letter asking her help in a very awkward case of church governance, is probably the same one Jerome speaks of sending two books on Ezekiel to, in a letter to a married couple, Marcellinus and Anapsychia, which appears among the letters of Jerome (ep.126) and of Augustine (ep.165) and may be as late as 410 or 414: “duos itaque libros misi sanctae filiae meae Fabiolae, quorum exempla, si volueris, ab ipsa poteris mutuari; pro angustia quippe temporis alios describere non potui.” “I sent two books [on Ezekiel] to my holy daughter, Fabiola, and you can borrow copies of them, if you like, from her, for I was not able to copy out any others in these woeful times.”(1)
Whether Augustine’s undated letter to a Fabiola, ep.267, is to the first Fabiola or the second is not known; if it was written in 402 as some have suggested, it was to the second, if earlier, it may well have been to the first.
Given the little that is known about the second Fabiola and the possibility that they were related, I have chosen to include all the Fabiola letters in this file.
