other · 373–375 · Palestine
Palladius knew her and is the only witness. He says that when the monks of Nitria were banished to Palestine she sold what she had brought with her and went after them, and that she attended them in prison dressed as a slave — carrying food in at night — until the governor discovered that the servant was a woman of consular family and had her brought in. Her answer, in Palladius' telling, was to point out what she was, which stopped the proceedings. She was a widow in her twenties with one surviving son, and she had left him in Rome. Everything the next generation of Roman ascetic women did, including her own granddaughter's much larger renunciation, is downstream of this.
To follow the Nitrian fathers into exile when the Arian prefect of Egypt deported them, and to keep them alive at the other end.
The first of the Roman senatorial women to put a fortune into the ascetic movement, and the pattern the rest of them followed.