foundation · 395 · Nola
Felix of Nola was a local confessor with a shrine and no great reputation. Paulinus and Therasia sold estates in Aquitaine, Spain and Italy, moved into rooms above his tomb, and stayed. He built a basilica beside the old one and described the building and its paintings in his letters — which is why art historians read him. He ran a hostel for the poor. And every January, on the saint's day, he wrote a poem: the natalicia, about twenty-five of them over as many years, which is the largest body of Latin verse devoted to a single saint. What makes him structurally useful here is the correspondence: he wrote to Augustine, to Jerome, to Sulpicius Severus, to Rufinus, and to his old tutor Ausonius, who thought he had thrown his life away and said so in verse. Nearly every one of those men is a page in this dataset.
To live beside the tomb of a third-century confessor nobody outside Campania had heard of.
A basilica, a hostel, twenty-five annual poems, and a correspondence that ties half the Latin fathers of this dataset together.