other · 410 · Sicily
Melania the Younger, her husband Pinianus and her mother had been selling estates across Italy, Spain, Gaul, Africa and Britain for several years — an operation large enough that the Roman senate objected and the imperial administration got involved — and in 410 they left, with Rufinus, before the siege closed. From Sicily they watched Rhegium burn across the strait as the Gothic column worked south. Rufinus, who had translated Origen and Eusebius and Basil and the Clementine Recognitions and had fallen out with Jerome over all of it, died there within about a year. The others went on to Africa, where they met Augustine, and then to Jerusalem. Rufinus' own preface names only Pinianus; the party is in the volume this project holds, and Melania is in it.
To get out of Italy ahead of the Goths.
An old man's death in exile, and a young couple carrying the largest liquid fortune in the West out of a collapsing empire.