ABSTRACT
By the time Jerome composed his vita of Asella, she was a lifelong virgin in her fifties. Like the religious women with whom he associated in Rome during his three-year stay there, Asella was of aristocratic stock. She evidently belonged to the monastic circle of Marcella, as people infer from the fact that her vita was cast as a letter to the latter. Just prior to leaving Rome for good in August, Jerome addressed a letter to her in which he rebutted charges of opportunism and sexual immorality brought against him by Roman church officials. This suggests that she was a person of some influence among his friends there and thus was in a position to help mobilize within his support base now that he no longer would be there to do so himself. Jerome wrote his epistolary tributes to Asella and Marcella at two very different junctures in his literary career.
