Macrina the Younger

Born around 327 in Cappadocia into a family that counts five saints, she was betrothed at twelve and, her intended having died, refused any other marriage: she called herself a widow, the engagement counting as a bond. She raised her younger brothers, among them Peter of Sebaste, and brought Basil back from the vanity his Athenian studies had given him — it is Gregory of Nyssa, the other brother, who tells it. She turned the family estate at Annisa into a monastic community where masters and servants lived as equals, one of the first of its kind in the East. Gregory, who came to see her dying in 379, wrote two texts about her: a *Life*, and a dialogue, *On the Soul and the Resurrection*, in which she teaches and he objects. She reasons there like a philosopher, on a bed of boards.