32 WOMAN IN SCIENCE 



Latin version of the Scriptures that is to-day known as 

 the Vulgate. This is evinced from the letters of the saint 

 himself and from what we know of the lives of these two 

 remarkable women, who, as St. Jerome informs us in the 

 epitaph which he had engraved on Paula's tomb in the 

 Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, were descended 

 from the Scipios, the Gracchi and the Pauli on the mother 's 

 side, and on the father's side from the half-mythical kings 

 of Sparta and Mycenae. 1 



They aided him not only by their sympathy and by pur- 

 chasing for him, often at a great price, the manuscripts he 

 needed for his colossal undertaking, but also assisted him 

 by their thorough knowledge of Latin, Greek and Hebrew 

 in translating the Sacred Books from the original Hebrew 

 into Latin. So great was Jerome's confidence in their 

 scholarship and so high was his appreciation of their abil- 

 ity and judgment that he did not hesitate to submit his 

 translations to them for their criticism and approval. 

 After he had completed his version of the first Book of 

 Kings, he turned it over to them, saying : ' ' Read my Book 

 of Kings read also the Latin and Greek translations and 

 compare them with my version." And they did read and 

 compare and criticise. And more than this, they fre- 

 quently suggested modifications and corrections which the 

 great man accepted with touching humility and incorpor- 

 ated in a revised copy. 



More wonderful still, the Latin Psalter, as it has come 

 down to us, is not, as is generally supposed, the transla- 

 tion from the Hebrew of Jerome, but rather a corrected 



*The following is the epitaph as written by St. Jerome, "the 

 Christian Cicero": 



Scipio quam genuit, Pauli fudere parentes, 

 Gracchorum soboles, Agamemnonis inclyta proles, 

 Hoc jacet in tumulo, Paulam dixere priores, 

 Euxtochii genetrix, Romani prima senatus, 

 Pauperiem Christ! et Bethlehemitica rura secuta est. 



