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that compels. We know that, as a student in Rome, Jerome dabbled in the wanton behavior of his contemporaries, but that, penitent, he would visit on Sundays the sepulchers of the martyrs and the Apostles in the catacombs, to remind him of the horrors of hell. In his writings is always this consciousness of divine retribution that pervades, that alarms him, remembering Virgil's words: "On all sides round horror spread wide, the very silence breathed a terror on my soul." In a letter from the desert of Chalcis to St. Eustochium, Jerome wrote this telling paragraph: "In the remotest part of a wild and stony desert, burnt up with the heat of the scorching sun so that it frightens even the monks that inhabit it, I seemed to myself to be in the midst of the delights and crowds of Rome. In this exile and prison to which for the fear of hell I had voluntarily condemned myself, I many times imagined myself witnessing the dancing of the Roman maidens as if I had been in the midst of them: in my cold body and in my parched-up flesh, which seemed dead before its death, passion was able to live. Alone with this enemy, I threw myself in spirit at the feet of Jesus, watering them with my tears…" Jerome's desire for a life of penance drove him to the Syrian desert of Chalcis, inhabited by many hermits. There he learned Hebrew under the guidance of a converted Jew and made copious notes of the Hebrew Gospel; the Gospel of Matthew Jerome translated, in turn, into Greek. In 378 or 379 Jerome was ordained in Antioch HYLAND