The life of St Macrina the Elder
She married, and when persecution broke out under Diocletian and Galerius, she and her husband went into hiding along the Black Sea coast, spending some six or seven years concealed in the wooded hills of Pontus with a small band of companions, often reduced to whatever food the land could offer.
She became grandmother to four children the Church would come to venerate in their own right: Basil, later called the Great; Gregory of Nyssa; Peter, later bishop of Sebaste; and a granddaughter, also named Macrina, who took her name. Through her son Basil the Elder and his wife Emmelia, the instruction Macrina had received as a young woman from Gregory the Wonderworker reached that next generation intact.
She died probably around the year 340. Tradition remembers her chiefly for an unbending sense of justice and a faith that held firm through hardship, qualities later visible in several of the fourth century's most significant churchmen.
