Pontius Meropius Paulinus was a wealthy Roman senator of Gaul, pupil and friend of the poet Ausonius, consul-suffect of Rome at twenty-four. He married Therasia, a Spanish noblewoman, and lived in retirement at his estates in Aquitaine. The death of their only child shortly after baptism turned them decisively to God.
Together they sold their enormous fortune, distributed it to the poor, and moved to Nola in Campania near the tomb of St. Felix of Nola, a third-century martyr to whom Paulinus had long been devoted. They lived as ascetics in a community attached to the basilica of Felix. Paulinus was ordained priest at Barcelona in 394 and bishop of Nola around 409.
His Latin letters and his fifteen surviving 'Natalicia' (annual poems composed for the feast of St. Felix) make him the first major Christian lyrical poet of the West. The conversion of his wealth, his correspondence with Augustine and Jerome and Sulpicius Severus, and his quiet rule as bishop of a small Italian town gave him a stature far beyond Nola in the Latin Christianity of the early 5th century.