Jerome's letters ruthlessly depict the condition of the Roman community. Fresh from his austerities in the desert of Chalcidia, the impulsive monk was as ready to denounce vice as to encourage virtue, and evidences of singular laxity mingle with heroic virtue in his vivid pages. On the one hand he directed, in the sobered palace of Marcella on the Aventine, a group of noble dames in the practice of the most rigorous piety and the cultivation of sacred letters. The populace even threatened to fling him into the river, when the lovely and high-born Blesilla terminated her austerities by a premature death, and even Christian writers fiercely contested this introduction into Rome of the ideals of the Egyptian desert. But, on the other hand, Jerome's directions to his pupils incidentally betray that, beyond his little school of virtue and learning, he saw nothing but sin and worldliness. In plain and crude speech he warns his pupils to shun their Christian neighbours and distrust the priests. Sombre as are many of the letters which Seneca wrote in the days of Nero, not one of them can compare with Jerome's lengthy letter to the gentle maiden Eustochium.[44] He fills her virgin mind with a comprehensive picture of frailty and frivolity, and tells her that she may regard, not as a Christian, but as a Manichæan, any austere-looking woman whom she may meet on the streets of Rome. He denounces "the new genus of concubines," the "spiritual brothers and sisters," who share the same house, even the same bed, and, if you protest, complain that you are evil-minded. Eustochium is to avoid gatherings of Christian women, and must never be alone with these clerics, who, exquisitely dressed, their hair curled and oiled, their fingers glittering with rings, spend the livelong day wheedling presents out of their wealthy admirers. I omit the graver details given in this and other letters of the outraged monk.