Robba

Robba (383/4 – 434) was a North African Donatist nun. A church was built in Ala Miliaria to commemorate her murder by traditors.

Epitaph of Robba, which reads: 'Memorial of Robba, consecrated servant of God, sister of Honoratus bishop of Aquae Sirensis; having succumbed to the mutiny of the traditores, she earned the dignity of a martyr; she was fifty years old and gave up the spirit on the eighth day of the calends of April in the year 395 of the province [434 CE]'

Robba was born in 383/4, the sister of Bishop Honoratus of Aquae Sirenses. She was a consecrated virgin of Donatism.

In 434, at the age of fifty, she was killed in an uprising of traditores (Catholic Christians who had given up their scriptures during Roman persecution).^[1][2][3]

Donatists either built or repurposed part of a military building in Ala Miliaria (modern-day Beniane, Algeria) into a substantial church, where Robba and several others are buried.^[4][5] Robba is commemorated there by an epitaph which calls her a martyr.^[1] The church was rediscovered by archaeologist Stéphane Gsell in 1899.^[6]

Robba's is the last known Donatist epitaph, and it demonstrates the public presence of Donatists in North Africa decades after the official suppression of Donatism at the Council of Carthage in 411.^[7][8][9]