The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church reports, "She suffered bodily ill-treatment at the hands of the Goths when they captured Rome in 410 and died from its effects.

[3] According to Christine Schenk, she "gathered women to study Scripture and pray in her aristocratic home on the Aventine Hill fully 40 years before Jerome arrived in Rome.

"[4][5] After her husband's early death, Marcella decided to devote the rest of her life to charity, prayer, and mortification of the flesh.

According to Butler, "Having lost her husband in the seventh month of her marriage, she rejected the suit of Cerealis the consul, uncle of Gallus Cæsar, and resolved to imitate the lives of the ascetics of the East.

She abstained from wine and flesh, employed all her time in pious reading, prayer, and visiting the churches of the apostles and martyrs, and never spoke with any man alone.

The house is supposed to have stood close to the present site of Santa Sabina and became a refuge for weary pilgrims and for the poor.

When the soldiers entered [Marcella's house] she is said to have received them without any look of alarm; and when they asked her for gold she pointed to her coarse dress to show them that she had no buried treasure.

She is said to have felt no pain but to have thrown herself at their feet and to have pleaded with tears for you [Principia], that you might not be taken from her, or owing to your youth have to endure what she as an old woman had no occasion to fear.

How much virtue and intellect, how much holiness and purity I found in her I am afraid to say, both lest I may exceed the bounds of men's belief and lest I may increase your sorrow by reminding you of the blessings you have lost.

Marcella of Rome is honored with a Lesser Feast on the liturgical calendar of the Episcopal Church in the United States of America[18] on January 31.