No More Learning

Many years after, an old Madaura grammarian, called
Maximus, wrote to him in a tone of loving reproach: "Thou hast drawn away
from us"--_a secta nostra deviasti_. Did he wish to hint that at this time
Augustin had glided into paganism? Nothing is more unlikely. He himself
assures us that the name of Christ remained always "graven on his heart. "
But while he was at Madaura he lived indifferently with pagans and
Christians.

Besides that, the teaching he got was altogether pagan in tone. No doubt he
picked out, as he always did, the subjects which suited him. Minds such as
his fling themselves upon that which is likely to nourish them: they throw
aside all the rest, or suffer it very unwillingly. Thus Augustin never
wavered in his dislike for Greek: he was a poor Greek scholar. He detested
the Greeks by instinct. According to Western prejudice, these men of
the East were all rascals or amusers. Augustin, as a practical African,
always regarded the Greeks as vain, discoursing wits. In a word, they
were not sincere people whom it would be safe to trust. The entirely
local patriotism of the classical Greek authors further annoyed this Roman
citizen who was used to regard the world as his country: he thought them
very narrow-minded to take so much interest in the history of some little
town. As for him, he looked higher and farther. It must be remembered that
in the second half of the fourth century the Greek attitude, broadened and
fully conscious of itself, set itself more and more against Latinism, above
all, politically. There it lay, a hostile and impenetrable block before the
Western peoples. And here was a stronger reason for a Romanized African to
dislike the Greeks.

So he painfully construed the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_, very cross at the
difficulties of a foreign language which prevented him from grasping the
plots of the fine, fabulous narratives. There were, however, abridgments
used in the schools, a kind of summaries of the Trojan War, written by
Latin grammarians under the odd pseudonyms of Dares the Phrygian and Dictys
of Crete. But these abridgments were very dry for an imagination like
Augustin's. He much preferred the _Æneid_, the poem admired above all
by the Africans, on account of the episode devoted to the foundation of
Carthage. Virgil was his passion. He read and re-read him continually;
he knew him by heart. To the end of his life, in his severest writings,
he quoted verses or whole passages out of his much-loved poet. Dido's
adventure moved him to tears. They had to pluck the book out of his hands.

Now the reason is that there was a secret harmony between Virgil's soul and
the soul of Augustin. Both were gracious and serious. One, the great poet,
and one, the humble schoolboy, they both had pity on the Queen of Carthage,
they would have liked to save her, or at any rate to mitigate her sadness,
to alter a little the callousness of Æneas and the harshness of the Fates.
But think of it! Love is a divine sickness, a chastisement sent by the
gods. It is just, when all's said, that the guilty one should endure her
agony to the very end. And then, such very great things are going to arise
out of this poor love! Upon it depends the lot of two Empires. What counts
a woman before Rome and Carthage? Besides, she was bound to perish: the
gods had decreed it. . . . There was in all that a concentrated emotion, a
depth of sentiment, a religious appeal which stirred Augustin's heart,
still unaware of itself. This obedience of the Virgilian hero to the
heavenly will, was already an adumbration of the humility of the future
Christian.

Certainly, Augustin did not perceive very plainly in these turbid years
of his youth the full religious significance of Virgil's poem. Carried
away by his headstrong nature, he yielded to the heart-rending charm of
the romantic story: he lived it, literally, with the heroine. When his
schoolmasters desired him to elaborate the lament of the dying Queen Dido
in Latin prose, what he wrote had a veritable quiver of anguish. Without
the least defence against lust and the delusions of the heart, he spent
intellectually and in a single outburst all the strength of passion.

He absorbed every love-poem with the eagerness of a participating soul. If
he took pleasure in the licentiousness of Plautus and Terence, if he read
delightfully those comedies wherein the worst weaknesses are excused and
glorified, I believe that he took still more pleasure in the Latin Elegiacs
who present without any shame the romantic madness of Alexandrine love.
For what sing these poets even to weariness, unless it be that no one can
resist the Cyprian goddess, that life has no other end but love? Love for
itself, to love for the sake of loving--there is the constant subject of
these sensualists, of Catullus, Propertius, Tibullus, Ovid. After the story
of Dido, the youthful reader was ravished by the story of Ariadne, even
more disturbing, because no remorse modifies the frenzy of it. He read:

_Now while the careless hero flees, beating the wave with his
and casting to the gales of the open sea his idle promises,--there,
standing among the shingle of the beach, the daughter of Minos follows
him, alas! with her beautiful sad eyes: she stares, astonied, like to a
Bacchante changed into a statue. She looks forth, and her heart floats
upon the great waves of her grief. She lets slip from her head her
fine-spun coif, she tears away the thin veils which cover her bosom,
and the smooth cincture which supports her quivering breasts. All that
slips from her body into the salt foam which ripples round her feet.
But little she cares for her coif or for her apparel carried away by
the tide! Lost, bewildered, with all her heart and all her soul, she is
clinging to thee, O Theseus. _

And if Augustin, when he had read these burning verses of Catullus, looked
through the Anthologies which were popular in the African schools, he
would come upon "The Vigil of Venus," that eclogue which ends with such a
passionate cry:

_O my springtime, when wilt thou come? When shall I be as the swallow?
When shall I cease to be silent? . . . May he love to-morrow, he
has not loved yet. And he who has already loved, may he love again
to-morrow. _

Imagine the effect of such exhortations on a youth of fifteen! Truly, this
springtide of love, which the poet cries for in his distress, the son
of Monnica knew well was come for him. How he must have listened to the
musical and melancholy counsellor who told his pain to the leaves of the
book! What stimulant and what food for his boyish longings and dreams! And
what a divine chorus of beauties the great love-heroines of ancient epic
and elegy, Helen, Medea, Ariadne, Phædra, formed and re-formed continually
in his dazzled memory! When we of to-day read such verses at Augustin's
age, some bitterness is mixed with our delight. These heroes and heroines
are too far from us. These almost chimerical beings withdraw from us into
outlying lands, to a vanished world which will never come again. But for
Augustin, this was the world he was born into--it was his pagan Africa
where pleasure was the whole of life, and one lived only for the lusts of
the flesh. And the race of fabulous princesses--they were not dead, those
ladies: they were ever waiting for the well-beloved in the palaces at
Carthage. Yes, the scholar of Madaura lived wonderful hours, dreaming thus
of love between the pages of the poets. These young dreams before love
comes are more bewitching than love itself: a whole unknown world suddenly
discovered and entered with a quivering joy of discovery at each step. The
unused strength of illusion appears inexhaustible, space becomes deeper and
the heart more strong. . . .

A long time afterwards, when, recovered from all that, Augustin speaks to
us of the Divine love, he will know fully the infinite value of it from
having gone through all the painful entrancements of the other. And he will
say to us, with the sureness of experience: "The pleasure of the human
heart in the light of truth and the abundance of wisdom--yea, the pleasure
of the human heart, of the faithful heart, and of the heart which is
holy, stands alone. You will find nothing in any voluptuousness fit to be
compared to it. I say not that this other pleasure is less, for that which
is called less hath only to increase to become equal. No, I shall not say
that all other pleasure is less. No comparison can be made. It is another
kind, it is another reality. "




VI

THE HOLIDAYS AT THAGASTE


In the city of Apuleius, the Christian Monnica's son became simply a pagan.
He was near his sixteenth year: the awkward time of early virility was
beginning for him. Prepared at Madaura, it suddenly burst out at Thagaste.

Augustin came back to his parents, no doubt during the vacation. But
this vacation lasted perhaps a whole year. He had come to the end of his
juvenile studies. The grammarians at Madaura could teach him nothing more.
To round off his acquirements, it would be necessary to attend the lectures
of some well-known rhetorician. Now there were very good rhetoricians only
at Carthage. Besides, it was a fashion, and point of honour, for Numidian
families to send their sons to finish their education in the provincial
capital. Patricius was most eager to do this for his son, who at Madaura
had shewn himself a very brilliant pupil and ought not therefore to be
pulled up half-way down the course. But the life of a student cost a good
deal, and Patricius had no money. His affairs were always muddled. He was
obliged to wait for the rents from his farms, to grind down his tenants,
and, ultimately, despairing of any other way out of it, to ask for an
advance of money from a rich patron. That needed time and diplomacy.

Days and months went by, and Augustin, with nothing to do, joined in with
easily-made friends and gave himself up to the pleasures of his time of
life, like all the young townsmen of Thagaste--pleasures rather rough and
little various, such as were to be got in a little free-town of those days,
and as they have remained for the natives of to-day, whether they live
a town or country life. To hunt, to ride horseback, to play at games of
chance, to drink, eat, and make love--they wanted nothing beyond that. When
Augustin in his _Confessions_ accuses himself of his youthful escapades he
uses the most scathing language. He speaks of them with horror and disgust.
Once more we are tempted to believe that he exaggerates through an excess
of Christian remorse. There are even some who, put on their guard by this
vehement tone, have questioned the historical value of the _Confessions_.
They argue that when the Bishop of Hippo wrote these things his views and
feelings had altered. He could no longer judge with the same eye and in
the same spirit the happenings of his youth. All this is only too certain:
when he wrote, it was as a Christian he judged himself, and not as a cold
historian who refuses to go beyond the brutal fact. He tried to unravel
the origin and to trace the consequences of the humblest of his actions,
because this is of the highest importance for salvation. But however severe
his judgment may be, it does not impair the reality of the fact itself.
Moreover, in natures like his, acts which others would hardly think of
have a vibration out of all proportion with the act itself. The evil of sin
depends upon the consciousness of the sin and the pleasure taken in it.
Augustin was very intelligent and very sensual.

In any case, young Africans develop early, and the lechery of the race
is proverbial. It must have been a good deal stronger at a time when
Christianity still had to fight against pagan slackness in these matters,
ere Islam had imposed its hypocritical austerity upon the general conduct.
There is even room for wonder that in Augustin's case this crisis of
development did not happen earlier than his sixteenth year. It seems that
it was only more violent. In what language he describes it! "I dared to
roam the woods and pursue my vagrant loves beneath the shade. " But he
was not yet in love--this he points out himself. In his case then it was
simple lust. "From the quagmire of concupiscence, from the well of puberty,
exhaled a mist which clouded and befogged my heart, so that I could not
distinguish between the clear shining of affection and the darkness of
lust. . . . I could not keep within the kingdom of light, where friendship
binds soul to soul. . . . And so I polluted the brook of friendship with the
sewage of lust. " Let us not try to make it clearer than he has left it
himself. When one thinks of all the African vices, one dare not dwell upon
such avowals. "Lord," he says, "I was loathsome in Thy sight. " And with
pitiless justice he analyses the effect of the evil: "It stormed confusedly
within me, whirling my thoughtless youth over the precipices of desire. And
I wandered still further from Thee, and Thou didst leave me to myself; the
torrent of my fornications tossed and swelled and boiled and ran over. " And
during this time: "Thou saidst nothing, O my God! " This silence of God is
the terrible sign of hardened sin, of hopeless damnation. It meant utter
depravity of the will; he did not even feel remorse any more.

Here he is, then, as if unfastened from his child's soul--separated from
himself. The object of his youthful faith has no more meaning for him. He
understands no longer, and it is all one to him that he does not. Thus,
told by himself, does this first crisis of Augustin's life emerge from the
autobiography; and it takes on a general significance. Once for all, under
a definite form, and to a certain degree classic, he has diagnosed with
his subtle experience of doctor of souls the pubescent crisis in all young
men of his age, in all the young Christians who are to come after him. For
the story of Augustin is the story of each of us. The loss of faith always
occurs when the senses first awaken. At this critical moment, when nature
claims us for her service, the consciousness of spiritual things is, in
most cases, either eclipsed or totally destroyed. The gradual usage to the
brutalities of the instinct ends by killing the sensitiveness of the inward
feelings. It is not reason which turns the young man from God; it is the
flesh. Scepticism but provides him with excuses for the new life he is
leading.

Thus started, Augustin was not able to pull up half-way on the road of
pleasure; he never did anything by halves. In these vulgar revels of the
ordinary wild youth, he wanted again to be best, he wanted to be first as
he was at school. He stirred up his companions and drew them after him.
They in their turn drew him. Among them was found that Alypius, who was the
friend of all his life, who shared his faults and mistakes, who followed
him even in his conversion, and became Bishop of Thagaste. These two future
shepherds of Christ roamed the streets with the lost sheep. They spent
the nights in the open spaces of the town, playing, or wantonly dreaming
before cups of cool drinks. They lounged there, stretched out on mats, with
a crown of leaves on the head, a jasmine garland round the neck, a rose
or marigold thrust above the ear. They never knew what to do next to kill
time. So one fine evening the reckless crew took it into their heads to
rifle a pear tree of one of Patricius's neighbours. This pear tree was just
beyond the vineyard belonging to Augustin's father. The rascals shook down
the pears. They took a few bites to find out the taste, and having decided
this to be rather disappointing, they chucked all the rest to the hogs.

In this theft, done merely for the pleasure of the thing, Augustin sees
an evidence of diabolical mischief. Doubtless he committed many another
misdeed where, like this, the whole attraction lay in the Satanic joy
of breaking the law. His fury for dissolute courses knew no rest. Did
Monnica observe anything of this change in Augustin? The boy, grown big,
had escaped from the supervision of the women's apartments. If the mother
guessed anything, she did not guess all. It fell to her husband to open her
eyes. With the freedom of manners among the ancients, Augustin relates the
fact quite plainly. . . . That took place in the bath-buildings at Thagaste.
He was bathing with his father, probably in the _piscina_ of cold baths.
The bathers who came out of the water with dripping limbs were printing
wet marks of their feet upon the mosaic flooring, when Patricius, who was
watching them, suddenly perceived that his son had about him the signs
of manhood, that he was already bearing--as Augustin says himself in his
picturesque language--the first signs of turbulent youth, like another
_toga praetexta_. Patricius, as a good pagan, welcomed with jubilation this
promise of grand-children, and rushed off joyously to brag of his discovery
to Monnica. She took the news in quite another way. Frightened at the idea
of the dangers to which her son's virtue was exposed, she lectured him
in private. But Augustin, from the height of his sixteen years, laughed
at her. "A lot of old-women's gossip! Why does she want to talk about
things she can't understand! . . . " Tired out at last, Monnica tried to get
a promise from her son that he would at least have some restraint in his
dissipation--that he would avoid women of the town, and above all, that he
would have nothing to do with married women. For the rest, she put him in
God's hands.

It may be wondered--Augustin himself wonders--that she did not think of
finding him a wife. They marry early in Africa. Even now any Arab labourer
buys a wife for his son, hardly turned sixteen, so that the fires of a too
warm youth may be quenched in marriage. But Monnica, who was not yet a
saint, acted in this matter like a foreseeing and practical woman of the
prosperous class. A wife would be a drag for a young man like Augustin, who
seemed likely to have such a brilliant career. A too early marriage would
jeopardize his future. Before all things, it was important that he should
become an illustrious rhetorician, and raise the fortunes of the family.
For her, all else yielded to this consideration.
But she hoped at least
that the headstrong student might consent to be good into the bargain.

This was also Patricius's way of looking at the matter. And so, says
Augustin, "My father gave himself no concern how I grew towards Thee, or
how chaste I was, provided only that I became a man of culture--however
destitute of Thy culture, O God. . . . My mother and he slackened the curb
without regard to due severity, and I was suffered to enjoy myself
according to my dissolute fancy. " Meanwhile, Patricius was now become
(very tardily) a catechumen. The entreaties of his wife had won him to the
Catholic faith. But his sentiments were not much more Christian--"He hardly
thought of Thee, my God," acknowledges his son, who nevertheless was
pleased at this conversion. If Patricius decided to get converted, it was
probably from political reasons. Since the death of Julian the Apostate,
paganism appeared finally conquered. The Emperor Valentinianus had just
proclaimed heavy penalties against night-sacrifices. In Africa, the
Count Romanus persecuted the Donatists. All the Christians in Thagaste
were Catholic. What was the good of keeping up a useless and dangerous
resistance? Perhaps the end of Patricius--which was near--was as edifying
as Monnica could wish. But at all events, at the present moment, he was
not the man to interfere with Augustin's pleasures: he only thought of
the eventual fortune of the young man. Alone, Monnica might have had some
influence on him, and she herself was fascinated by his future career in
the world. Perhaps, to quiet her conscience, she said to herself that this
frivolous education would be more or less of a help to her son towards
bringing him back to God, that a day would come when the famous rhetorician
would plead the cause of Christ? . . .

Scandalized though she might be at his conduct, it is however apparent that
it was about this time she began to get fonder of him, to worry over him as
her favourite child. But it was not till much later that the union between
mother and son became quite complete. Too many old customs still remained
preventing close intercourse between the men and women of a family. And it
will hardly do to picture such intimacy from the intimacy which may exist
between a mother and son of our own time. There was none of the spoiling,
or indulgence, or culpable weakness which enervates maternal tenderness and
makes it injurious to the energy of a manly character. Monnica was severe
and a little rough. If she let her feelings be seen, it was solely before
God. And yet it is most certain that in the depth of her heart she loved
Augustin, not only as a future member of Christ, but humanly, as a woman
frustrated of love in a badly assorted marriage may spend her love on her
child. The brutality of pagan ways revolted her, and she poured on this
young head all her stored-up affection. In Augustin she loved the being she
wished she could love in her husband.

A number of personal considerations were no doubt involved in the deep and
unselfish attachment she had for her son: instinctively, she looked for him
to protect her against the father's violence. She felt that he would be the
support of her old age, and also, she foresaw dimly what one day he would
be. All this aided to bring about the tie, the understanding, which grew
more and more close between Augustin and Monnica. And so from this time
they both appear to us as they were to appear to all posterity--the pattern
of the Christian Mother and Son. Thanks to them, the hard law of the
ancients has been abrogated. There shall be no more barriers between the
mother and her child. No longer shall it be vain exterior rites which draw
together the members of the same family: they shall communicate in spirit
and truth. Heart speaketh to heart. The fellowship of souls is founded,
and the ties of the domestic hearth are drawn close, as they never were in
antiquity. No more shall they work in concert only for material things;
they will join together to love--and to love each other more. The son will
belong more to his mother.

At the time we have now come to, Monnica was already undertaking the
conquest of Augustin's soul. She prayed for him fervently. The young man
cared very little: gratitude came to him only after his conversion. At this
time he was thinking of nothing but amusement. For this he even forgot his
career. But Monnica and Patricius thought of it constantly--especially
Patricius, who gave himself enormous trouble to enable this student on a
holiday to finish his studies. Eventually he got together the necessary
money, possibly borrowed enough to make up the sum from some rich landowner
who was the patron of the people of small means in Thagaste--say, that
gorgeous Romanianus, to whom Augustin, in acknowledgment, dedicated one of
his first books. The young man could now take the road for Carthage.

He left by himself, craving for knowledge and glory and pleasure, his heart
full of longing for what he knew not, and melancholy without cause. What
was going to become of him in the great, unknown city?




THE SECOND PART

THE ENCHANTMENT OF CARTHAGE


Amare et amari.
"To love and to be loved. "

_Confessions_, III, i.




I

CARTHAGO VENERIS


"I went to Carthage, where shameful loves bubbled round me like boiling
oil. "

This cry of repentance, uttered by the converted Augustin twenty-five
years later, does not altogether stifle his words of admiration for the
old capital of his country. One can see this patriotic admiration stirring
between the lines. Carthage made a very strong impression on him. He gave
it his heart and remained faithful to the end. His enemies, the Donatists,
called him "the Carthaginian arguer. " After he became Bishop of Hippo, he
was continually going to Carthage to preach, or dispute, or consult his
colleagues, or to ask something from men in office. When he is not there,
he is ever speaking of it in his treatises and plain sermons. He takes
comparisons from it: "You who have been to Carthage--" he often says to
his listeners. For the boy from little Thagaste to go to Carthage, was
about the same as for our youths from the provinces to go to Paris. _Veni
Carthaginem_--in these simple words there is a touch of naive emphasis
which reveals the bewilderment of the Numidian student just landed in the
great city.

And, in fact, it was one of the five great capitals of the Empire: there
were Rome, Constantinople, Antioch, Alexandria--Carthage. Carthage was the
sea-port capital of the whole western Mediterranean. With its large new
streets, its villas, its temples, its palaces, its docks, its variously
dressed cosmopolitan population, it astonished and delighted the schoolboy
from Madaura. Whatever local marks were left about him, or signs of the
rustic simpleton, it brushed off. At first, Augustin must have felt himself
as good as lost there.

There he was, his own master, with nobody to counsel and direct him. He
does indeed mention his fellow-countryman, that Romanianus, the patron of
his father and of other people in Thagaste, as a high and generous friend
who invited him to his house when he, a poor youth, came to finish his
studies in a strange city, and helped him, not only with his purse, but
with his friendship. Unfortunately the allusion is not very clear. Still,
it does seem to shew that Augustin, in the first days after his arrival at
Carthage, stayed with Romanianus. It is not in the least improbable that
Romanianus had a house at Carthage and spent the winter there: during the
rest of the year he would be in his country houses round about Thagaste.
This opulent benefactor might not have been satisfied with giving Augustin
a good "tip" for his journey when he was leaving his native town, but may
also have put him up in his own house at Carthage. Such was the atonement
for those enormous fortunes of antiquity: the rich had to give freely and
constantly. With the parcelling out of wealth we have become much more
egoistical.

In any case, Romanianus, taken up with his pleasures and business, could
not have been much of a guide for Monnica's son. Augustin was therefore
without control, or very nearly. No doubt he came to Carthage with a strong
desire to increase his knowledge and get renown, but still more athirst
for love and the emotions of sentiment. The love-prelude was deliriously
prolonged for him. He was at that time so overwhelmed by it, that it is the
first thing he thinks of when he relates his years at Carthage. "To love
and be loved" seems to him, as to his dear Alexandrine poets, the single
object of life. Yet he was not in love, "but he loved the idea of love. "
_Nondum amabam, et amare amabam . . . amare amans. . . . _

Truly, never a pagan poet had hitherto found such language to speak
of love. These subtle phrases are not only the work of a marvellous
word-smith: through their almost imperceptible shades of meaning may be
descried an entirely new soul, the pleasure-loving soul of the old world
awakening to spiritual life. Modern people have repeated the words more
than enough, but by translating them too literally--"I loved to love"--they
have perhaps distorted the sense. They have made Augustin a kind of
Romantic like Alfred de Musset, a dilettante in love. Augustin is not so
modern, although he often seems one of ourselves. When he wrote those words
he was a bishop and a penitent. What strikes him above all in looking back
upon his uneasy and feverish life as a youth and young man, is the great
onrush of all his being which swept him towards love. Plainly, man is made
for love, since he loves without object and without cause, since in itself
alone the idea of love is already for him a beginning of love. Only he
falls into error in giving to creatures a heart that the Creator alone can
fill and satisfy. In this love for love's sake, Augustin discerned the sign
of the predestined soul whose tenderness will find no rest but in God. That
is why he repeats this word "Love" with a kind of intoxication. He knows
that those who love like him cannot love long with a human love. Nor does
he blush to acknowledge it:--he loved--he loved with all his soul--he
loved to the point of loving the coming of love. Happy intimation for the
Christian! A heart so afire is pledged to the eternal marriage.

With this heat of passion, this lively sensibility, Augustin was a prey for
Carthage. The voluptuous city took complete hold on him by its charm and
its beauty, by all the seductions of mind and sense, by its promises of
easy enjoyment.

First of all, it softened this young provincial, used to the harder country
life of his home; it relaxed the Numidian contracted by the roughness of
his climate; it cooled his eyes burned by the sun in the full-flowing of
its waters and the suavity of its horizons. It was a city of laziness, and
above all, of pleasure, as well for those plunged in business as for the
idlers. They called it _Carthago Veneris_--Carthage of Venus. And certainly
the old Phoenician Tanit always reigned there. Since the rebuilding of her
temple by the Romans, she had transformed herself into _Virgo Coelestis_.
This Virgin of Heaven was the great Our Lady of unchastity, towards whom
still mounted the adoration of the African land four hundred years after
the birth of Christ. "Strange Virgin," Augustin was to say later, "who can
only be honoured by the loss of virginity. " Her dissolving influence seemed
to overcome the whole region. There is no more feminine country than this
Carthaginian peninsula, ravished on all sides by the caress of the waters.
Stretched out between her lakes on the edge of the sea, Carthage lounged in
the humid warmth of her mists, as if in the suffocating atmosphere of her
vapour-baths.

She stole away the energies, but she was an enchantment for the eyes.
From the top of the impressive flight of steps which led up to the temple
of Æsculapius on the summit of the Acropolis, Augustin could see at his
feet the huge, even-planned city, with its citadel walls which spread out
indefinitely, its gardens, blue waters, flaxen plains, and the mountains.
Did he pause on the steps at sunset, the two harbours, rounded cup-shape,
shone, rimmed by the quays, like lenses of ruby. To the left, the Lake of
Tunis, stirless, without a ripple, as rich in ethereal lights as a Venetian
lagoon, radiated in ever-altering sheens, delicate and splendid. In front,
across the bay, dotted with the sails of ships close-hauled to the wind,
beyond the wind-swept and shimmering intervals, the mountains of Rhodes
raised their aerial summit-lines against the sky. What an outlook on the
world for a young man dreaming of fame! And what more exhilarating spot
than this Mount Byrsa, where, in deep layers, so many heroic memories were
gathered and superimposed. The great dusty plains which bury themselves
far off in the sands of the desert, the mountains--yes, and isles and
headlands, all bowed before the Hill that Virgil sang and seemed to do
her reverence. She held in awe the innumerable tribes of the barbaric
continent; she was mistress of the sea. Rome herself, from the height of
her Palatine, surged less imperial.

More than any other of the young men seated with him on the benches of the
school of rhetoric, Augustin hearkened to the dumb appeals which came
from the ancient ruins and new palaces of Carthage. But the supple and
treacherous city knew the secret of enchaining the will. She tempted him by
the open display of her amusements. Under this sun which touches to beauty
the plaster of a hut, the grossest pleasures have an attraction which men
of the North cannot understand. The overflowing of lust surrounds you.
This prolific swarming, all these bodies, close-pressed and soft with
sweat, give forth as it were a breath of fornication which melts the will.
Augustin breathed in with delight the heavy burning air, loaded with human
odours, which filled the streets and squares of Carthage. To all the bold
soliciting, to all the hands stretched out to detain him as he walked, he
yielded.

But for a mind like his Carthage had more subtle allurements in reserve.
He was taken by her theatres, by the verses of her poets and the melodies
of her musicians. He shed tears at the plays of Menander and Terence;
he lamented upon the misfortunes of separated lovers; he shared their
quarrels, rejoiced and despaired with them. And still he awaited the
epiphany of Love--that Love which the performance of the actors shewed him
to be so touching and fine.

Such then was Augustin, given over to the irresponsibility of his eighteen
years--a heart spoiled by romantic literature, a mind impatient to try
every sort of intellectual adventure in the most corrupting and bewitching
city known to the pagan centuries, set amidst one of the most entrancing
landscapes in the world.




II

THE AFRICAN ROME


Carthage did not offer only pleasures to Augustin; it was besides an
extraordinary subject to think about for an understanding so alert and
all-embracing as his.

At Carthage he understood the Roman grandeur as he could not at Madaura
and the Numidian towns. Here, as elsewhere, the Romans made a point of
impressing the minds of conquered races by the display of their strength
and magnificence. Above all, they aimed at the immense. The towns built
by them offered the same decorative and monumental character of the
Greek cities of the Hellenistic period, which the Romans had further
exaggerated--a character not without emphasis and over-elaboration, but
which was bound to astonish, and that was the main thing in their view. In
short, their ideal was not perceptibly different from that of our modern
town councillors. To lay out streets which intersected at right angles; to
create towns cut into even blocks like chessboards; to multiply prospects
and huge architectural masses--all the Roman cities of this period revealed
such an aim, with an almost identical plan.

Erected after this type, the new Carthage caused the old to be forgotten.
Everybody agreed that it was second only to Rome. The African writers
squandered the most hyperbolical praises upon it. For them it is "The
splendid, the august, the sublime Carthage. " Although there may well be a
certain amount of triviality or of patriotic exaggeration in these praises,
it is certain that the Roman capital of the Province of Africa was no less
considerable than the old metropolis of the Hanno and Barcine factions.
With a population almost as large as that of Rome, it had almost as great
a circumference. It must further be recalled that as it had no ramparts
till the Vandal invasion, the city overflowed into the country. With its
gardens, villas, and burial-places of the dead, it covered nearly the
entire peninsula, to-day depopulated.

Carthage, as well as Rome, had her Capitol and Palatine upon Mount Byrsa,
where rose no doubt a temple consecrated to the Capitolean triune deities,
Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva, not far from the great temple of Æsculapius, a
modern transformation of the old Punic Eschmoum. Hard by these sanctuaries,
the Proconsul's palace dominated Carthage from the height of the acclivity
of the Acropolis. The Forum was at the foot of the hill, probably in the
neighbourhood of the ports--a Forum built and arranged in the Roman way,
with its shops of bankers and money-changers placed under the circular
galleries, with the traditional image of Marsyas, and a number of statues
of local celebrities. Apuleius no doubt had his there. Further off was the
Harbour Square, where gathered foreigners recently landed and the idlers of
the city in search of news, and where the booksellers offered the new books
and pamphlets. There was to be seen one of the curiosities of Carthage--a
mosaic representing fabulous monsters, men without heads, and men with only
one leg and one foot--a huge foot under which, lying upon their backs, they
sheltered from the sun, as under a parasol. On account of this feature they
were called the _sciapodes_. Augustin, who like everybody else had paused
before these grotesque figures, recalls them somewhere to his readers. . . .
Beside the sea, in the lower town and upon the two near hills of the
Acropolis, were a number of detached buildings that the old authors have
preserved the names of and briefly described. Thanks to the zeal of
archæologists, it is now become impossible to tell where they stood.

The pagan sanctuaries were numerous. That of the goddess Coelestis, the
great patroness of Carthage, occupied a space of five thousand feet. It
comprised, besides the actual [Greek: hieron], where stood the image of the
goddess, gardens, sacred groves, and courts surrounded with columns. The
ancient Phoenician Moloch had also his temple under the name of Saturn.
They called him _The Old One_, so Augustin tells us, and his worshippers
were falling away. On the other hand, Carthage had another sanctuary which
was very fashionable, a _Serapeum_ as at Alexandria, where were manifested
the pomps of the Egyptian ritual, celebrated by Apuleius. Neighbouring
the holy places, came the places of amusement: the theatre, the Odeum,
circus, stadium, and amphitheatre--this last, of equal dimensions with
the Colosseum at Rome, its gallery rising upon gallery, and its realistic
sculptures of animals and artisans. Then there were the buildings for the
public service: the immense cisterns of the East and the Malga, the great
aqueduct, which, after being carried along a distance of fifty-five miles,
emptied the water of the Zaghouan into the reservoirs at Carthage. Finally,
there were the Baths, some of which we know--those of Antoninus and of
Maximianus, and those of Gargilius, where one of the most important
Councils known to the history of the African Church assembled. There were
likewise many Christian basilicas at the time of Augustin. The authors
mention seventeen: it is likely there were more. That of Damous-el-Karita,
the only one of which considerable traces have been found, was vast and
richly decorated, and was perhaps the cathedral of Carthage.

What other buildings there were are utterly lost to history. It
may be conjectured, however, that Carthage, as well as Rome, had a
_septizonium_--a decorative building with peristyles one above the other
which surrounded a reservoir. In fact, it is claimed that the one at
Rome was copied from Carthage. Straight streets paved with large flags
intersected around these buildings, forming a network of long avenues, very
bright and ventilated. Some of them were celebrated in the ancient world
either for their beauty or the animation of their trade: the street of the
Jewellers, the street of Health, of Saturn, of Coelestis, too, or of Juno.
The fig and vegetable markets and the public granaries were also some of
the main centres of Carthaginian life.

It is unquestionable that Carthage, with its buildings and statues, its
squares, avenues and public gardens, looked like a large capital, and was
a perfect example of that ideal of rather brutal magnificence and strength
which the Romans obtruded everywhere.

And even while it dazzled the young provincial from Thagaste, the African
Rome shewed him the virtue of order--social and political order. Carthage,
the metropolis of Western Africa, maintained an army of officials who
handled the government in its smallest details. First of all, there
were the representatives of the central power, the imperial rulers--the
Proconsul, a sort of vice-emperor, who was surrounded by a full court, a
civil and military staff, a privy council, an _officium_ which included a
crowd of dignitaries and subaltern clerks. Then there was the Proprætor
of Africa who, being in control of the government of the whole African
province, had an _officium_ still larger perhaps than the Proconsul's.
After them came the city magistrates, who were aided in their functions by
the Council of the Decurions--the Senate of Carthage. These Carthaginian
senators cut a considerable figure: for them their colleagues at Rome
were full of airs and graces, and the Emperors endeavoured to keep them
in a good-humour. All the details of city government came under their
supervision: the slaughter-houses, buildings, the gathering of municipal
taxes, and the police, which comprised even the guardians of the Forum.
Then there were the army and navy. The home port of a grain-carrying fleet
which conveyed the African cereals to Ostia, Carthage could starve Rome
if she liked.