and fearing worse; she pressed red dew from his body struck

with repeated blows, roses fastened together,

already red, drew blood more fiery red.

The fierce threats died away, the punishment having seemed

now greater than his own offenses, and Venus

about to become the offender. The heroines

themselves intervene and each prefers to blame

her own death on cruel Fate. Then the fond mother

gives thanks at their having withdrawn their grievances

and forgiven her boy and pardoned his crimes.

And then such visions in nocturnal shapes

upset his sleep, disturbed by empty terror,

which Cupid, having suffered most of the night—

the fog of sleep at last dispelled—flees, leaves

the ivory gate and flies up to the gods.

A CLASSICS STUDENT

Confessions, Book I

Saint Augustine

Translated by Peter Constantine, 2018

Augustine (354–430 AD) wrote his Confessions after he became a bishop in Hippo, a Roman city in what is now Algeria, in North Africa. He used the work to reflect on his life experience, especially the misdemeanours of his youth, prior to his discovery of God. His mother was a Christian but his father was not. In many respects Augustine represents the union of classicism and Christianity. In this extract he recounts his struggles to learn – and more importantly enjoy – classical literature. He can quote from Virgil’s Aeneid, particularly the episodes surrounding Dido’s suicide (see Story 49), but Homer, he recalls, was a struggle. Like many pupils, his feelings towards the subject he was studying were influenced by his feelings towards its teachers; his Greek tutors, he writes, ‘goaded me with fierce threats and punishments’. He nevertheless recognised ‘the sweetness of the Greek heroic tales’. Saint Augustine evidently enjoyed a good story.

I have still not managed to fathom the reasons why I hated Greek, which I studied as a boy. Yet Latin I truly loved; not what my first masters taught me, but what I later learned from the men we call grammarians. For I considered my first lessons of reading, writing, and arithmetic as great a burden and punishment as any Greek lesson. And yet, as I was flesh, a passing breath that does not return, did this not come from the sin and vanity of life? The first lessons were in fact better than the later ones, because they were more sound. Through them I acquired, and still retain, the ability to read whatever I find written and to write whatever I want; whereas in my later lessons I was forced to retain the strayings of an Aeneas I did not know, forgetting my own, and to weep over a dead Dido who killed herself for love; while I, without a tear, was prepared to pitiably die away from You through such works, my God, my life.