Augustine spoke and wrote in Latin, but he grew up in a multilingual society and was familiar with at least three other languages, Greek, Punic, and Hebrew. Like most members of the elite in the western half of the Roman Empire, he gained his knowledge of Greek primarily from school, and his recollections of the difficulties of learning the language in his Confessions (1.14) were shared by other schoolchildren, as attested by surviving ancient schoolbooks, one of which bears testimony to the fact that there were “difficult dispositions with regard to the hard work of literary study.”Footnote ¹ Despite his early antipathy to the language, as a professor of rhetoric, Augustine had undoubtedly been educated to a standard where he was able to engage with Greek texts directly in the original. There is debate about how much Greek was in use as a spoken language in the area around Carthage in the later empire. The North African author of the Latin Passio Sanctarum Perpetuae et Felicitatis (an account of the martyrdom of early Christians at the turn of the third century including an inset narrative attributed to the Perpetua) was conversant with Greek, and one passage of the Passio relates how Perpetua spoke Greek with several church elders. However, this does not prove that Greek was widely spoken in the provinceFootnote ² but may rather represent the impact of the language of the New Testament on nascent Christian communities.Footnote ³ Although Augustine himself (doc. Chr. 2.12.18) states that many of the early translations into Latin were made by those who were unable to fully comprehend Greek phrases or idioms, scholarly work on the surviving Old Latin texts of the gospelsFootnote ⁴ shows that the translators were able to appreciate nuances in the Greek, some of which were missed in Jerome’s translation.

Augustine also had some knowledge of Punic, a Semitic language spoken by the Carthaginians before the Roman conquest, which still survived in smaller towns and among members of his congregation. By the fourth century CE, Punic had virtually no written tradition, and educated Romans, such as the grammarian Maximus of Madaura (who may have been Augustine’s former teacher), looked down on the language and its speakers. Although Augustine rebuked Maximus for his condescending attitude (ep. 17), his own Punic was far from perfect: he reports that he himself confused the Punic words for “pity” and “piety” (mag. 13.44). Augustine’s tolerant attitude toward the local language was not shared by all Christian writers; Jerome had little time for the language spoken in northern Syria, probably a dialect of Aramaic, which he refers to as a “barbarous half-language” (ep. 7.2). The view that Punic was in some way substandard to Latin no doubt contributed to its rapid demise in the fifth and sixth centuries CE. The fate of Punic is mirrored by that of most of the local languages spoken in the Roman Empire, which had all disappeared from the epigraphic record by the fifth century and which go largely unnoticed and unrecorded in our surviving Latin and Greek texts. There was no attempt to make a written version of the Bible in Punic and no mention of the language after Augustine until the eighth century.Footnote ⁵

The first attempts to set down the Latin language to writing were made in the seventh century BCE, and although the development of literary culture in Latin was only to take place 400 years later, by Augustine’s day, the ever-changing spoken idiom had deviated considerably from the written form of the language. Schoolchildren were taught to write in a Latin that would have been far removed from everyday speech, and grammarians formulated spelling rules and laid down precepts for which word forms and constructions were acceptable and which were not.Footnote ⁶ Learning to write consequently also meant learning a completely different register, and texts written by those with little education or comments by grammarians and others reveal some of the fault lines between the written and the spoken.

The treatment of initial aspiration provides a good illustration of the separation between speech and writing. By the fourth century CE, Latin speakers of all classes had ceased to pronounce the sound h at the beginning of words in everyday speech, and the sound does not survive into the Romance languages derived from Latin. The tendency to drop h is first noticed by Roman writers in the first century BCE, and we know that the change was fairly general already in republican Rome by the fact that some speakers, aiming not to sound uneducated, overcompensated by putting h at the beginning of words that had never had it. Through our knowledge of etymology, it is possible to identify words such as anser (“goose”) that originally would have had an initial h and others such as humerus (“shoulder”) that would not. A few words, such as (h)arundo (“reed”) and (h)arena (“sand”), are spelled both with and without h because the grammarians do not agree on which form is preferable. Trained scribes were taught when to write h at the beginnings of words, even if the speakers who were dictating to them left it out (and some examples of corrections can be found in the writing tablets from the Roman military camp at Vindolanda on Hadrian’s wall, written in the early second century CE). By the time of Augustine, learning to write in the educated Latin of the grammarians (what is termed “Classical Latin”) was consequently analogous to learning a foreign language, and Augustine says as much in his conf. 1.13, “For those first rudiments, to read, to write and cipher, I accounted no less painful and troublesome than [learning] the Greek” (translation by William Watts).

In several places in his writings, Augustine took issue with the grammarians’ insistence on the correct form of words in preference to their communicative function and effect. In conf. 1.18.28–19.30, he notes that some people were more afraid to drop the h of homo (“human”) than to say that they hated somebody. In doc. Chr. 2.13, he refuses to stigmatize the nonclassical construction inter hominibus (“between men”) (rather than the classical inter homines) and the longer form ossum (“bone”) rather than the classical os (Ibid., 4.10.24).Footnote ⁷ Augustine justifies the use of the preposition with the ablative (as in inter hominibus) because it causes no difference in meaning, and he recommends the form ossum because it avoids any confusion with the word ōs (“mouth”). In s. 37.14, he comments on the variants neat and neiat (“she spins”), stating that “as long as everyone is being instructed, grammarians should not be feared.”Footnote ⁸ Augustine’s statements about “correct” Latin appear radical when set alongside the bulk of contemporary grammatical writings, which set down inter as a preposition taking the accusative case, castigate the form ossum, and give rules for which words to write with i between two vowels. It is noteworthy that Augustine does not himself use the nonclassical forms that he defends, although they are common in contemporary inscriptions, medical writings, and some of the “Old Latin” versions of the Bible. Thus he uses the ablative singular osse (“bone,” from os) in the City of God instead of the form osso (as from ossum), which is found in medical texts.Footnote ⁹ As argued by Burton,Footnote ¹⁰ Augustine does not seek to challenge the authority of the grammarians for the learned writer or reader, believing authority and tradition to be good things, but he thinks that, for those with lower levels of education, understanding the message is more important than the correction of error.

Augustine was not alone in his desire to bridge the gap between speech and writing in order in favor of a better understanding by a wider proportion of the population; other Christian writers were also aware of the need, and some, such as Jerome, explicitly comment on their own attempts to select a word or form that will be more familiar to the audience, although none of Augustine’s contemporaries go so far in their defense of stigmatized forms.Footnote ¹¹ There are also ample precedents from earlier authors and intellectuals for a more flexible attitude toward spelling and for tolerance for forms that were stigmatized by grammarians but avoided ambiguity for readers. Thus Suetonius tells us that the Emperor Augustus aimed for clarity in his writing (Life of Augustus 86), and Julius Caesar, who composed a treatise on language in two books, also aimed for simplicity and an avoidance of unusual or ambiguous forms.Footnote ¹² Adams gives further examples of the avoidance of grammatical niceties by writers of technical treatises, such as Vitruvius on architecture, or the authors of medical works, who needed to be understood by people who had perhaps not gone very far in their own education (note the presence of the nonclassical ossum in medical works).Footnote ¹³ Many literary figures in the early empire had expressed scorn for the grammarians, who were generally of lower social status and seen primarily as schoolmasters. Although by the time of the later empire grammarians were drawn from all social classes, they were still for the most part situated at a social level well below the aristocracy.Footnote ¹⁴

Augustine’s ideas about the nature of language and the logical features of discourse draw partly from the Roman grammatical tradition and partly from the Stoic and Epicurean philosophical schools, both of which had developed extensive philosophical accounts of the function and nature of language. The original Greek texts of much of Stoic and Epicurean linguistic philosophy do not survive, although more is coming to light with the ongoing recovery of the Epicurean Philodemus from carbonized scrolls excavated in the Italian city of Herculaneum. Several Roman works on rhetoric, including Cicero’s Brutus, Orator, and De oratore and Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria, do survive, and these reveal the effect of the Greek philosophical schools on Roman linguistic thinking.Footnote ¹⁵ Augustine certainly had access to a much wider range of ancient writing on language and rhetoric than we do, including the work of the Stoic Chrysippus, which now survives only in fragments. Augustine may also have been aware of Plato’s dialogue Cratylus, written before the birth of Epicurus and Zeno (the founder of Stoicism) and which was a fundamental text in setting out the opposition between the view that words were “conventional” or “natural” signs. In one view, later adopted by the Epicureans, the link between the sound of a word and its meaning was arbitrary, and the significance of any particular sequence of sounds was agreed by convention in a community. The Stoics adopted a more naturalist view of language, arguing that there was a link between the forms of words and their meanings, although avoiding the strong form of naturalism that was already satirized by the etymologies given by Socrates in the Cratylus.Footnote ¹⁶

To a modern audience, it is perhaps surprising that despite the wealth of ancient work on linguistics and philosophy of language, some of the basic technical terms that we use to describe languages have no simple equivalents in Latin and Greek. Take, for example, the word for “word.” Greek logos is usually translated as “word,” most famously at the beginning of the Gospel of John, but it had a wider range of uses than English “word.” It can be used of an argument or, as is general in Stoic linguistic theory, to refer to a sentence. Greek writers on language sometimes used the term lexis to mean “word,” and lists of foreign or unusual words were generally termed lexeis (plural of lexis). It is from this that our terms such as “lexicon” and “lexical” derive; lexis could, however, also be used to refer to an expression (its normal meaning in Stoic linguistic writings) or an author’s style. The term lekton, literally meaning “something said,” could also mean “word,” but it had a special meaning for the Stoics, who used lekton to refer to “the meaning or fact or truth or falsehood that we express or understand by means of spoken or written language.”Footnote ¹⁷ Greek grammarians also used two further technical terms, onoma (literally “name”) and rhēma (which correspond broadly to our “noun” and “verb”), although in some earlier writers on language, such as Plato and Aristotle, the two terms might be used to refer to “word” and “expression,” respectively. Roman grammatical terminology took over the Greek distinction between nouns and verbs as nomen and verbum, but they lacked the wider range of words available to the Greeks, and verbum could also be used in many of the senses of logos (as in the Latin Vulgate’s translation of the beginning of the Gospel of John) and lexis and was in general the default word for “word.”

The apparent confusion in the linguistic terminology generally causes little problem for the readers of ancient grammars, whose works abound in lists and definitions, so it is possible to ascertain what they mean by a technical term by the surrounding examples and context. Thus, in mag. 2, when Augustine asks Adeodatus how many words there are in a line of Vergil, the question and answer serve to illuminate what sense of verbum is used in the passage. In a culture where there was normally no graphic indication of where an individual word began and ended – there were no spaces between words in ancient texts – the question is in any case less straightforward than we might think. The few surviving ancient Greek and Roman texts that separate words through a punctuation mark generally count groups such as preposition and noun or verb and pronoun as a single unit. Augustine’s own development of a philosophy of language therefore requires him to clarify a Latin terminology for language, a challenge that he rises to in the De dialecta through the creation of new technical senses for the terms dictio and dicibile.

In conclusion, Augustine’s career as a rhetorician meant that he was very well acquainted with the large body of ancient work on grammar and the philosophy of language. He stands apart from his contemporaries and predecessors in his attitudes toward foreign languages, his acceptance of linguistic variation, and his ability to think through grammatical and linguistic questions afresh.

In the five and a half centuries that the province had been Roman before Augustine’s time, writers in North Africa were steeped in Roman literary culture (and Greek and, for some, Punic).Footnote ¹ Authors from this region contributed to the development of Latin literature, from the mid-second-century BCE playwright Terence whose works became school texts down to Augustine and beyond him to the poet Dracontius among others. Indeed, for the second and third centuries CE, it has been argued that Roman literature was North African literature; that is to say, the major authors of this period who have survived were Romans living in North Africa.Footnote ² It will not do, therefore, to try to characterize the hold of classical literary culture on some North African writer as if one were detecting which few of the classical authors were still known many centuries after their deaths in some purportedly isolated English monastic community of the Middle Ages. Furthermore, the classical literary culture of the later Roman Empire was not limited to the authors who would become the school canons of later periods, including our own.Footnote ³

The richness and variety of the literary culture of North Africa of the second to fifth centuries, of course, comes after Quintilian, the great authority on the classical (Latin) literary canon, active at the turn of the first century CE. His list has directed, again since the Renaissance, the idea of a classical canon. One could add to the authors he approved the chief figures who subsequently entered the canon, but one must also offer a strong second and double supplement. The first supplement would be the later literary greats Martial, Tacitus, and others, plus the Christian greats, Minucius Felix, the North Africans Tertullian and Lactantius, and of great significance but not high style, the martyr Perpetua, as well as so-called minor authors, e.g., Ausonius, contemporary with Augustine and not for his period or for many centuries really a minor figure. The second supplement should include intellectuals who did not come to be celebrated as literary stylists, including philosophers, theologians, rhetoricians, and other technical writers. But let us add not only all the not-so-greats but all that has not survived, individual works like the very great Cicero’s protreptic to philosophy, the Hortensius, and such a magnum opus as, for instance, the poetry of Virgil’s friend Varus and all the other works we know only by report.Footnote ⁴ Often scholars have approached the question of the presence and influence of classical literature on Augustine (as on many a later author) by reconstructing a list of reading, what the author read in school, what he had in his library, and what books his books clearly made use of. Such a list reflects the canon making of ancient (and medieval) literary practice and school curricula. Of course, the lists change in very interesting ways. But the whole approach verges on the anachronistic and piecemeal.Footnote ⁵

Thus, to plumb the literary culture before Augustine, I will not redescribe, for instance, the use in the immediately preceding centuries of school authors known to Augustine. Instead of such survey archeology, I shall try two exploratory trenches. In the late third century, two authors show remarkable uses of and attitudes toward the old literary culture. These two Christian authors, Arnobius of Sicca Veneria and Commodian, who at the least was influenced by the writings of Cyprian, the bishop of Carthage, and may well have lived there, share a professedly polemical attitude toward the substance of classical literature. In addition, Arnobius explicitly criticized the form of this literature, which, in turn, Commodian’s chosen style implicitly and performatively criticizes. Both ridicule, in rather sophisticated literary ways, the stories of the old gods. I bring them together not to allege any Africitas of style or attitude but to consider them as indices of the variety of literary culture in the province of North Africa a generation or two before Augustine.

Arnobius has not earned the title of the “Christian Cicero,” which his student Lactantius would, and yet there is a rush and energy to his writing animated by his faith in Christ as savior and his disbelief in human conventions. He discovers an argument and rides it hard. He varies the articulation of his point, crushes his imagined opponents with arguments ad absurdum and, it is true, with long lists of words or examples. It must have been something to hear.Footnote ⁶ Jerome wrote that he had been a rhetorician,Footnote ⁷ and his work, while strongly critical of the pretensions of grand style, is written in a sophisticated, rhetorical, even arresting Latin. At times, the sentences hold one breathless as his sarcasm, rhetorical questions, and almost fantastical imaginations of scenes and situations roll on and on.

The second author here considered, Commodian, also produced convincing, argumentative literature, but his verse form is decidedly not the quantitative hexameter read and taught in schools. Scholars have had difficulty in determining exactly what it is, but his aesthetic choices reflect an effort to write in a popularizing form.Footnote ⁸ He himself says he writes in middling style, and he seems to address the ordinary – the traditionalist who has not thought about his religious practices and the Christian initiand who needs doctrine laid out, simply. Persuasion and didacticism and not any inability or some unrecognized reflex that reproduced contemporary linguistic usage seem to have guided his choice of form. Both these authors innovate in a way that directly and even avowedly takes issue with the practice and precepts of classical literature while making great use of classical literature. They model a new practice with the old literature and not any abandonment or retrenchment.

The Roman gods take direct hits.Footnote ⁹ Arnobius especially anticipates the long list of minor deities that Augustine would ridicule at civ. Dei 6.9. This apologetic theme necessitates a criticism of the inherited literary canon (and of real-life religious practices, especially sacrifice). No inherent reason forced a writer of the third or fourth century to feel that, as a writer or thinker, he or she was engaged in an activity separate from the practice of Virgil or Horace. Undoubtedly the first authors of the imperial age represented their activity and works as secondary to the great achievement of the late republicans and Augustans, but this dynamic of belatedness is already evident in Horace and Virgil. The Latin author has always been entering a genre already well established and masterfully executed. Arnobius, however, represents something new: the Christian has almost a parallel literature, a second set of stories and styles that allegedly is at odds with the old, traditional set. Arnobius reports that the traditionalists find the Christian set rudely expressed and their readers stupid to be fooled by such stories. Arnobius’ work was entitled Contra Gentes, according to Jerome, or Contra Nationes, according to the single manuscript that transmitted the text to the Carolingian world.Footnote ¹⁰ Further in his text he simply refers to the non-Christians as “you” and the Christians as “we.” He thus evades the divisive reification of name calling, which will help him in his ultimate task, which is to reunite you and us as Roman Christians. But he opens by stressing a divide between two aggrieved parties: he takes the stance of the defendant’s lawyer answering a charge already made. The charge, the chief source of division, is a literary problem or a problem of literary hermeneutics even if the traditionalists seem only to be engaged in name calling.

The traditionalists have accused the Christians of stupidity (stultitia)Footnote ¹¹ and in particular credulity (credulitas). The real charge is credulitas, which does not put the Christians in good company. When Glaucus, the love-smitten Cyclops in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, tries to stay the fleeing Scylla (13.743), he tells her of his earlier life as a mortal fisherman. He managed to catch many fish by net or by hook or by a third means, “their credulity drew them to the curved hook” (aut sua credulitas in aduncos egerat hamos). The independent minded Scylla is of course unmoved. Credulitas is a serious charge. Fables make clear the difference. The fabulist Phaedrus has many of his fables turn on the distinction between credere and non credere.Footnote ¹² When the wolf asks the heron to stick her long neck down his throat to remove a bone, the right moral is, don’t believe him. The animal, the subhuman, the fool credunt. Men, especially the learned, judge. It could be that Arnobius has been influenced by Stoic ideas about withdrawing judgment from commonly received ideas (doxa in Greek, fama in Latin), but his rhetoric appeals to wider cultural norms.

The charge of credulity is serious then from the point of view of the sophisticated textuality that underlay elite culture and also more broadly the attitudes that the popular form fable communicated,Footnote ¹³ but credulity in this context has an important, particular consequence. Faith in the Christian stories neglects the gods and provokes their anger. Credulitas leads to neglect of religion, which leads to harm, iniuria – military losses, plague, etc. Such is the line of argument that Arnobius will address. At the heart of the trouble for Christians is a neglect of the old literature that is attendant on neglect for the gods. One solution, here not taken, would be to abandon, expurgate, bowdlerize, or allegorize the old stories, all of which approaches had already been essayed by one philosopher or another.

Arnobius does not propose that classical literature be abandoned. It should not be believed, or, more precisely, its literary artifice should not pass as argument. In rhetorical terms, he is presenting his opponents’ charge, which is a form of occupatio or anticipatio, that wonderfully Ciceronian mode of representing the grounds of debate in terms of one’s own choosing. He expresses the mutual recriminations of traditionalist and Christian in a series of elegant chiasmi, beginning (1.57)

One chiasmus follows another in this paragraph, where “you” and “we” jostle about “writings.” The effect is to establish reciprocity as well as antagonism. “We” and “you” are brought into juxtaposition, almost into a balance where we do not yet know which scale will fall down with the weight of truth. The passage does not make doctrinal or methodological differences clear. Rather, the reader hears two parties wrangling, Christians on one scale of the balance, the traditionalists on the other. But the litigants are united as members of the chiasmus, belief, and writings. The solution to this dilemma, to this hanging scale, is far more radical than the clear denunciation of one party and celebration of the other. This scene of balancing will lead to the common ground by which Arnobius will prevail and unite.

His first step to draw together the positions is to redefine credulitas. This is in keeping with rhetorical principles: as a strategy of defense, the orator can redefine the crucial element or term of law.Footnote ¹⁵ Arnobius again accomplished more than a trick of rhetoric. He offers a universalizing hermeneutics: here is the development of his thought, which moves from the first axiom, the impasse that is the manifestation of disagreement, to an explanation of motive:

What is nicely avoided in this reduction is any particular that might stir up animus, e.g., such a formulation as the Christians tell of recent epiphany in poor language, whereas the old authors write, in good literary fashion, of the gods’ (mis)adventures. He will come like Commodian and later Augustine to make fun of the particular functions, lusts, and adventures of the old gods, but now with a certain clinical detachment he presents the problem as one of hermeneutics. The question of what texts to believe becomes the sole issue; only a method of reading separates the two parties. Arnobius solves this problem (of his own framing) by presenting a hermeneutics divorced from literary form (the response to antiquity as authority is almost subsumed as a necessary consequence of his new theory). This is fairly radical for the ancient world. The philosophical tradition had developed an antirhetorical theory if not exactly use of language.Footnote ¹⁶ Arnobius goes further. On several occasions he indicts the old authors for their faith in rhetorical figures. He advocates positively for an interpretation of texts based solely on their truth content. This helps him with vetustas as well. He illustrates abundantly that antiquity is no guarantor of truth. Indeed, his illustrative capacity, his amplificatio, is a magnificent skill in finding embarrassing examples. In his contrastive thinking, he has also to show that plain language and modern times are or can be positive. For the latter, he will argue that the speed and degree of the spread of belief are a proof for Christianity and in particular that the veracity of the recent miracles is special proof. This part of his argument is in fact extremely interesting: he thinks that miracles are a sponsio – the legal term for guarantee – of the veracity of the Christian writings. At 2.11.17, he derides philosophers’ skill in syllogism and rhetoric. He maintains “[t]hat author is not to be deemed good who produces spotless speech, rather value the author who proves what he promises by the surety of divine works” (Ille <non> est dicendus auctor bonus, qui sermonem candidule prompsit, sed qui quod pollicetur divinorum operum prosequitur sponsione).Footnote ¹⁷ Of course, this makes for a problematic hermeneutics: an appeal to nontextual factors (be they the author’s conviction or other witnesses or revelation) can reassure that the text is serious, but they contribute nothing to the validity of textual science. Arnobius, like many a rhetorician, is far better at undermining a case: he succeeds in discrediting the traditionalists by demonstrating that their texts and their interpretations depend on conventions, the formal language invented by men and received ideas – old stories. His positive achievement may simply be only that all human beings should be careful where they put their faith. His immediate target is the canon of classical literature. He might have singled out poetry for its fictions – Plato had established the contours of this long-lived criticism – but Arnobius in fact develops a universal criticism of texts that leads also to a certain harmony between the old literature and the new.

His critique applies to all writings because he demonstrates that language itself is conventional.Footnote ¹⁸ Arnobius attacks traditionalists’ faith or pride in grammar and rhetoric on five different occasions (1.59; 2.4; 2.11.17; 2.19; 3.19). He most directly indicts human confusion of linguistic artifice with reality in an attack on the inconsistency and conventionality of grammatical gender (1.59.7):

The great late-republican scholar Varro had listed words with two genders (very often words he found employed by an early writer with a different gender from that used in his day). To judge from later grammarians who share these examples (and who probably did not read Arnobius), Varro is the ultimate source.Footnote ¹⁹ Varro, however, did not see in the variety of linguistic form an essential arbitrariness. Rather, words changed their form either by voluntary or involuntary forces. Originally, the relation of form to content, the word to its thing, had been transparent. Arnobius’ attention to changes or inconsistencies in the gender of nouns could owe something to the situation of his schooling, where the Latin of the school texts was not the Latin of the community,Footnote ²⁰ but the stimulus to his thinking, the spirited defense of a Christian literature of low stylistic polish, has led to a fundamental revision of his great classical precursors, Cicero (De natura deorum especially) and Varro (probably the De lingua Latina, channeled into later grammatical writers). Grammatical gender, like the silly gods of the traditionalists, emerges as a conventional act of humans giving names to things and then mistaking the name for a real thing. Arnobius’ rhetorical tour de force and spirited polemicism have perhaps obscured his serious purpose. In traditional Roman terms, he practices a literary or intellectual evocatio, that old Roman military practice where the enemies’ gods were called out of their shrines and brought over to the Roman side. Arnobius has shown that the gods are only voces, “words.”

In his criticism of the gods and of their literary presentation, he had been anticipated (the chronology is likely) by Commodian, whose Instructiones begin with a series of short poems ridiculing the major divinities. Like Arnobius, Commodian shows wide literary learning. Influences on his poetic diction include what was probably already a school text, the Distichs of Cato, and the poets Lucretius, Virgil, Horace, Ovid, and others, including Valerius Flaccus.Footnote ²¹ Still he can be quite prosaic, and this quality, along with his unclassical meter, has led to a misappraisal of his work. Here he demythologizes the Roman god Silvanus (who may not seem all that important but who was widely depicted in art and literature, his statues commonplace as he marked the borders of estates and fields – Dolabella says that every estate had three).Footnote ²² Commodian begins his fourteenth poem with a typical rhetorical question (also typical is his habit of calling his pagan reader stupid, here at 1.14.6):

Commodian continues to consider what benefit the alleged god has brought men. His answer or his focus on wood (timber) has puzzled some, but he is probably responding to the iconographic element of the god holding a cypress tree (cf. Virgil, Georgics 1.20). This allows the poet then to mock men worshipping wood – they believe the wooden tablets that depict the god (or perhaps the wooden curse tablets, one of which has been found in North Africa). All of this is typical of the demythologizing tradition and one strain in that the iconoclastic tradition, which mocks human beings’ confusion of material for the divine, the bronze (statue) for Athena, here the wood for a forest god. Commodian’s prosaic expression is in fact argumentative and didactic, as in Lucretius or Horace’s Epistles and Satires (the last an especially appropriate generic model). A particular source for the diction is the collection of aphorisms used in Roman schools, the Distichs of Cato (1.27):

It is not just that the first half of the second line has been transformed by Commodian to bene fistula cantat. He replaces canit with cantat because he pays particular attention to the ends of his lines, the fifth and sixth feet look like the traditional dactylic hexameter, and to Commodian’s ear perhaps they sounded the same. He likes to end with a three syllable word followed by a disyllable. The trisyllable need not be a quantitative dactyl, but the final disyllable is always a quantitative spondee or trochee; i.e., the penultimate syllable is always long. So whereas he does not really care to make the opening word a proper dactyl or spondee, he is concerned to end the line as a line ended in Virgil and the other hexameter poets. One cannot conclude that he was trying to write hexameters and missed the mark or that he did not know that what he was doing was different.Footnote ²⁵ The schools taught prosody and versification, but a verse system that does not have phonemic support will change.Footnote ²⁶ No doubt Commodian’s freer verse reacts to the collapse of diphthongs and long vowels. In addition, however, his neglect of the rules seems related to his new message. The “Arians” wrote rhythmic hymns, and Augustine a rhythmic poem in response.Footnote ²⁷ Perhaps Commodian exploits, like Arnobius, the change in linguistic practice and a polemical, apologist resistance to the old canons and the pride in literary stylistics. Commodian uses the Distichs elsewhere, and their didacticism has more broadly influenced his verse.Footnote ²⁸ In the poem on Silvanus, the point of the original aphorism from the Distichs, the deception worked by the sweet sound, has recommended its reuse. If we remember the point of the Distich, the diction in Commodian has greater resonance: we recognize the deceit in sweet sounds. More broadly his prosiness can be found in the Distichs, and the declaration of a mediocre (middling and humble) style derives from Roman satire and in particular Horace. The Christian apologist Commodian found in the traditions and forms of Roman satire much that was useful for the criticism of social conventions and for a plain exhortation to the virtuous life. To rescue the traditionalist from stupidity and to turn the canon to good use amount to the same thing; for this salvation, what is needed is a new form, a new rhetoric divorced from surface glamour. Augustine thus joined a tradition of lively invective against the traditionalists. His uneasy attraction to the old literature was also part of this tradition (and not simply a biographical fact of his early schooling). He could have learned as well from his local literary precursors that literature itself could at the same time call for and exemplify a style that sought to reflect the novelty of the new religion while it bound together its readers into a new society.

This passage is perhaps the most cited one from conf. 8.12.29 because it presents the moment of Augustine’s moral conversion. I have put it at the start of my piece on the author because it thematizes the author’s concern with textuality: that is, for him, conversion takes place through his reading of a text, namely, a passage from Apostle Paul’s epistle to the Romans. It matters what one reads and how one reads – and especially so for Augustine, first, as a student of rhetoric and, later, as a foremost teacher of rhetoric in Roman Africa. After his conversion, his aim, as I have argued elsewhere,Footnote ¹ became to distinguish God’s Word from the everyday discourse of the world. Thus this chapter seeks to explore the intellectual milieu in which Augustine, as a foremost practitioner of public language, worked by looking at the educational, rhetorical, and grammatical influences on him.

Augustine underwent a conventional acculturation into the verbal culture of his day, which regarded ability at oratory as key to later subsequent wealth and honor in public life. He underwent a classical Roman training, studying the authors that anyone learning the art of public speech would have been reading and emulating. Born in Thagaste, he was sent to school at Madaura at the age of eleven, where he learned Latin literature and, in particular, Virgil’s Aeneid (conf. 1.14.23), which was a key text in the curriculum of the time. Because he was of the upper classes (i.e., the honestiores), his first language would have been Latin. He declares an aversion to the Greek language and its literature, which rather than taken literally might be read as a subsequent rejection of the immorality represented in Hellenic literary culture, beginning with Homer’s account of the gods (1.13.20; cf. also 14.33 and 16.25), although it is the case that his work was markedly influenced by Plato’s thought.

In antiquity, learning literature involved the student in an enactment of the narrative and the emotions depicted in a text. The pupil literally became what he read in this pedagogy. So, by his own account, he would have been caught up in the depiction of erotics in the text, which, in turn, led him to sexual exploration at the age of sixteen (2.2.20). Enacting Aeneas’ own story in the Aeneid, Carthage (cartago) was for the young Augustine the “cauldron (sartago) of illicit loves,” and he entered into a relationship with a woman there. One notes that in this world language is instantiated – as denoted by the similarity of cartago and sartago – for good or bad.

Being taught enabled one, in turn, to teach. And so he began his teaching career back at Thagaste in 373–4, where he taught grammar (4.4.7). The following year found him in Carthage, running a school of rhetoric and dealing with unruly students. After eight years, he moved to Rome, where he had to deal with students who defaulted on their payments. Looking back on this career in the Confessions, he presents himself as someone whose life consisted “of being seduced and seducing, being deceived and deceiving,” by language and by women and so, as someone enacting his desire, “to love and to be loved” (2.2.3, 4.1.1). The life of rhetoric was a life of seduction and deception, opposed to the life of the Word of God, which constituted his world after his baptism in 387. It was in 384 that Symmachus, who was prefect of the city, chose Augustine to be the imperial professor of rhetoric at Milan and, therefore, the prominent representative of verbal culture in late antique North Africa, who was likely to move into a political position.

Yet, for Augustine as a Christian, the figure of the teacher was radically reimagined. All teaching occurs through words or other signs (mag. 1.1–10.31), but God makes these signs understood (doc. Chr. 2.24.37). As a Christian, he would espouse Christ as the Inner Teacher, who instructs the soul, according to Miles Burnyeat.Footnote ² Because no human teacher can teach another, or more precisely, because no human teacher can teach another one to understand something, it takes the Inner Teacher to facilitate understanding. This line of thought follows De magistro, a dialogue written in 389 before his ordination to the priesthood, which dramatizes a conversation between Augustine and his son Adeodatus. Furthermore, signs and words are the vehicles of teaching, but not all teaching occurs through them because God is the ultimate teacher (cf. mag. 10.31).Footnote ³

Originally, all of rhetorical culture was in conflict with Christian culture. Augustine spent time at Carthage learning the handbooks of rhetoric, which would have its uses even for him as a converted Christian. In conf. 4.2.2, he states that he left his “chair of lies (cathedra mendacii)” when he resigned his chair of rhetoric (9.2.4–5). Rhetoric is fundamentally amoral and therefore, in Augustine’s implicit binary logic, immoral. The time that Augustine spent in Manicheism after his discovery of Cicero’s Hortensius, which led him to be interested in philosophy while at Carthage (3.4.7), was also fundamentally involved in rhetoric in that the sect was a religion of the book, as Brian Stock observes.Footnote ⁴ Yet despite the absence of concern for morality where rhetoric was concerned, Augustine understands the capacity of rhetoric and grammar to be used as tools for Christianity. Henri Marrou declared that the church could not disregard what was being taught in the “pagan” schools,Footnote ⁵ and rhetoric was one of the arts included later in Augustine’s canon of liberal arts.Footnote ⁶ Joseph Mazzeo notes that Cicero’s view that rhetoric should teach (docere), delight (delectare), and persuade (flectere) is expressed in doc. Chr. 2.16.23–5 and 2.29.45.Footnote ⁷

In any case, Cicero and Quintilian provided some means for Augustine to accommodate them because these authors at least believed that rhetoric should be practiced by the virtuous person, but now as understood by Augustine in Christian terms, and Cicero’s mark on Augustine was also a philosophical one given the effect of the Hortensius on him. Certainly, Dave Tell argues that the practice of rhetoric is justified for Augustine if it is used for good ends.Footnote ⁸ According to doc. Chr. 2.37.55, rhetoric is to be employed foremost not for ascertaining meaning but for setting meaning forth once it has been determined. Sarah Byers observes that Augustine notes with pleasure when Scripture follows the rules of style set by these classical writers on rhetoric at, for instance, en. Ps. 71.2 and 67.16, in commenting on repetition in the Psalms, treating a topic that Cicero (cf. Orat. 3.53.203 and 3.54.206) and Quintilian (Inst. 9.3.66–74) did in their works on rhetoric.Footnote ⁹ In this Augustine demonstrates a need for Scripture to conform to non-Christian protocols of rhetoric because the goal of Christian writing, both scriptural and his own, was to persuade (e.g., doc. Chr. 4.2.3).

But Apuleius, a North African rhetorician of the second century CE (ca. 125–80), was of marked importance when thinking about the Christian author. Like the former, he was born in Numidia and studied at Carthage, where he was celebrated with a statue. Augustine himself declares that Apuleius is especially known to him as an African because he was also an African. “Apuleius, after all, in order to speak of one in particular who was an African is better known to us Africans” (ep. 138.19).Footnote ¹⁰ Harald Hagendahl and Peter Sanlon note that the two authors shared a common rhetorical style.Footnote ¹¹ Yet Apuleius is not so much a rhetorical guide, as Cicero and Quintilian were, as an important rhetorical counterpoint for Augustine, representing interests that were opposed to Christianity. In his civ. Dei 4.2, Augustine cites Apuleius’ De Mundo to provide support for the view that the earthly life is subject to change and devastation. And because Apuleius represented himself as a magician and a sophist, Augustine had to distance himself from him. Augustine refers to the magician’s De deo Socratis in discussing the demonology he dismisses (cf. civ. Dei 8.22). In civ. Dei 18.18, he cites the transformation of Apuleius into an ass and comments that he does not know whether such metamorphoses are fact or fiction. Augustine refers constantly to his predecessor, who represented a lifestyle opposed to the Christian one he was following in order to refute the latter’s views.Footnote ¹²

In the classical curriculum, grammar was the twofold subject concerned with the correct parts of speech and with literature that preceded rhetoric. Henri Marrou declares that the student encountered the primary school teacher (grammatistēs), who taught basic literacy, before the grammarian (grammatikos), the teacher of literature, who was followed by the rhetor, the sophistēs or rhetor. Of the seven liberal arts, grammar, along with dialectic and rhetoric, deals with language, whereas the other group deals with numbers. But the division of the liberal arts was not so distinct because they had affinities with others across the divide. Grammar was also concerned with sound, its material, and therefore, it had affinities with music, one of the arts concerned with numbers (cf. Augustine, ord. 2.9). In retr. 1.6, Augustine mentions that he had written an early work on grammar now lost to us, perhaps an Ars (pro fratrum mediocratate) breviata, which would have been indebted to prior and contemporary grammarians such as Donatus and Charisius.Footnote ¹³

Yet, of conventional grammar and its teaching, Augustine was critical. The arts of grammar are concerned with falsehoods (cf. conf. 1.13.22), whereas children remained ignorant of salvation while learning the rules governing letters and syllables (conf. 1.18.29).Footnote ¹⁴ In Sol. 2.11.19, Augustine establishes that the fabulous and apparently false things he has been dealing with pertain to grammar. Despite this, grammar itself is ethically neutral and acts as a custodian over language: the grammarian was the custos vocis articulatae, the “guardian of articulate speech” (Sol. 2.11.19).Footnote ¹⁵ Grammar was of importance to Augustine, and he was regarded as a grammatical authority. He offered his friend Nebridius advice on verbal forms of which the latter was uncertain (ep. 3.5).Footnote ¹⁶

According to retr. 1.6, Augustine finished writing one book on grammar, later lost from his bookcase, and then began working on five other disciplines, dialectic, rhetoric, music, geometry, arithmetic, and philosophy, which are the canon of the seven “liberal arts.”Footnote ¹⁷ He had an interest in encyclopedic work, which was influenced by Neoplatonism and authors such as Marius Victorinus and Martianus Capella.Footnote ¹⁸ In ord. 2.16.45, Augustine speaks of the “nearly divine power” of grammar and proposes that it has both a soul, which his mother Monica allies herself with, and a body, which the rhetoricians grasp at. In De doctrina Christiana, he states that grammatical skills set the sharp-eyed reader apart from the lazy reader who did not pay close attention to the text and was therefore deceived by it (2.31.48). Not reading carefully, that is, without knowledge of grammar, can lead to incorrect belief (3.33.46).Footnote ¹⁹ Stock observes that also in De dialectica, Augustine dealt with grammar as well as dialectic and rhetoric so that it could help with problems of interpretation.Footnote ²⁰ In cat. rud. 9.11–16, a work dealing with how one should begin religious education, Augustine proposed that those who came from “the most well-visited schools of grammarians and orators [quidam de scholis usitatissimis grammaticorum oratorumque venientes]” could move to a better understanding of biblical texts. Grammar was thus seen as a propaedeutic for scriptural study.Footnote ²¹ This field of study is removed from the purely linguistic arena to one that is predominantly hermeneutical, and Augustine’s view that grammar assisted the understanding of God anticipated Wittgenstein’s view that theology is grammar.

The “treatment of Scripture (tractatio scripturarum)” in the first three books of De doctrina Christiana reveals why grammar was so important for correct understanding of Scripture. Catherine Chin observes that the “treatment of Scripture” here has much in common with the late antique grammatical analysis of texts known as tractatio.Footnote ²² The schools of grammar taught the resolution of verbal ambiguity, proper word division and word usages, and Augustine espoused this in his use of grammar in scriptural study. Book Two of De doctrina Christiana treats grammatical issues, whereas Book One deals with distinguishing between “things” and “signs” (1.2.2). Chin notes that Augustine compares the work of the Roman litterator or grammaticus to his own task of scriptural exegesis in De doctrina Christiana.Footnote ²³ The use of grammar enables the transfer and dislocation of knowledge from the secular to the religious, from Egypt to Israel.Footnote ²⁴

For Augustine, the grammarian was the authority on discourse and on meaning. Dodaro discerns that Augustine used this role of the grammarian as the watchman over articulate language in order to advocate what he regarded as orthodox doctrine.Footnote ²⁵ So the theologian rebuffs the Manichean Faustus on various inconsistencies within the Old and New Testaments, which he regards as a theologically unified text. He also takes issue, for instance, with verbal license (licentia verborum), so Plotinus is faulted for using language that threatens religious orthodoxy. But the authors of the Bible are permitted verbal license where it supports a reading of virtue in the text: accordingly, Augustine defends Gen 29–30 and the patriarchs where Faustus sees the text, which, for example, presents Jacob as having four wives, as spurious (cf. c. Faust. 22). Grammar becomes theology because it is about meaning and interpretation, and one becomes a good reader of Scripture by being an adept manipulator of grammatical rules.

In Augustine’s life education, rhetoric and grammar remained constant pursuits. Grammar was an important tool to aid understanding for his “pupils” in school and in church. While the preconversion Augustine saw teaching as occurring through language alone, the postconversion Augustine understood the role of God as acting in someone coming to an understanding of what language conveys. Likewise, the preconversion Augustine understood rhetoric as a tool for deception, whereas the Christian author viewed rhetoric as taught by pagan authors as a discourse that needed to convey morality. Grammar helped the Christian Augustine with understanding and explanation of scriptural texts no less than with pagan literature.

What we have, then, is not only the conversion of the author but also the conversion of education, rhetoric, and grammar to Christian goals. To use one of Augustine’s own images from De doctrina Christiana Book Two, he spoiled the Egyptians, as did the Israelites in taking vessels, gold, silver ornaments, and clothes for their own use while leaving behind the idols and heavy burdens that they otherwise hated (2.40.60). These tools should be taken away from the “Egyptians” for the sake of preaching the gospel and therefore for a Christian use.

“What are those things in your pack?” demanded the Roman proconsul of Africa, Vigellius Saturninus, to a group of Christians arrested in July of 180 CE. “Books, and letters of Paul, a just man,” a certain Speratus responded. This interrogation scene in the Acts of the Scillitan Martyrs provides the first evidence of a Latin Bible, for Greek had been the first language of Christians in the western empire and lingered in the Roman church well into the third century. While it is unclear that the bilingual Tertullian possessed all the Scriptures in Latin, the writings of Cyprian, bishop of Carthage (248/9–258), evidence the existence of a Latin Bible.Footnote ¹ Yet we must not be deceived by the singular form of the term with which we denominate the pre-Vulgate Latin translations of the Bible: Vetus Latina, or “Old Latin.” Jerome in his Novum opus Preface to the Vulgate gospels said of the Vetus Latina that “there are almost as many originals [exemplaria] as there are copies.” Only in 405 did Jerome complete the Vulgate he had begun by revising the Vetus Latina gospels for Damasus in 384.Footnote ² A Vulgate edition of the epistles was similarly made around 400, probably by Jerome’s friend Rufinus of Syria.

Augustine’s life coincided with the “Golden Age of Latin Christian literature,”Footnote ³ but when he was born (354), there was just the beginning of a Latin tradition of biblical commentary. Only one Latin author, Victorinus, the martyr-bishop of Petau (283–304), had left a significant legacy of exegetical works. How different the situation at the end of Augustine’s days! Within his lifespan, Latin biblical exegesis burgeoned, with eleven other authors producing works on biblical books. A survey of these commentators and their exegetical works illuminates the context of Augustine’s own labors in the field of biblical exegesis.

We divide the Latin commentators of the early church into two categories: those who wrote before Augustine’s decisive conversion in summer 386 (Victorinus of Petau, Hilary of Poitiers, Gregory of Elvira, Marius Victorinus, Ambrosiaster) and those whose works were (mostly) composed thereafter. This latter group encompasses the well-known figures of Augustine’s world: Ambrose, Jerome, Tyconius, Rufinus, Pelagius, and Julian of Aeclanum. Also in this group is the pithy commentator on the fourteen-letter Pauline canon known as the Budapest Anonymous from the location of the manuscript preserving the work. Tyconius’ commentary on Revelation, composed before his famous Liber regularum (written ca. 392), is unfortunately lost but has been partially reconstructed from quotations in later commentaries.Footnote ⁴

Of all these authors, only two rival Augustine in volume of exegetical works: Victorinus of Petau and Jerome of Stridon. Jerome’s work in its quantity and quality is without parallel or peer, owing to his knowledge of Hebrew and Aramaic, his personal contacts with Greek exegetes, and his access to Eusebius’ library in Caesarea that housed Origen’s Hexapla. Into Jerome flowed the interpretative methods of both secular – historical, literary, and philological – studies and theological interpretive traditions of literal and figurative reading.Footnote ⁵ Ambrose and Rufinus of Aquileia also read Greek, which defined (in different ways) their impressive exegetical corpora. Rufinus is distinct in that his commentaries are all translations of Origen’s works, most important, his mighty tome on Romans, the only complete commentary we have from the great Alexandrian.Footnote ⁶

The direct impact of Greek exegetes made itself felt in Ambrose’s exegetical œuvre, which is also exceptional among Latins as a very substantial corpus consisting almost entirely of homilies or texts composed from homilies. In their level of coverage of the biblical texts, these can be divided into those that are topical homilies – such as his great treatments of the patriarchs and other figures from the Hebrew Bible – and those that resemble commentaries in being systematic treatments of a full unit of a biblical text. His On the Six Days goes verse by verse through Gen 1, and On Paradise continues the close treatment of the text. The method of continuous commentary is also the rule in Ambrose’s lengthy expositions of select psalms (Exposition of Psalm 118 and Interpretation of Twelve Psalms of David).Footnote ⁷ This mode of treatment contrasts with that of On Isaac and the Soul, which is rather an exegetical essay and treats Sg. 1–8 more completely than the relevant passages in Genesis. His only full treatment of a New Testament work is his commentary on Luke in ten books. Ambrose’s unacknowledged use of Origen’s homilies on Luke stimulated Jerome to translate this latter work to embarrass the bishop of Milan, whom he despised.Footnote ⁸

There is little wonder that Origen was the main source for the first Latin commentator, Victorinus of Petau.Footnote ⁹ Victorinus was bishop of Poetovio,Footnote ¹⁰ and his Greek was better than his Latin, as Jerome tells us, such that “his works, grand in their meanings, appear rather paltry through the arrangement of his language” (vir. ill. 74). Jerome also says there that Victorinus composed works on Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Isaiah, Ezekiel, Habakkuk, Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs, Matthew, and Revelation, drawing heavily on the commentaries of Hippolytus and Origen (ep. 36, 16; in Eccl. 4, 13–16). Only the commentary on Revelation survives, largely because Jerome reissued it, correcting its style, moderating the chiliasm, and adding material from Tyconius’ commentary on Revelation.Footnote ¹¹ The disappearance of Victorinus’ other works cannot obscure the fact that they influenced many fourth- and fifth-century authors of Italy, Africa, Gaul, and Spain.

Victorinus’ exegesis incorporated historical and literal analysis along with allegorical readings of the sacred text. His Commentary on Revelation opens without preface – an element developed by literary scholars and used by most biblical commentators – but later fills in historical details, e.g., that “John was on the isle of Patmos, condemned by Caesar Domitian to the mines” (in Apoc. 10.3). He does not quote the whole biblical text but skips through it, giving brief explanations of words, phrases, and occasionally longer units. He decodes the apocalyptic symbolism of Revelation, quotes other scriptures – Matthew and Isaiah are favorites – to clarify points, and draws attention to significant matters of belief and practice. His interpretation of the opening vision of the “seven stars” (Rev 1:20) is important for the principle of generalizing the message of Paul’s letters. The seven letters in Rev 2:1–3:22 address seven congregations, but “not because they are the only churches or the leading churches … Paul has taught that seven churches mean all churches, and that the seven churches mean the one catholic church.” The apostle Paul addressed only individuals in his other letters in order to establish this symbolism of the number seven (in Apoc. 1.7).

The first of a series of fourth-century commentators, Hilary of Poitiers, profited from Victorinus of Petau’s work. Hilary’s exegetical compositions arose in the context of the trinitarian controversy. His Commentary on Matthew was composed before his exile (356–61) to the east, and his later works were written during or after his exile, when he became proficient in Greek and got acquainted with Origen’s works. These later compositions include a commentary on Psalms and a translation of Origen’s homilies on Job (Jerome, vir. ill. 100). Hilary’s Commentary on Matthew employs the traditional idea of two levels of meaning: “The word of God is rich … and very necessary to any progress, whether it is understood simply or looked at more deeply” (comm. in Matth. 12, 12). Jesus’ deeds too must be read so as to reveal the “inward meaning” and the “spiritual understanding.” His approach to the Psalms is Christocentric: “The things said in the Psalms ought to be interpreted in accord with the gospel message, so that no matter by what mouth the Spirit of prophecy has spoken, the whole thing would pertain to the knowledge, glory, and power of the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ” (in Ps., Prol. 5). Although Hilary grants that the superscriptions to individuals psalms have a historical meaning relating to the events and their times, “through the corporeal meaning of the superscriptions the spiritual purport of the psalm makes itself understood” (ibid., 22). This work’s lengthy Prologue, filled with information about various numerological symbolisms in the Psalms, bespeaks Hilary’s use of Origen’s work.

Another Latin veteran of the Nicene cause who composed biblical commentaries was Gregory of Elvira, “the most important and best-known Spanish author prior to Isidor of Seville.”Footnote ¹² Gregory’s commentary on the Song of Songs, the first in Latin and difficult to date, shows the influence of Origen, probably through the translations of Rufinus and Jerome. Gregory’s commentary extends only to Sg. 3:4 and is entitled Epithalamium (“wedding song” in Greek; cf. Origen, in Cant. 1.1). His approach is that of Origen – the impossibility of a literal interpretation (defectus litterae) indicates the need for a “spiritual understanding” – yet this work is not slavishly dependent on the previous treatments by Hippolytus and Origen.Footnote ¹³

Marius Victorinus, a professor of rhetoric in Rome, also made a splash in the trinitarian controversy shortly after his conversion in 355 or 356, with dense philosophical treatises and hymns. In 363, he turned his hand to compose works on the Pauline epistles (Jerome, vir. ill. 101), the first in Latin. Extant are commentaries on Galatians, Ephesians, and Philippians, but internal references indicate he also commented on Romans and the Corinthian correspondence. Marius characterizes his work as commentatio simplex (in Eph. Prol. Book II) or expositio simplex verborum (in Eph. 1:11; in Gal. 4:18).Footnote ¹⁴ He maintains a progressive exposition of the text, consisting largely of paraphrase and summary, and provides brief clarifications of syntax or vocabulary when necessary, occasionally with consultation of the Greek. This method of expository paraphrase was at home in the schools of grammar and rhetoric, both Latin and Greek. His Prefaces are a model of brevity in presenting the summa – “sum and substance” – of Paul’s message in each epistle. Yet Marius’ literal-historical approach did not inhibit him from including philosophical digressions (in Eph. 1:4–8; in Phil. 2:6–11, in Gal. 4:6) to expound on the deep matters of God and the soul intimated by the apostle. Fully competent in Greek, Victorinus apparently wrote his commentaries without consultation of Greek exegetes. For this Jerome lambasted him in the Preface of his own commentary on Galatians as “completely ignorant of Scripture.”Footnote ¹⁵ Part of Jerome’s harsh judgment comes from his conviction that comparison of exegetical opinions is the essence of a learned commentary.

Within less than a half century after Victorinus’ treatment of the Pauline corpus, six other Latins produced exegetical works on this most popular part of the Bible for commentary: Ambrosiaster (thirteen epistles), Jerome (Galatians Ephesians, Titus, Philemon), Augustine (Galatians and Romans), the Budapest Anonymous (fourteen epistles), Rufinus (Romans), and Pelagius (thirteen epistles). Excepting the translations and adaptations of Origen by Jerome and Rufinus, “a thread of continuity amid the variations from one commentator to the next in this Roman tradition is the style of commentary,” as Theodore de Bruyn has well observed.Footnote ¹⁶ Despite differences of form and quantity of comment, these commentaries all share Victorinus’ aim of reproducing a clear account of the apostle’s teachings and the situation of the believers addressed in his epistles.Footnote ¹⁷ These commentators use the basic approach of the grammarian – the clarification of verba and res, or language and subject matter – to render an expository paraphrase of a lemmatized text and apply to the Pauline Corpus the grammarian’s principle of interpreting “Homer from Homer.”Footnote ¹⁸ Compared with the commentators influenced by Alexandrian exegesis, they adduce fewer outside Scriptures.

This is very evident in the case of the Roman presbyter we call Ambrosiaster, whose works were issued anonymously and circulated widely because of their ascription to Ambrose.Footnote ¹⁹ This publicity-eschewing commentator was familiar with Victorinus’ work and had by 384 composed the first complete Latin commentary on the Pauline canon.Footnote ²⁰ His basic method consists of explanatory paraphrase, where he occasionally draws on other Pauline letters or Acts of the Apostles to establish the historical context. In a rare methodological remark, Ambrosiaster acknowledges the role of both history (historia) and text (litterae) in making exegetical decisions (in this case, to accept the reading of Gal 2:5 without the negative particle). On Rm. 5:14, he invokes Tertullian, Cyprian, and Victorinus of Petau as witnesses to the antiquity of Vetus Latina readings against those who would revise them in light of recent Greek copies (Jerome). Ambrosiaster’s Questions on the Old and New Testaments, transmitted under Augustine’s name, is not altogether a work of exegesis. Many of its “questions” are polemical and doctrinal treatises, and most of the exegetical ones are directed to a single passage or verse. A few questions, such as Q. 111 (Ps. 23) and Q. 112 (Ps. 50), are mini-commentaries, much like the homilies of Ambrose or Jerome on the Psalms that quote and comment on a given psalm text completely.

The last two original Latin commentators on Paul, Pelagius, and the Budapest Anonymous, produced commentaries of great concision. Pelagius’ work, composed between 405 and 410, is the most compact of the continuous commentaries. Taking the Vulgate as his basis, he treats the entire text of the epistles with brisk explanatory remarks. Pelagius used the works of Ambrosiaster, Rufinus’ Origen on Romans, and the even more compact commentary of the Budapest Anonymous.Footnote ²¹ This recently discovered work, the first to include Hebrews, was composed between 396 and 405 by a Latin competent in Greek, a reader of Origen, and a follower of Antiochene exegesis. The commentary’s form is a radical innovation.Footnote ²² The biblical text is not quoted in short units, but the comments are sprinkled in like scholia, generally after sizable chunks of the commented work. Philippians, for example, contains nine such insertions of comment. The author shows his keen historical sense in his remark on the apostle’s greeting to the Philippians “with their bishops and deacons”: “Note that he calls priests [presbiteros] ‘bishops.’” The comments occasionally extend beyond one or two sentences, rarely more than three or four, such as when needed to clarify the meaning of “born of a woman” in Gal 4:4, a passage ripe with possible misunderstandings.

Another set of exegetical works written with a decided bent toward literal interpretation are the commentaries of Julian of Aeclanum on Job, the minor prophets (extant on Hosea, Joel, and Amos), and the Song of Songs (fragments in Bede).Footnote ²³ These were likely composed in the 420s in Sicily in the period after Julian found temporary refuge with Theodore of Mopsuestia. He also translated Theodore’s Commentary on Psalms 1–40. Julian used the Vulgate and pursued the Antiochene version of literal commentary. His treatment of the minor prophets is less compact than Ambrosiaster, resembling in its comprehensiveness Theodore’s commentaries on the minor Pauline letters, which were translated into Latin between the fifth and seventh centuries.Footnote ²⁴ G. de Plinval has enumerated Julian’s exegetical principles in three points: to recover the intentio auctoris, to explain difficult passages in light of clear ones, and to reinforce the “real meaning of the text independent of all subjective or symbolic interpretation.”Footnote ²⁵ Although Plinval maintains that Julian’s exegetical works show “no trace of his doctrinal polemic,” Julian’s commentary on Job (3.4) seems to contain a reference to the Pelagian controversy: “The life of holy Job is praised so that the good of human nature might be acknowledged.”

It is a sign of the ground covered in this period that the Latin tradition began with the Alexandrian-influenced Victorinus of Petau and Hilary, moved to the development of a native Latin literalism by Victorinus and Ambrosiaster, then to a blend of allegorical and historical approaches in Jerome, and finally to reach Julian of Aeclanum and the full importation of the Antiochene approach into the Latin exegetical tradition. Even if Augustine in the end turned out to be “an heir of the Alexandrian tradition,” as Richard Norris has maintained,Footnote ²⁶ it is surely no accident that his exegetical writings display a broad knowledge of the variety of forms of scriptural commentary.

Three areas spring immediately to mind when considering the context of Augustine’s intellectual endeavor with a focus on polemical and theological writings in early Latin Christian literature: (1) Tertullian, Cyprian, Novatian, and the third/early-fourth-century apologists, (2) the aftermath of the “Arian” controversy that saw the rise of writers such as Hilary of Poitiers and Ambrose of Milan, and (3) Augustine’s own time with its various controversies against Manicheans, Donatists, Pelagians, and writings related to the ongoing discussions about the nature of God and Christ in the aftermath of the Council of Constantinople (381) and in the run-up to the Councils of Ephesus (431) and Chalcedon (451).

Several distinct streams of tradition nurtured the moral and spiritual writings of Latin Christianity in Augustine’s day. First, there was the native Christian literature of North Africa, represented most clearly by Tertullian and Cyprian, but also present in a variety of pseudonymous texts, often attributed to Cyprian, such as The Single Life of the Clergy and The Hundredfold, Sixtyfold, and Thirtyfold Reward (the former attacked unmarried clerics who lived in “spiritual marriage” with unmarried women; the latter presented a hierarchy of merits from martyrs to virgins to sexually continent married persons).Footnote ¹ The North African literature included numerous acta of the Christian martyrs, much of it preserved in fourth-century Donatist circles.Footnote ² Similar rigorist ideals appeared in the writings of the third-century Roman presbyter Novatian, who established an ecclesial tradition that persisted for centuries.

But the context of Augustine’s thought was also shaped by the moral and spiritual writings of Greco-Roman philosophy. Augustine himself attested to the influence exerted on him by Cicero’s Hortensius, an exhortation to pursue the philosophical life, and later by the “books of the Platonists.”Footnote ³ In the early 380s at Milan, Augustine also encountered Christian Platonism in the sermons and ascetical treatises of bishop Ambrose. The later years of the fourth century and early years of the fifth also saw a proliferation of the literature of asceticism and monasticism, for example, the letters and treatises of Jerome, Pelagius, and their supporters, as well as in Latin translations of monastic lives and rules, many reflecting eastern Christian traditions. Some of these traditions differed from the views taken by Augustine himself, but all of them deserve further attention here.

Although usually overshadowed by more famous theological works, the collections of letters and sermons from late antiquity have attracted more attention in recent years due to growing interest among scholars in the social and cultural context of the church fathers. In addition to providing insight into the life and thought of important theologians, the letters and sermons of Augustine and his contemporaries are particularly valuable for how they reflect the day-to-day life of a bishop: the guidance and discipline of the laity and clergy, as well as the administrative work of maintaining correspondence with a broad network of contacts. Augustine’s intellectual legacy might surpass that of most other thinkers of his time, but his correspondence and preaching allow us to understand him as a bishop operating within the larger framework of the religious and cultural transformations taking place during the fourth and fifth centuries.

Late antique letters vastly outnumber their classical predecessors, with collections surviving from both “pagan” and Christian authors, including correspondence among bishops, monks, emperors, orators, and political officials.Footnote ¹ Augustine’s epistolary corpus includes just over 300 letters, the majority coming from his time as bishop of Hippo. His correspondence includes letters exchanged with other well-known figures of his time, such as Jerome and Paulinus of Nola. This period was also the “golden age” of Christian preaching throughout the Roman Empire, as Christian leaders aimed to attract more adherents and promote their understandings of orthodoxy against their rivals.Footnote ² Augustine’s is the largest collection of sermons in Latin, numbering over 500 and spanning his ecclesiastical career from his ordination as presbyter in 391 to his death in 430. In addition to his works, numerous sermon collections from across the Roman Empire have been preserved, from the Coptic sermons of Shenute of Atripe in Upper Egypt to the Eusebius Gallicanus collection composed in fifth- and sixth-century Gaul.Footnote ³

Letters and sermons were originally produced in much greater quantities than the texts we have today. For instance, given that he preached every Sunday and on festivals, Augustine alone must have preached several thousand sermons; we have no idea how many letters he wrote but did not copy and archive.Footnote ⁴ The same goes for all the authors whose works survive, plus the countless bishops who preached regularly to their congregations and maintained correspondences, but, because they were less impressive rhetoricians, their words were not preserved. Fifth-century church historian Socrates Scholasticus provides an anecdote that reminds us of the lost unremarkable sermons from the “golden age” of preaching: the bishop Atticus of Constantinople started off memorizing sermons he had written beforehand, later graduating to extemporaneous speaking. Despite this improvement, “His discourses, however, were not such as to be received with much applause by his auditors, or to deserve to be committed to writing” (H.E. 7.2). This must have been especially conspicuous given that one of the bishop’s recent predecessors had been John Chrysostom, who had earned his nickname “Goldenmouth” for his eloquence.

Neither letters nor sermons can always be pinned down as belonging to distinct genres. For instance, lengthy letters might be indistinguishable from treatises.Footnote ⁵ If recited, a letter could function as an oration or sermon.Footnote ⁶ In general, though, letters differ from other types of texts insofar as they are written messages conveyed from sender to recipient(s).Footnote ⁷ Sermons as a genre can also be ambiguous. Although related to classical oratory, the liturgical context and the focus on Christian doctrine distinguish sermons from other types of public speaking. Sermons evolved from earlier, smaller-scale discussions within Christian communities, influenced by both Jewish teaching and classical rhetoric, later reaching larger audiences in the churches built following the “conversion” of Constantine.Footnote ⁸ Some sermons could be categorized as scriptural commentary, hagiography, or theological treatises, whereas Syriac sermons are similar to hymns.Footnote ⁹ Augustine’s Expositions of the Psalms provides another example that is difficult to categorize: part of the collection was written in the style of homilies but not delivered as such, whereas the other part consists of actual homilies.Footnote ¹⁰ Ultimately, the categorization of a letter or a sermon has more to do with its original purpose than with the style or length of the text.

Augustine lived in one of the most homogeneous periods of the history of philosophy. In his time, the philosophical schools, which had animated the Hellenistic age with their vivid and bitter debates, were virtually reduced to a single one, the Platonic. Platonism had gradually incorporated conceptual elements and doctrinal instances of the rival schools, especially of the Peripatetic and the Stoic. At the same time, from Plotinus (205–70) onward, Platonism had taken on a new form, currently called “Neoplatonism,” the main exponents of which were, immediately after Plotinus, Porphyry (ca. 234–305) and Iamblichus (ca. 245–325).