1 Earliest Rome

13. P E R S P E C T I V E S
Christ and raise high the martyr's name in hymns. The very luminaries of the senate,
once luperci or flamines? kiss the portals of the apostles and martyrs. We see distinguished
families, noble on both sides, offering their most illustrious children as pledges in their
vows. The pontifex who once wore the fillets is admitted to the sign of the cross, and the
Vestal Claudia enters your shrine, Lawrence.
(529) O three, four, and seven times blessed is the inhabitant of the city who pays
homage in person to you and the abode of your bones, who can kneel beside them, who
sprinkles the spot with his tears, who presses his chest to the ground, who quietly pours
out his prayers.
362
1. Cato is here taken as a type figure for a traditional Roman senator.
2. Troy, the home of Aeneas, is taken as the origin of Roman religion.
3. See 13.6 n.l.
4. Son of Aeneas, ancestor of the Romans.
5. On the immoralities of Roman gods see 2.Id and 12.7a(i) and (ii).
6. I.e. the execution of Peter and Paul (see 12.7f(iii)).
7. Lawrence here 'prophesies' the reign of Theodosius, on whom see 3.7, 11.14, Vol. 1,
374-5,387-8.
8. In the temple of Vesta at Rome (see 4.7 n.l 1) was a statue of Athena known as the
Palladium. Here it is used as an epithet for the household gods (see on Lares 2.2a) supposedly
lodged in the temple.
9. See 5.2, 8.1.
13.9 The old and the new cities of god
Reacting in part to the sack of Rome by the Goths in A.D. 410, for which the
Christians were blamed, Augustine, the Christian bishop of Hippo in North
Africa, wrote a massive treatise, The City of God, explaining the difference
between the earthly city and the heavenly city of god. He thus implicitly
rejected two earlier Christian views of Rome: that it was satanic, and (as argued
by Prudentius (13.8) among others) that it was the fulfilment of god's will.
The first half of the work was a critique of traditional Roman religion. As
Augustine explained in a letter, 'in the first five books I write against those who
maintain that the worship of the gods - I would rather say, of the evil spirits -
leads to happiness in this life. The next five books are written against those who
think that suchlike deities are to be worshipped by rites and sacrifices in order
to secure happiness in the life to come.'
In this passage, from Book VI, he discusses the scholar Varro's theories of reli­
gion, attempting to use Varro's words themelves as an argument against tradi­
tional Roman religion. For us, this provides a clear example of how
complicated (indeed impossible) it is entirely to disentangle the separate
strands of traditional thought and Christianity. Augustine's views are inevitably
influenced by the traditional scholarship on which he had been brought up;
while we are in the position of having to reconstruct Varro's reflections on his
own religion from Augustine's Christian polemic.