A source-book of ancient history - The Search For Mecca

570 Roman Life Under the Late Empire
Learning
under
compulsion.
Jb.i. 12, 19.
In my boyhood, for which my mother had less fear than
for my youth, I loved not my lessons, and I loved not to
be made learn them. But I was made learn them, and
that was good
;
yet was I not doing good in learning them;
for I would not have learned them had I not been driver
to it, and no one is doing good whose will is not in what
he does, even though the thing he does is good. Nor were
they who made me learn doing good, but Thou, O God,
Through
the reading
of Cicero.
St. Augustine,
Confessions,
i. 4, 7 f.
The Hortensius
has not
been preserved.
wast doing good to me through them. . . .
XIII.
Converted to Philosophy
I was studying books which taught eloquence, in which
I desired to excel, seeking by means of the satisfaction of
human vanity an end that was itself evil and vain, when
in the usual course of reading I came to a book of one
Cicero, whose eloquence, though not his character, is
almost universally admired. This book of his is called
the Hortensius, and contains an exhortation to the study
of philosophy. That book changed my whole attitude,
changed the prayers which I offered to Thee, and made
all my desires and aspirations different from what they
had been.
All at once every hope that was set on vanity
seemed worthless, and I desired with an incredible intensity
of emotion the immortality with which philosophy
is concerned, and I began to rise up that I might return
unto thee. For it was not to the polishing of my speech
that I used it, which was what I was ostensibly buying
with the funds provided by my mother—for my father
had died two years before and I was now in my nineteenth
year. It was not to the polishing of my speech that I
used it, and what impressed me was not the style but the
subject-matter.
How I burned, O my God, how I burned to flee from