Saint Augustine: An African in the City of God
Saint Augustine was educated for a Roman world, but it was his time in North Africa that shaped his identity, his faith, and Christianity itself.
Virgil’s epic poem the Aeneid was at the centre of the education system in the Roman Empire. The young boys of the ruling classes – and the occasional fortunate privately tutored girl – learned to read by sounding out lines from the poem; whole swathes of it were learned off by heart. As adolescents, boys would begin the rhetorical studies on which an imperial career was based by entering imaginatively into the lives of characters from the Aeneid; they would compose speeches for the characters to declaim at crucial moments of choice or crisis. Their schoolmasters would award prizes for the speech that was most convincing and most elegantly composed.
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