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Updated: June 2, 2025
It is unquestionable that Carthage, with its buildings and statues, its squares, avenues and public gardens, looked like a large capital, and was a perfect example of that ideal of rather brutal magnificence and strength which the Romans obtruded everywhere. And even while it dazzled the young provincial from Thagaste, the African Rome shewed him the virtue of order social and political order.
He has not tablets enough to put down his notes. He asks Romanianus to give him some. His beautiful tablets, the ivory ones, are used up; he has used the last one for a ceremonial letter, and he asks his friend's pardon for writing to him on a wretched bit of vellum. Besides all that, he interests himself in the affairs of his fellow-townsmen. Augustin is a personage at Thagaste.
He had beside him his fellow-countryman, Alypius, the future Bishop of Thagaste, who had followed him to Carthage and would, later on, follow him to Milan; Nebridius, a not less dear companion, fated to die early; Honoratus, whom he drew into his errors and later did his best to enlighten; and, finally, that mysterious young man, whose name he does not tell us, and whose loss he mourned as never any one has mourned the death of a friend.
This is the first rise of the great plain which declines towards Theveste and the group of the Aures Mountains. Coming from the woodland country of Thagaste, the nakedness of it is startling. Here and there, thin cows crop starveling shrubs which have grown on the bank of some oued run dry.
Days and months went by, and Augustin, with nothing to do, joined in with easily-made friends and gave himself up to the pleasures of his time of life, like all the young townsmen of Thagaste pleasures rather rough and little various, such as were to be got in a little free-town of those days, and as they have remained for the natives of to-day, whether they live a town or country life.
And as he was not content with losing himself, but also drew others into peril disputing, speech-making before his friends, abusing his power of language to throw trouble into consciences Monnica finally made up her mind. She forbade her son to eat at her table, or to sleep under her roof. She drove him from the house. This must have been a big scandal in Thagaste.
To the east and west, wide stretches of woodland, rounded hill-summits, streams and torrents which pour through the valleys and glens there you have Thagaste and the country round about the world, in fact, as it revealed itself to the eyes of the child Augustin. This full-foliaged land has its harsh and stern localities. The African light, however, softens all that.
Little streets, quite white, which climb up to clay-formed hills deeply furrowed by the heavy winter rains; between the double row of houses, brilliant in the morning sun, glimpses of sky of a very tender blue; here and there, in the strip of deep shade which lies along the thresholds, white figures crouched upon rush-mats indolent outlines, draped with bright colours, or muffled in rough and sombre wool-stuffs; a horseman who passes, bent almost in two in his saddle, the big hat of the South flung back over his shoulders, and encouraging with his heel the graceful trot of his horse such is Thagaste as we see it to-day, and such undoubtedly it appeared to the traveller in the days of Augustin.
He takes comparisons from it: "You who have been to Carthage " he often says to his listeners. For the boy from little Thagaste to go to Carthage, was about the same as for our youths from the provinces to go to Paris. Veni Carthaginem in these simple words there is a touch of naive emphasis which reveals the bewilderment of the Numidian student just landed in the great city.
In Africa, the Count Romanus persecuted the Donatists. All the Christians in Thagaste were Catholic. What was the good of keeping up a useless and dangerous resistance? Perhaps the end of Patricius which was near was as edifying as Monnica could wish.
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