- chose to sit among the senators and spoke of himself as the enforcer of laws by which he felt himself
bound, this was a criticism of his predecessor Constantius II, whose language and actions were at times
absolutist, dangerously fortified by the belief that he was called to represent divine monarchy on earth,
rather than a restatement of an older and more collegial political theory. In practice Julian's reversion to
polytheism imposed on him a necessity to assert his unique position as the embodiment of public law
and as principal exponent of a philosophical theology designed to vindicate pagan cults. Many students
have been struck by the resemblance in political theory and practice between Julian and Justinian, both
Emperors regarding religious dissent as a treason to society and the Empire. Paradoxical though it may
seem, the 'democratic' ideal of populist participation came to our modern world more from Christian
beliefs in the share of all the faithful in the society of the people of God than from Aristotle, the Stoics,
or the Greek experience generally. Likewise surprising is the recognition that the Anglo-Saxon tradition
of the common law owes more to the operations of ecclesiastical canon law than to classical Roman law.
The ancient political ideal was certainly very slow to die. When early in the fifth century Augustine of
Hippo came to describe his ideal society, he did so in anachronistic terms of the classical city-state, with
an autonomy that no city of the Empire had enjoyed for some centuries past-an antiquarianism which
emerges again in his description of Roman religion on the basis of Varro's work, in tactful silence about
the contemporary scene. Augustine's attitude to imperial power was considerably indebted to the sombre
pages of Sallust, and he writes with a hot and cold ambivalence about Rome's domination of the
Mediterranean world: a manifestation of cupidity and lust to dominate on the one hand, yet, on the other,
a beneficent force for centralized order and peace, without which human society would degenerate into
jungle warfare. Augustine was well informed about Roman law, whose maxims and principles he cited
with admiration. Friends to whom he turned for advice when questions of arbitration in civil cases were
referred to him for judgement, included jurisconsults. He was aware that good Emperors can enact laws
with unfortunate and unfair consequences, that bad Emperors may enact legislation that has a wholly
beneficent effect, and that the problems of social justice are anything but simple.
Like his elder contemporary Jerome, Augustine was master of the classical literary tradition. Both men's
writings abound in echoes and allusions to Cicero and Seneca, or the poets Virgil, Horace, Juvenal, and
Tibullus. Terence was especially familiar. Though Augustine came from a small provincial town where
a single schoolmaster taught all subjects to every child, the ancient educational system was not
ineffective for him. He tells of one lifelong friend named Simplicius who 'knew Virgil backwards'; cite a
line and he could tell you the preceding line, and he knew by heart several of Cicero's orations. A
century later Boethius' prose and verse in the Consolation of Philosophy, written without access to a
library in prison at Pavia, abounds in reminiscences of classical texts in which his mind was soaked. At
one time in his youth Augustine taught grammar, and even wrote a textbook on the subject, together -
with other guides to the liberal arts of rhetoric, dialectic, geometry, and music (rhythm and metre, not
pitch, on which he never wrote-Boethius was to take it up later). His writings show a sustained interest
in grammar and diction. He could not but be acutely aware of the gulf between Ciceronian usage and the
colloquial Latin of the Hippo waterfront.
Language