from Horace's Ars Poetica or the Aeneid, was to be elevated above the common herd and to have access
to positions of considerable emolument.
Pronunciation of Latin varied regionally. When Augustine moved from Carthage to Milan, his African
vowels brought comment from his Italian hearers. Africans made no distinction, as Italians still did,
between long and short vowels. He astringently remarks that whether the third syllable of ignoscere is
long or short is a matter of sublime indifference to a man crying to God for pardon. But only the
educated in North Africa knew anyway, because the pronunciation would have been identical without
regard to the quantity. In Gaul, on the other hand, there came to be a habit of making c before 1 or e to
sound f5. But among the northern barbarians in Britain the older hard k sound was kept for c. In the
tenth century Abbo of Fleury (no mean logician) came to England to live for two years at Ramsey
Abbey, and was pained by what seemed to him sad evidence of the uncivilized ways of the English who,
though hospitable, were so uncultured as to pronounce ce and ci as fee and ki. It would have provoked
incredulous astonishment to inform him that the crude barbarians of the north had preserved a more
original usage than his own. It is likely that both Bede and Alcuin were accustomed to use the hard k,
which was usual in the Irish schools, the isolation of which after the barbarian invasions produced deep
conservatism.
In Augustine's mercantile congregation at Hippo (mainly sailors, dockers, and farm workers-very unlike
Carthage, where he could address people who knew what a Stoic or Epicurean was), popular speech said
'dolus' for 'pain' when a grammarian would have prescribed 'dolor'. Having an identical pronunciation
for both os, mouth and os, bone, the people had replaced the latter by ossum. Although by training and
every acquired reflex Augustine was acutely conscious of grammatical correctitude, he also knew, and
liked to quote Horace to reinforce the point, that what is correct usage is determined by custom, the
consuetudo loquendi which has a way of defying both logicians and grammarians with indifferent
serenity. He reserved special scorn for people more offended by a linguistic vulgarism than by a
fundamental breach of ethical principle. He admired the spontaneous vigour of popular Latin. While the
Latinity of the Confessions is highly elaborate rhyming prose, never more sophisticated in rhetorical
skill than when denouncing the meretricious arts of rhetoric, his sermons are in a direct style using short
sentences and everyday idioms, usually with some apology and occasionally a swipe at scornful secular
grammarians who did not know what was important in human life. In both Jerome and Augustine we
find classical literature regarded as essentially secular. In Jerome's famous nightmare he dreamt of being
arraigned before the Judgement Seat on a charge of being a Ciceronian, not a Christian. His promise of
reform was ineffective. Augustine could also express reserve ('a certain Cicero', he wrote in the
Confessions), but the Virgil who had first inflamed his heart as a schoolboy remained a lifelong love,
together with Plotinus. He thought it very possible that the fourth Eclogue was a prophecy of Christ, the
poet being inspired without being aware of the fact, and hoped the great sages and poets of the classical
world had not only a providential role in the preparation for the gospel, but also a place in God's
kingdom.
Augustine knew how to write moving Latin prose, whether simple or sophisticated. In the later Roman
Empire there was a strong taste for a rococo style with out-of-the-way words and neologisms to
challenge the reader's erudition and flatter his ingenuity in discovering the author's meaning. At its worst