Essay: Augustine – City of God

This book is essentially a historical survey of the Roman Empire, from its beginnings in the womb of Troy, to its founding by the brothers Romulus and Remus, through the ascendancy of Augustus to the imperial throne and the birth of Christ. Augustine herein focuses especially on the bloody conflicts and calamities endured by Rome, from enemies and from nature herself, whilst Rome was supposedly under the protection of their multitude of gods. He does all of this to answer the polemic made against Christians that the present state of the empire, referring especially to the sack of Rome by the Gothic tribes, is a result of the adoption of Christianity as the predominant religion of the empire and the suppression of traditional Roman religion. If it can be demonstrated that Rome still suffered calamities such as those that have occurred in the Christian era, Augustine’s adversaries must either refrain from blaming such disasters on supernatural forces at all or hold the old gods accountable to the same degree, if not more than, they blame the Christian God.
Augustine first turns his attention to the founding of Rome by the survivors of the Trojan war. Reasoning that, if one ought not to blame the gods for the fall of Troy, the gods must have had a reason to let that city succumb to the Greek armies. Having ruled out any sort of moral fault on the part of the Trojans, due to the inconsistency of the gods’ own behavior and their treatment towards immoral humans, he concludes that the gods themselves were incapable of preserving their worshippers from destruction. From here he moves on to describe the situation in the earliest days of the city of Rome while it was still under the leadership of Romulus. In those days, Rome was engaged in perpetual strife with its neighboring cities as it sought to expand. Young men raided their neighbors to take for themselves wives, killing their fathers-in-law and prohibiting their women to mourn for them. He tells of their war with the city of Alba, which city Augustine says is more properly their mother than was Troy, and the subsequent bloodshed inflicted by both sides. Through all of this, the gods did not voice their disapproval, nor did they leave Rome, but allowed such iniquity to continue with impunity. This Augustine takes as proof that the gods care nothing for the characters of their worshippers, nor do the Romans themselves care that their gods failed to protect them from the deterioration of their morality, which deterioration is a worse calamity than anything that might befall one’s body or city.
The disasters endured by Rome in its infancy, however, pale when compared to those witnessed during the age of the republic. Augustine here relates the constant strife in which Rome found herself, beset by insurrections and civil conflicts until the outbreak of the second Punic war united Rome against a common enemy. It is here, in chapter xvii, that the full force of Augustine’s rhetoric is unleashed upon his opponents, forming a veritable salvo as he recounts in rapid succession the calamities suffered by the Romans leading up to the war with Carthage. He does not dwell long on the second Punic war, for to do so would require more space than he is willing to devote. He highlights, however, the total destruction of the Saguntines, who had allied themselves with Rome against Carthage, and yet were abandoned by the gods when Hannibal sought to besiege their city. Though Rome eventually prevailed over Carthage, Augustine points out that even Roman chroniclers liken its victory to defeat, such was the loss of life and land incurred during the war.
The most brutal period of Rome’s history, however, in Augustine’s estimation, is the period of civil wars following the victory over Carthage. He relates the inability of the Roman people to act in concord with one another, despite having erected a temple to the goddess to preserve unity. In particular, he singles out the bloodshed of the civil wars of Marius and Sulla, after which the victorious Sulla and his followers massacred those who had supported his rival, to the extent that the body count after the conflict resembled that of those who perished on the battlefield. Finally, Augustine contrasts this conflict with the earlier invasion of Rome by the Gauls and also with the Gothic sack of Rome, the latter of which seems minor when compared to the destruction wrought under the protection of the gods. Augustine, therefore, displays the true folly of the pagan position: they wish to return to the protection of the gods, during whose era Rome experienced these monumental catastrophes, blaming the comparatively mild Gothic invasion on the prevalence of Christianity.
Throughout his argument, Augustine makes it a point to remind his audience that he is using the Romans’ own historians, poets, and philosophers in his account of their scandalous history. This is presumably to increase the strength of his argument, for if even the Romans’ own historians are willing to acknowledge the atrocities committed and endured whilst Rome esteemed the gods, Augustine cannot be said to be manipulating history to suit his own purposes. Indeed, he quotes several portions directly from the histories of Livy and Sallust and cites works such as Virgil’s Aeneid. By doing this, he makes it apparent to whomever may be reading this book that he is well-versed in the literature of the Roman elite in addition to Christian tests, though from the latter he quotes little in this section, adding further credibility to the hypothesis that he wrote this section of the City of God with a pagan audience in mind. Augustine furthermore demonstrates his ability as a rhetorician in the way in which this book simply bombards the reader with evidence against the claims of his opponents, referencing war after war, calamity after calamity, and death after death, all the while asking of the Romans to account for their gods’ whereabouts. In the face of such evidence against them, and the logic of Augustine’s argument, it seems that his adversaries are left without rebuttal.