How the Irish Saved Civilization

by Thomas Cahill

  The borders of the empire were contracting. By the end of the third decade of the fifth century, the grain-heavy plain of northern Africa—Rome’s breadbasket—was lost to the Vandals, who had already seized or savaged large swaths of Spain and Gaul. Through most of the century, various armies of Goths, then of Huns, driving westward over the Danube and decimating the eastern provinces, marched up and down the Italian peninsula, raising panic and leaving desolation. As the fifth century opened, the Roman garrison in Britain was already on its way to depletion, so desperately were soldiers needed elsewhere. By 410, the year of Alaric’s Sack, it had been withdrawn completely, exposing Britain more than ever to the depredations of the Germanic Angles and Saxons on its eastern shore and to the even more terrifying slave raids of the Celts of Ireland along its jagged western bays.

  One of the most horrifying features of the period is the wholesale enslavement of freemen and -women. Estate agents for the great landlords often acted as redemptores, redeemers of Roman citizens seized in barbarian raids. The object was usually not the freedom of the Roman prisoner, but his fresh enslavement as a serf on the landlord’s estate. The ransom paid was a cheap price for a lifetime of service from the liberated prisoner. Sometimes the ruse was even simpler: at the time of an invasion, a local farmer would be given shelter for himself and his family on a great estate, only to find that, when the barbarian hordes had passed, neither he nor his would ever be free to leave.

  The barbarians, too, were likely to enslave whomever they could lay their hands on. In the slavery business, no tribe was fiercer or more feared than the Irish. They were excellent sailors—in skin-covered craft that they maneuvered with consummate skill. Just before dawn, a small war party would move its stealthy oval coracles into a little cove, approach an isolated farmhouse with silent strides, grab some sleeping children, and be halfway back to Ireland before anyone knew what had happened.

  The Irish moved in larger war parties, as well. One day in 401 or thereabouts, a great fleet of black coracles swept up the west coast of Britain, probably into the Severn estuary, and, seizing (according to an eyewitness) “many thousands” of young prisoners, returned with them to a slave market in Ireland. We still have the testimony of one of the captives, a boy of sixteen who called himself Patricius. He tells us that his father, Calpurnius, was (God help him) a curialis and that his grandfather Potitus had been a Catholic priest—so he was a middle-class lad, a Romanized Briton looking forward to a classical education and a career. Not surprisingly, he was not interested in following in his father’s footsteps: “I sold my noble rank, I blush not to state it nor am I sorry.” Whatever the plans of this brash young man, they were cut short by the terrible Irish raid. He finds himself “chastened exceedingly and humbled in truth by hunger and nakedness and that daily,” as a shepherd-slave in the Irish district of Antrim, as the property of a local “king” named Miliucc. What became of Patricius will form the subject of a later chapter, after we have left the civilized world for good and journeyed to the unholy land of Ireland.

  But before we bid goodnight to the late classical world and make our way to the fiercest of the fierce barbarians, we must consider one last question: What was lost when the Roman Empire fell? The life of Ausonius can show us the why of the Fall, but it gives us nothing to weep for. Classical civilization—the world that came to birth in the Athens of Pericles five centuries before Christ and that dies now five hundred years after Christ in the century of the barbarian invasions—is worth a far better elegy than Ausonius can provide. What died, when no one any longer had the leisure to pass on the essentials of the classical tradition, when the barbarians burned the libraries and the books turned to dust, when the stones remaining were reassembled into rural outhouses?

  We find the answer in the life of Augustine of Hippo, almost the last great classical man—and very nearly the first medieval man.

  Just thirty years before Patricius was brought in chains to Ireland, another teenager with a similar background—a Romanized African whose father was a petty official—came all too willingly, not to an impossible hinterland, but to the seething capital of Roman Africa. “To Carthage I came,” recalled Augustine later, “where there sang all around me in my ears a cauldron of unholy loves. As yet I loved no one, yet I loved to love, and out of a deep-seated need, I hated myself for not being needy. I pursued whoever-whatever might be lovable, in love with love. Safety I hated—and any course without danger. For within me was a famine.”

  This is clear, poignant, ruthless prose. But though it still reads awfully well, the words of Augustine’s Confessions no longer jump with the fresh shock they held when he published his memoir in 401—probably the same year Patricius was kidnapped. The reason for this is that Augustine’s is a sensibility that has since become so common that we no longer experience the Confessions as the earthquake they were felt to be by readers of late antiquity. For Augustine is the first human being to say “I”—and to mean what we mean today. His Confessions are, therefore, the first genuine autobiography in human history. The implications of this are staggering and, even today, difficult to encompass. A good start is made, of course, by reading the Confessions themselves and falling under their spell. But in order to grasp the immensity of Augustine’s achievement, one must read the “autobiographies” that went before him.

  Open any collection of Great Thoughts or Great Sayings—especially one that, like Bartlett’s, goes in chronological order—and let your eye pick out the I’s. In the oldest literature their paucity and lack of force will begin to impress you. Of course, characters in Homer refer to themselves occasionally as “I.” Socrates even speaks of his daimon, his inner spirit. But personal revelation, such as we are utterly accustomed to, is nowhere to be found. Even lyric poems tend to be objective by our standards, and the exceptions stand out: a fragment (“The moon has set …”),* attributed to Sappho, and the Psalms, attributed to King David.

  When in the classical period we reach the first works to be designated as autobiographies, we can only be confounded by their impersonal tone. Marcus Aurelius, by Gibbon’s standards the most enlightened emperor and the great philosopher of Roman antiquity, speaks to us in epigrams, like Confucius and Ecclesiastes before him: “This Being of mine, whatever it really is, consists of a little flesh, a little breath, and the part which governs”—he means his mind. This is as confidential as Marcus gets. Or how about this for a personal revelation? “All that is harmony for you, my Universe, is in harmony with me as well. Nothing that comes at the right time for you is too early or too late for me.” For all their ponderousness, the great emperor’s thoughts are never more personal than a Chinese fortune cookie.

  Then we reach Augustine, who tells us everything—his jealousies in infancy, his thieving as a boy, his stormy relationship with his overbearing mother (the ever-certain Monica), his years of philandering, his breakdowns, his shameful love for an unnamed peasant woman, whom he finally sends away. His self-loathing is as modern as that of a character in Camus or Beckett—and as concrete: “I carried inside me a cut and bleeding soul, and how to get rid of it I just didn’t know. I sought every pleasure—the countryside, sports, fooling around, the peace of a garden, friends and good company, sex, reading. My soul floundered in the void—and came back upon me. For where could my heart flee from my heart? Where could I escape from myself?”

  No one had ever talked this way before. If we page quickly through world literature from its beginnings to the advent of Augustine, we realize that with Augustine human consciousness takes a quantum leap forward—and becomes self-consciousness. Here for the first time is a man consistently observing himself not as Man but as this singular man—Augustine. From this point on, true autobiography becomes possible, and so does its near relative, subjective and autobiographical fiction. Fiction had always been there, in the form of storytelling. But now for the first time there glimmers the possibility of psychological fiction: the subjective story, the story of a soul. Tho
ugh the cry of Augustine—the Man Who Cried “I”—will seldom be heard again in full force until the early modern period, he is the father not only of autobiography but of the modern novel. He is also a distinguished forebear of the modern science of psychology.

  What prepared Augustine to be Augustine? What was the ground, and what the seed?

  Augustine was among the last of classically educated men. Born in 354 into what all believed to be a stable world, he would witness in old age—in the 420s—the last days of the grammaticus. His Latin has a refinement and a piquancy that few could match in any period of antiquity. The delicate changes rung on three words—love, need, hate—in the famous passage from the Confessions quoted above mark him as adhering to the highest standards of classical rhetoric. What Ausonius wore like a medal Augustine bears stamped on his heart: the show-off accomplishments of Ausonius are for Augustine honored disciplines of the spirit.

  Augustine gives us the world’s first description of how a child may fall hopelessly in love with literature—a fall so palpable it is almost carnal. Like creative children in every age, he despised his first school assignments in “reading, writing, and arithmetic” because they were nothing but rote: “‘One and one are two; two and two are four’—what hateful singsong.” Nor did he like any better his first lessons in Greek, accompanied by the teacher’s “punishments and cruel threats”; and he states succinctly the complaint of numberless generations of students before and after him: “Mastering a foreign language was as bitter as gall, for not one word of it did I understand.” But then, after all the dreary classes of grinding recitation, he is handed real literature in his own tongue: “I loved Latin … and I wept for Dido slain, she ‘seeking by the sword a stroke and wound extreme.’”

  Despairing Dido, queen of ancient Carthage, slain by her own hand as her magnificent lover Aeneas lifts anchor and sails away forever: this is one of the most haunting and permanent images of the classical world. What opened Augustine’s heart to Latin literature was Virgil’s Aeneid, the literary masterpiece of the Roman world, its Bible and its Shakespeare in one. The Aeneid is a conscious literary epic, not a folk epic like the Greek Iliad. Picking up where Homer leaves off—with the fall of Troy to the Greek forces, who penetrate its impregnable walls by the “gift” of a huge hollow horse lined with armed men—Virgil recounts the exploits of his hero, Aeneas, son of Venus and a Trojan father. “Arma virumque cano” (“I sing of arms and the man”), begins Virgil in a great trumpet fanfare. As all Virgil’s readers could savor with thrilling foreknowledge, Aeneas will miraculously escape the certain doom of burning Troy, faithfully carrying his ancient father on his back and holding his little son by the hand. A wanderer, he is received with high celebration by the queen of Carthage, who is riveted by his tale. Dido and Aeneas are fated to fall passionately in love, but Aeneas always knows—as does the reader—that, though it will break Dido’s heart and end her life, he must move bravely on to his destiny, the founding of the City of Rome.

  Virgil wrote in the age of Caesar Augustus, the first emperor, and he conceived the Aeneid as a national epic (the only completely successful one in world literature), orchestrated artfully to evoke in the reader a wave of patriotism for the great empire’s heroic beginnings. This younger, less seasoned civilization of the Latin west, having absorbed, both politically and culturally, the lofty civilization of the Greek east, needed to establish its own legitimacy to rule and to overwhelm. To the Greeks, the Romans were cocky and underbred. To the Romans, the Greeks were too clever by half—and more than a little unsavory. (In observing a refined Hellene flaunt his superiority, your regular, plainspoken Roman could not help but let the suspicion of perversion play at the back of his mind: by Jupiter, don’t they look the other way and let those faggoty tutors they hire bugger their own children?) The cultural relation of Roman to Greek was, in many ways, not unlike the cultural relation of Englishman to Frenchman and of American to Englishman: in all three relations, simplicity is the virtue and complexity the vice on one side, while on the other subtlety is prized and (supposedly rustic) straightforwardness can give offense.

  In Virgil’s new myth, forthright Rome is the moral superior of sneaky Greece and (surprise!) actually the older civilization, since it can trace its roots to fabled Ilium—ancient Troy. Virgil makes his new myth unforgettable by framing it in a new language that rivals anything Greece ever produced: a heroic but flexible Latin that still rings down the ages. In recounting the story of the hollow horse, by which the Greeks won through duplicity what they could not win fair and square on the field of battle, Aeneas warns not only Dido but all of subsequent humanity: “Timeo Danaos et dona ferentis” (“I am wary of Greeks, even bearing gifts”).

  In Dido there is more than a hint of another dusky African queen—the Cleopatra whose “eastern” sensuality did in Mark Antony. But our hero Aeneas is virtuous enough, in the end, to reject even this temptation against his—and every Roman’s—destiny. Of course, he is flesh and blood, and no prig either, and the lovemaking of these two is the occasion for some of Virgil’s most exciting poetry. But Dido’s suicide, though genuine tragedy, is necessary. This is—for Greeks as well as Romans—the ancient meaning of tragedy: unavoidable catastrophe. And it is to Dido, especially, that we may apply the greatest of all Virgil’s great lines:

  Sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt.

  These are the tears of things,

  and the stuff of our mortality cuts us to the heart.

  To Augustine, provincial Roman of Africa born, Dido was less exotic than she would have appeared to an Italian; she was, in some respects, an incarnation of Africa, and her catastrophe was Africa’s catastrophe: sensuous Africa, whose great City of Carthage was Dido’s city … and was now, from his lascivious seventeenth year, Augustine’s city—the city that boiled without while Augustine boiled within.

  The famous sentence “To Carthage I came …” contains a purposeful rhyme, one of the first in Latin literature.* The city’s name, Carthago, rhymes with sartago, cauldron. This is incantatory, meant to draw our attention to the bubbling of the city and the bubbling of the boy, macrocosm and microcosm. A powerful and subtle rhetorical device, it would nonetheless have been eschewed by all earlier writers as indecens—rustic and inappropriate. But, unlike the déraciné Ausonius, Augustine, the budding African Latinist who could identify so completely with Dido’s passion, can allow his inner bubbling to surface from time to time in the form of African rhythms and rhetorical devices. After his conversion and consecration as bishop of Hippo, Augustine will repeatedly delight his congregations by employing verbal pyrotechnics with an African “swing.” “Bona dona” (“good gifts”) will become one of their favorites. In this vernacularizing of Latin, we may discern the first step toward the simplified, rhythmic, rhyming “people’s Latin” of the Middle Ages.

  If Virgil was the great teacher of language and style (or grammar and rhetoric, to use the categories of the medieval school), Cicero was the great teacher of argument or disputation (dialectic, to use the medieval term). As Virgil’s Greek counterpart was—very roughly speaking—Homer, so Cicero’s Greek counterpart was Demosthenes. The two dialecticians have cast their shadows over the otherwise happy schooldays of countless students of the Greek and Latin classics. The boy C. S. Lewis, deliriously satisfied while basking in the high sun of Homer’s war stories and in the soft afternoon of the discreetly erotic Catullus and the discreetly precise Tacitus, at last confronts the approaching gloom: “The Two Great Bores (Demosthenes and Cicero) could not be avoided.”

  Homer and Virgil are art, and each was to his age and place what good movies are to ours—never a chore, always refreshing, occasionally ennobling. Demosthenes and Cicero are hard work, and were studied in Augustine’s day as paragons of the “art” of persuasion—the kind of thing one might study today in journalism school. If the Aeneid is language as metaphor, as the sacramental ritualizing of human experience, Cicero’s speeches are language
as practical tool. A two-thousand-year-old poem may still, conceivably, speak to us with as much force as it did to the people of its day. We would not expect the same from a two-thousand-year-old newspaper editorial or a two-thousand-year-old advertising jingle. Nor should we expect it from Cicero.

  Cicero, born in the century before Christ, exercised his techniques when republican Rome, in all its vigor, welcomed public men. Augustine loved Cicero, as did the whole Latin world, which placed the Roman orator just below Virgil on the divinity charts. (Jerome, the cantankerous translator of the Latin Bible, awoke one night in a frenzied sweat: he had dreamed that Christ had condemned him to hell for being more a Ciceronian than a Christian.) The ancients held the practical use of words in much higher regard than we do, probably because they were much closer to the oral customs of prehistoric village life—so clearly reflected in Nestor’s speech to the Greek chieftains in the Iliad and in Mark Antony’s speech over Julius Caesar’s body—in which the fate of an entire race may hang on one man’s words.

  But we are made uncomfortable and bored by Cicero’s elaborately coaching us in all the tricks of his trade—the many techniques for convincing others to act the way we want them to. For Cicero, “to speak from the heart” would be the rashest foolishness; one must always speak from calculation: What do I want to see happen here? What are the desires of my audience? How can I motivate them to do my will? How shall I disguise my weakest arguments? How dazzle my listeners so they are no longer able to reason matters through independently?

  The techniques of the successful politician, the methods of modern advertising—the whole panoply of persuasion is to be found in Cicero. The figure closest to him in our own age might be Dale Carnegie, who advised that every single word and gesture be calculated to “win” and “influence.” However squeamish such advice may make us, to the ancients it made perfect sense. For in addition to learning how to write a poem for one’s own satisfaction, in addition to learning how to turn a phrase in a letter so as to please a friend, there was a larger literary task to be played out in the larger world—the polis—to which all educated men were bound to make their contribution, to bring their positive influence to bear. And this world of politics required the arts of persuasion, if one were to meet with success. In Ausonius, classical education calcified into the merely ornamental. In Augustine, it remains as vigorous as it had been in Cicero’s day, and Augustine will spend his life using Cicero’s elaborate and nuanced arsenal of techniques on behalf of a new worldview and a new political agenda. This will be the public contribution of Augustine, the Roman citizen, to the dying Roman Res Publica.