Augustine, Vergil and the Foundation of a Christian Empire.pdf

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Jennifer EBBELER
Augustine, Vergil and the Foundation of a Christian Empire
Augustine's engagement with Vergil in the
Confessions
has been well documented. He is
typically described as using Vergil and especially Vergil's treatment of Dido and
Carthage to come to terms with and Christianize the pagan, Roman past. This paper
argues that Augustine invokes Book 4 of the
Aeneid
as an intertext to the
Confessions
not
merely to "Christianize" Vergil and the pagan past that he embodied; but, more precisely,
to create a Christian foundation legend that sets up Augustine as the founding hero and
North Africa as the implicit and imaginary center of a new Christian Empire.
After explicating the two variants of the Dido myth available to Augustine, thereby
demonstrating that Augustine's engagement with Vergil represented a divergence from
patristic tradition, the paper treats the relevant intertexts from the
Aeneid
in the
Confessions.
Augustine casts himself in the role of Aeneas, but in order to overturn
Rome's traditional dominance over Carthage and to subvert pagan culture's threat to
Christian culture. If the imminent destruction of Carthage was integral to Republican and
Imperial Roman identity, so is the defeat of Rome and the pagan culture the city
embodied necessary for the prosperity of Christianity in the late fourth and early fifth
centuries CE.
Vergil's treatment of the Dido myth was not the only version available to Augustine.
Fragments from Timaeus as well as Justin's epitome of Pompeius Trogus's history
preserve a version in which Dido never met Aeneas and remained loyal to her husband. It
has been suggested that this version reflects an un–Romanized, Phoenician source of a
Carthaginian foundation legend. The notion of Dido as a model of chastity survived in
Christian authors notably Tertullian and Jerome. Augustine's decision to follow Vergil
and the pagan tradition rather than Tertullian and the patristic tradition would have been
striking to his Christian and especially North African readers.
I will suggest that Augustine deliberately referenced the Vergilian treatment because it
was the only version that preserved the dyadic relationship between Rome and Carthage.
Vergil's (or perhaps Naevius's) great innovation was conflating the foundation myths of
Rome and Carthage to suggest that Rome's existence and prosperity depended on the
domination and ritual destruction of Carthage. Augustine's treatment implies a reversal of
this binary: the epic hero (and epic poet) Augustine settles in North Africa; he creates a
prototype for the City of God; the prosperity of this Christian community and Christianity
writ large depends on the continued submission of Rome and the pagan past that the city
embodies.
The
Confessions,
then, posits a kind of foundation myth for the Christian community in
which North Africa replaces Rome as the
caput orbis.
The paper concludes with a brief
discussion of how this "foundation myth" for a Christian Empire in the
Confessions
(c.
397) anticipates Augustine's symbolic razing of Rome in his
City of God,
written in 413
following Alaric's devastating sack of Rome in 410.; If the
Confessions
furnishes the
foundation legend, the
City of God
provides the blueprint for the new Christian world
order.

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