![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Augustine would have assumed, like his parents, Numidia was separated from desert nomads by a long ditch (the Fossa) that defined Rome's jurisdiction as clearly as did Hadrian's Wall in the empire's far north. But this southern edge of the empire was secure. Rim, the empire was troubled by "barbarians" and by theological wars (the high theology and low skullduggery of fights over Arianism). Numidia was part of the Roman Empire, whose signs were all around Augustine as he was growing up-the straight stonerooted roads, the striding aqueducts, the peopled amphitheaters. So Virgil's hero Aeneas would be struggling with tempests in a water cup when Augustine first read the Aeneid. Of water with a boundary is as close as the nearest drinking cup (L 7). Asked in later life, by a friend from his hometown, how one can "remember" things never experienced, he admitted that no one can recall a strawberry's flavor who has not tasted one. But toward the sea he had to grope with mental Mountains would always be part of his mental landscape-symbols of God's stability or of skyward reach in John's Gospel. To the south, the more distant Aures chain Thagaste, his birthplace in North Africa (modern Souk Ahras), was sixty miles inland from the Mediterranean, sealed off by the nearby Medjerda mountain range. Mountains he had known from boyhood, but not the sea. ![]()
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