Augustine's hatred of the Homer

From: dixonps@juno.com
Date: Fri Dec 10 1999 - 17:40:38 EST


Dear fellow Grecian enthusiasts:

I came across this is while reading Augustine's confessions and
found it interesting:

Why then did I hate the Greek classics, which have the like tales? For
Homer also curiously wove the like fictions, and is most sweetlyvain, yet
was he bitter to my boyish taste. And so I suppose would Virgil be to
Grecian children, when forced to learn him as I was Homer. Difficulty, in
truth, the difficulty of a foreign tongue, dashed, as it were, with gall
all the sweetness of Grecian fable. For not one word of it did I
understand, and to make me understand I was urged vehemently with cruel
threats and punishments. Time was also (as an infant) I knew no Latin;
but this I learned without fear or suffering, by mere observation, amid
the caresses of my nursery and jests of friends, smiling and sportively
encouraging me. This I learned without any pressure of punishment to urge
me on, for my heart urged me to give birth to its conceptions, which I
could only do by learning words not of those who taught, but of those who
talked with me; in whose ears also I gave birth to the thoughts, whatever
I conceived. No doubt, then, that a free curiosity has more force in our
learning these things, than a frightful enforcement. Only this
enforcement restrains the rovings of that freedom, through Thy laws, O my
God, Thy laws, from the masterâs cane to the martyrâs trials, being able
to temper for us a wholesome bitter, recalling us to Thyself from that
deadly pleasure which lures us from Thee.

St. Augustine, The Confessions of Saint Augustine

Paul Dixon

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