ABSTRACT
Yet these last autobiographies of antiquity have an interest of their own. It is strange enough that right down to the sixth century such works were written, including a full autobiography in verse. And only some of these works are direct imitations of the Confessions. In them inner states are systematically described according to traditional rules, but the outward details of a life are more broadly handled, and this, together with the dissolution in that time of the classical literary forms, had the result that one or another of these works contains matter of relatively great importance to the history of social life. Traditions from Hellenistic autobiography were still present, and we see again that the repertory of autobiography is not completely
represented in the one super-eminent work, the Confessions. In Augustine himself autobiographical production was not exhausted by that document: a generation later, finishing his life's work, which lay in his writings, he published his Retractations, in which he transformed the traditional Hellenistic type of writers' autobiographies into a literary product of characteristic importance, expressive of the will-power that gave unity to his writings.
