ABSTRACT
For fifteen hundred years, from the fourth century to the nineteenth, school children in Europe were exposed daily to two books. One was the Bible, and the other was the works of Cicero. The co-existence of these two texts in our culture is a remarkable phenomenon, for on a clear-headed reading of each of them they have very little in common. The fundamental challenge to Christian values represented by Roman authors, such as Seneca, Sallust or Quintilian, rested on their implicit or explicit endorsement of the themes of late Hellenistic philosophy, and in particular of both Stoicism and Academic scepticism. There is a poetic elegance to Augustine's vision, but it rested of course on a metaphor. It left the Roman writers unassailed as texts in the Latin schools, and if one was unpersuaded by the metaphor it also left one exposed to the fundamental discrepancy between their views and those of conventional Christianity.
