ABSTRACT
The relationship between mothers and children in antiquity is often elusive for modern historians, because it was for the most part not the kind of thing that our ancient predecessors cared to write about. For one family of the provincial gentry in late Roman North Africa, however, a window has been left open to shed a dazzling light. Monnica, the mother of Augustine, bishop of Hippo, is the subject of an extended memoir that forms part of Augustine's Confessions, the meditation on human frailty and the love of God that her son wrote upon becoming a bishop. With this chapter, Augustine concluded the story of Monnica's life, but also of his own. After the account of Monnica's death, he turns to face his audience in the present, eliding the nine years between his departure from Ostia and his assumption of office as Bishop of Hippo. It was to be all but thirty years before he began to write retrospectively again.
