ABSTRACT
It is remarkable that a man as busy as Ambrose was with the affairs of the Church and the Empire should have left behind as large an accumulation of writings as he did. He had, it is true, the help of a secretary, but he did not always rely on him. On the other hand, he did not write to the extent that (or on the same level as) his great contemporary Augustine did, who was almost a writer by profession. Ambrose was by profession a man of the law and an administrator, whose intelligence and whose acquaintance with the classics of Greek and Roman literature and with Scripture and the theology of the Fathers made him at minimum a passable writer and occasionally a great one.
