Saint Augustin | Page 5

by a castellum. Full-flowing waters moisten the land. To those
coming from the stony regions about Constantine and Setif, or the vast
bare plain of the Medjerda, Thagaste gives an impression of freshness
and cool. It is a laughing place, full of greenery and running water. To
the Africans it offers a picture of those northern countries which they

have never seen, with its wooded mountains covered by pines and cork
trees and ilex. It presents itself as a land of mountain and
forest--especially forest. It is a hunter's country. Game is plentiful
there--boar, hare, redwing, quail, partridge. In Augustin's time, wild
beasts were apparently more numerous in the district than they are
to-day. When he compares his adversaries, the Donatists, to roaring
lions, he speaks like a man who knows what a lion is.
To the east and west, wide stretches of woodland, rounded hill-summits,
streams and torrents which pour through the valleys and glens--there
you have Thagaste and the country round about--the world, in fact, as it
revealed itself to the eyes of the child Augustin. But towards the south
the verdure grows sparse; arid mountain-tops appear, crushed down as
blunted cones, or jutted in slim Tables of the Law; the sterility of the
desert becomes perceptible amid the wealth of vegetation. This
full-foliaged land has its harsh and stern localities. The African light,
however, softens all that. The deep green of the oaks and pines runs
into waves of warm and ever-altering tints which are a caress and a
delight for the eye. A man has it thoroughly brought home to him that
he is in a land of the sun.
To say the least, it is a country of strongly marked features which
affords the strangest contrast with the surrounding districts. This
wooded Numidia, with its flowing brooks, its fields where the cattle
graze, differs in the highest degree from the Numidia towards Setif--a
wide, desolate plain, where the stubble of the wheat-fields, the sandy
steppes, roll away in monotonous undulations to the cloudy barrier of
Mount Atlas which closes the horizon. And this rough and melancholy
plain in its turn offers a striking contrast with the coast region of
Boujeiah and Hippo, which is not unlike the Italian Campania in its
mellowness and gaiety. Such clear-cut differences between the various
parts of the same province doubtless explain the essential peculiarities
of the Numidian character. The bishop Augustin, who carried his
pastoral cross from one end to the other of this country, and was its
acting and thinking soul, may perhaps have owed to it the contrasts and
many-sidedness of his own rich nature.
Of course, Thagaste did not pretend to be a capital. It was a free-town
of the second or third order; but its distance from the great centres gave
it a certain importance. The neighbouring free-towns, Thubursicum,

Thagura, were small. Madaura and Theveste, rather larger, had not
perhaps the same commercial importance. Thagaste was placed at the
junction of many Roman roads. There the little Augustin, with other
children of his age, would have a chance to admire the out-riders and
equipages of the Imperial Mail, halted before the inns of the town.
What we can be sure of is that Thagaste, then as now, was a town of
passage and of traffic, a half-way stopping-place for the southern and
coast towns, as well as for those of the Proconsulate and Numidia. And
like the present Souk-Ahras, Thagaste must have been above all a
market. Bread-stuffs and Numidian wines were bartered for the flocks
of the Aures, leather, dates, and the esparto basket-work of the regions
of Sahara. The marbles of Simitthu, the citron-wood of which they
made precious tables, were doubtless handled there. The neighbouring
forests could furnish building materials to the whole country. Thagaste
was the great mart of woodland Numidia, the warehouse and the bazaar,
where to this day the nomad comes to lay in a stock of provisions, and
stares with childish delight at the fine things produced by the inventive
talent of the workers who live in towns.
Thus images of plenty and joy surrounded the cradle of Augustin. The
smile of Latin beauty welcomed him also from his earliest steps. It is
true that Thagaste was not what is called a fine city. The fragments of
antiquity which have been unearthed there are of rather inferior
workmanship. But how little is needed to give wings to the imagination
of an intelligent child! At all events, Thagaste had a bathing-hall paved
with mosaics and perhaps ornamented with statues; Augustin used to
bathe there with his father. And again, it is probable that, like the
neighbouring Thubursicum and other free-cities of the same level, it
had its theatre, its forum, its nymph-fountains, perhaps even its
amphitheatre. Of all that nothing has