Augustine: Confessions Books V–IX

This edition highlights Augustine's art as a narrator, enhances appreciation of the Confessions by explaining unfamiliar Augustinian vocabulary, idioms, and ideas, and clarifies his place as one of the most original thinkers of late antique Christianity. It will be indispensable for students and teachers of Latin.

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Books V-IX of the Confessions trace five crucial years in the life of Augustine, from his debut as a teacher of rhetoric in North Africa to his baptism as a Christian and the renunciation of a worldly career in Milan. This commentary will be invaluable for those wishing to read his story in the original Latin. Through careful glosses and notes, Augustine's Latin is made accessible to students of patristics and of classics. His extensive quotations from Scripture are translated and explained in light of the variant Bible texts and the interpretative assumptions through which he came to understand them. The unfolding of his career is set against the background of political, cultural, and religious change in the fourth century, and the art with which he created a form of narrative without precedent in earlier Latin literature is illustrated in close detail.