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ORATORY AND EPISTOLOGRAPHY
to Valentinian II in his famous Relatio. It is a balanced and noble plea for
religious tolerance, for the avoidance of imposed uniformity, and for respect
for the traditions of the past. Naturally, it is the kind of declaration which only
threatened minorities make. It did not succeed in its purpose. But it was a sufficiently
serious and effective plea to provoke a response from Ambrose {Epist.
17) setting out with unequivocal clarity the principle of Christian intolerance.
The Christian poet Prudentius also composed a refutation of its arguments
(cf. pp. 713-14)-
Symmachus was the last great Roman orator in the classical tradition and
the last senator whose correspondence was collected and published. But both
oratory and epistolography found a new place in the life of the Christian
church. The detailed study of this Christian literature falls outside the domain
of the present volume. But it may be noted that Ambrose left a collection of 91
letters, Jerome one of 154, and Augustine one of 270. Like the letters of
Symmachus, these epistles are works of art, written by men trained in the
discipline of literature. But they are unlike those of Symmachus in almost every
other respect. They are full of biblical quotation and allusion, which imports
a new element into their language. They are often very long. And they are not
mere tokens of friendship, but are full of information and argument. The
needs of Christian communication broke the narrow bounds within which
classical epistolography flourished.
In the same way the Christian sermon was a new form of oratory. "We do
not possess any sermons of Jerome or Ambrose, at any rate not in their raw
form. But an extensive collection of Augustine's Sermones, delivered before
his congregation at Hippo, survives. The former professor of rhetoric displays
a confident command of all the artifices of the discipline. But at the same time
he realizes that these artifices may in fact impede communication with an
average audience. So he deliberately uses a popular or on occasion vulgar
register, quite distinct from that of the De civitate Dei: melius in barbarismo
nostro, he observes, uos intellegitis quam in. nostra disertitudine uos deserti estis
' It is better for you to understand through my solecism than for you to be left
behind by my eloquence' (Enarr. in psalm. 36, serm. 3.6); and in another
passage he remarks, melius est reprehendant nos grammatici quam non intellegant
populi 'It is better that grammarians should censure me than that the people
should not understand me' (Enarr. in psalm. 138.20). It is hard to imagine a
more radical break with the tradition of late classical rhetoric.
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