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Augustine’s Law of the Heart: Thieves’ Honor

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Cultural Anatomies of the Heart in Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Calvin, and Harvey

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Abstract

This study investigates historically the notorious, perplexing episode in Augustine’s Confessions about his collaborative theft of pears. It interprets his law of the heart as conformity to human custom in distinction to the biblical law of the heart as obedience to divine command. It locates his indictment of himself and his companions in its Roman socio-cultural contexts, especially the customary adolescent sexual play, in imitation of Jove’s rapes as thefts. It explains Augustine’s law of the heart as social affinity, in the proverbial thieves’ honor, which acted as a law unto itself anarchically. Its outlawry was outside both divine and human laws, operative anthropologically as a social code that determined precedence in a group. Augustine’s law of the heart was customary behavior from social sympathy.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Augustine, Confessionum libri tredecim 2.2.9, ed. Lucas Verheijen (Turnholt: Brepols, 1981).

  2. 2.

    E.g., William Mann, “Inner-Life Ethics,” in The Augustinian Tradition, ed. Gareth Matthews (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), pp. 157–60.

  3. 3.

    E.g., Gerald Bonner, “Augustine’s Doctrine of Man: Image of God and Sinner,” Augustinianum 24 (1984): 496; John Freccero, “Autobiography and Narrative,” in Reconstructing Individualism: Autonomy, Individuality, and the Self in Western Thought, ed. Thomas C. Heller et al. (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1986), p. 23; Hugues Derycke, “Le vol des poires, parabolé du péché originel,” Bulletin de littérature ecclésiastique 88 (1987): 337–48; William J. O’Brien, “The Liturgical Form of Augustine’s Conversion Narrative and Its Theological Significance,” Augustinian Studies 9 (1978): 57–58; Leo C. Ferrari, “The Arboreal Polarization in Augustine’s Confessions,” Revue des études augustinennes 25 (1979): 35–46; idem, “The Pear-Theft in Augustine’s Confessions,” Revue des études augustiniennes 16 (1970): 233–42; Robert J. O’Connell, St. Augustine’s “Confessions”: The Odyssey of Soul (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, Belknap Press, 1969), pp. 47–50; Kenneth Burke, The Rhetoric of Religion: Studies in Logology (Boston: Beacon, 1961), pp. 93–101.

  4. 4.

    Gen. 2:18, 21–23; 3:7.

  5. 5.

    Confessiones 2.3.8–2.10.18.

  6. 6.

    Ibid. 2.4.9.

  7. 7.

    Ibid. 2.2.1.

  8. 8.

    Theodore C. Burgess, Epideictic Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1902), pp. 115–16.

  9. 9.

    Confessiones 2.2.3–2.2.4.

  10. 10.

    John W. Welch, “Chiasmus in Ancient Greek and Latin Literatures,” in Chiasmus in Antiquity: Structures, Analyses, Exegesis, ed. idem (Hildesheim: Gerstenberg, 1981), pp. 250–68. Chiasmus was also a prominent feature of the Hebrew Scriptures, whose law Augustine considered, and it appeared in the New Testament. See Nils W. Lund, “The Presence of Chiasmus in the Old Testament,” American Journal of Semitic Languages and Literatures 46 (1930): 104–26; idem, Chiasmus in the New Testament (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1942), which cites as a rare example of extended chiasmus beyond Scripture Augustine, Enarrationes in psalmos 21, p. 33.

  11. 11.

    Ian H. Thomson, Chiasmus in the Pauline Letters (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1995), pp. 34–35; Welch, “Introduction” to Chiasmus in Antiquity, p. 12.

  12. 12.

    See José Antonio Mayoral, “Chiasmus,” in Encyclopedia of Rhetoric, ed. Thomas O. Sloane (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 89.

  13. 13.

    Cicero ap. Donatus, “De comedia” 5.5 in Commentum Terenti.

  14. 14.

    See, without reference to Augustine, Heinrich F. Plett, “Hyperbole,” in Encyclopedia of Rhetoric, p. 364.

  15. 15.

    Aristotle, Rhetorica 3.11.15–16 1413a; The Complete Works of Aristotle, The Revised Oxford Translation, trans. Julian Barnes, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 2:2255.

  16. 16.

    Quintilian, Institutio oratoria 8.6.67; The Orator’s Education, trans. Donald Russell, 4 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001), 3:465, 469. For hyperbole in Roman schools, see Stanley F. Bonner, Education in Ancient Rome: From the Elder Cato to the Younger Pliny (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1977), p. 165.

  17. 17.

    H. W. Wolff, The Anthropology of the Old Testament, trans. Margaret Kohl (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1974), p. 40, which counts 858 occurrences.

  18. 18.

    Marjorie O’Rourke, “‘In the Heart of the Sea’: Fathoming the Exodus,” Journal of Near Eastern Studies 63 (2004): 17–27; idem, “The Law of the Heart: The Death of a Fool (1 Samuel 25),” Journal of Biblical Literature 120 (2001): 401–27; idem, “Broken Hearts: The Violation of Biblical Law,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 73 (2005): 731–57.

  19. 19.

    Confessiones 11.2.3, 4.4.7–9.

  20. 20.

    Ibid. 5.11.21, 5.14.24, 6.4.6, 7.21.27.

  21. 21.

    Ibid. 10.43.70, 11.2.2, 11.2.3, 11.2.4, 8.11.27, 11.2.4. For Augustine’s text of Ps. 119, which differs from the Masoretic Text, the Vulgate version, and the Roman Psalter, see Alban Dold and A. Allgeier, Der Palimpsest Psalter im Codex Sangallensis 912: Eine altlateinische Übersetzung des frühen 6. Jahrhundert aus der einstigen Kloster-Bibliothek von Bobbio (Beuron: Erzabtei, 1933), pp. 30–52, with v. 85 at pp. 86, 47.

  22. 22.

    Confessiones 12.18.27, 12.25.35; 12.30.41; Deut. 6:5, Lev. 19:18, Matt. 22:35–38; Confessiones 12.18.27, 13.24.37.

  23. 23.

    Ibid.

  24. 24.

    See D. S. Raven, Latin Metre: An Introduction (London: Faber and Faber, 1965).

  25. 25.

    Augustine, De musica 6. Marjorie O’Rourke Boyle, “Augustine’s Heartbeat: From Time to Eternity,” Viator: Medieval and Renaissance Studies 38 (2007): 19–43.

  26. 26.

    Confessiones 10.12.19.

  27. 27.

    Ibid. 1.18.29.

  28. 28.

    Ibid. 5.13.23, 5.8.14, 1.16.26, 9.2.2, 8.5.10, 1.16.25. For thunderbolts of eloquence, see Quintilian, Institutio oratoria 8.6.4. For payments, see Bonner, Education, pp. 146–62.

  29. 29.

    Confessiones 2.2.4.

  30. 30.

    Ex. 20:15 Vulg; cf. Deut. 5:19.

  31. 31.

    H. F. Jolowicz, ed., Digest XLVII.2: “De furtis” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1940), pp. lxviii–lxxv, 1. Augustine knew this law from declamatory practice, for which see S. F. Bonner, Roman Declamation in the Late Republic and Early Empire (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1969), p. 105.

  32. 32.

    Bonner, Education, p. 166.

  33. 33.

    Marjorie O’Rourke Boyle, Divine Domesticity: Augustine of Thagaste to Teresa of Avila (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1997), pp. 11–12. See also Cicero, De officiis 1.35.129.

  34. 34.

    Confessiones 7.20.26, 10.8.13, 10.10.17, 10.12.19. For the legal terms, see Jolowicz, ed., Digest XLVII.2, pp. xvii, xix, lv–lxi, and theft of fruit, pp. lviii, 96.

  35. 35.

    Confessiones 4.2.2. For chicanery, see Cicero, De officiis 1.10.33. Confessiones 2.4.9, 8.10.24.

  36. 36.

    Confessiones 2.4.9.

  37. 37.

    Boyle, Divine Domesticity, pp. 9–11.

  38. 38.

    Confessiones 2.2.2, 2.3.7, 2.4.9, 2.6.12, 2.7.15, 2.8.16, 2.9.27. For scum on boiled liquids, see Aristotle, De generatione animalium 2.6 743b.

  39. 39.

    Propertius, Elegiae 2.2, 2.13; To Cynthia 2.30.25.

  40. 40.

    Ovid, Metamorphoses 4.611, 6.113, 11.117. See Amy Richlin, “Reading Ovid’s Rapes,” in Pornography and Representation in Greece and Rome, ed. idem (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 157, 161.

  41. 41.

    Catullus, Carmina 68b lines 136, 140.

  42. 42.

    Confessiones 2.1.1.

  43. 43.

    Without reference to Augustine, see J. Reginald O’Donnell, “The Meaning of silva in the Commentary on the Timaeus by Chalcidius,” Mediaeval Studies 7 (1945): 12–13, 8, 19, 6–7, 11–12.

  44. 44.

    Suetonius, Vita 1.

  45. 45.

    Terence, Eunuchus lines 318, 693, in Terence, ed. and trans. John Barsby, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001), vol. 1. Augustine, Confessiones 2.1.1, 2.2.4, 2.3.6, 2.6.12.

  46. 46.

    Terence, Eunuchus lines 654, 704, 858, 953.

  47. 47.

    Confessiones 1.2.2, 2.3.7, cf. Sodomites 3.8.15, 2.6.14, 2.5.11, 2.6.12, cf. 2.8.16, 2.9.17, 2..6.14. Terence, Eunuchus lines 382, 1013, 1022, 856, 860.

  48. 48.

    Terence, Eunuchus lines 857–860; trans., p. 415.

  49. 49.

    Ibid. lines 654, 704, 722, 858, 953, 643–44, 664, 668, 670; trans., pp. 385, 389.

  50. 50.

    Cynthia S. Dessen, “The Figure of the Eunuch in Terence’s Eunuchus,” Helios 22 (1995): 123–39, 125; John Whitehouse, “The Rapist’s Disguise in Menander’s Eunuchus,” in Intertextualität in der griesch-römischen Komödie, ed. Niall W. Slater and Bernhard Zimmermann (Stuttgart: M & P Verlag für Wissenschaft und Forschung, 1993), pp. 122–32.

  51. 51.

    Confessiones 2.2.3.

  52. 52.

    Terence, Eunuchus line 319. Cf. Confessiones for pears as “pretty” 2.6.12 but “neither in shape nor in savor alluring,” 2.4.4. Eunuchus lines 319–20, 382–87; trans., p. 357; Barsby, ed., pp. 146, 156; line 574, trans., p. 377; line 550, cf. the anti-oath line 709.

  53. 53.

    Terence, Eunuchus lines 583–606, 289–90.

  54. 54.

    See note 14.

  55. 55.

    David Konstan, “Love in Terence’s Eunuch: The Origins of Erotic Subjectivity,” American Journal of Philology 107 (1986): 387; Karen F. Pierce, “The Portrayal of Rape in New Comedy,” in Rape in Antiquity: Sexual Violence in the Greek and Roman Worlds, ed. Susan Deacy and Karen F. Pierce (London: Duckworth with the Classical Press of Wales, 1997), pp. 163–84. Terence, Eunuchus lines 175–76.

  56. 56.

    Aelius Donatus, Commentum Terenti ad Eunuchus line 592. Katrina Philippides, “Terence’s Eunuchus: Elements of the Marriage Ritual in the Rape Scene,” Mnemosyne: A Journal of Classical Studies 48 (1995): 272–84.

  57. 57.

    Edward K. Rand, “The Art of Terence’s Eunuchus,” Transactions of the American Philological Association 63 (1932): 58, 62.

  58. 58.

    Konstan, “Love in Terence’s Eunuch,” p. 387.

  59. 59.

    Mary R. Lefkowitz, “Seduction and Rape in Greek Myth,” in Consent and Coercion to Sex and Marriage in Ancient and Medieval Societies, ed. Angeliki E. Laiou-Thomadakis (Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 1993), pp. 17–37; Frances van Keuren, “Female Sexuality and Danaë and the Golden Rain,” American Journal of Archaeology 101 (1997): 369.

  60. 60.

    Arnobius, Adversus nations 5.22.1.

  61. 61.

    Richlin, “Reading Ovid’s Rapes,” pp. 162, 163, 165.

  62. 62.

    Louise Pearson-Smith, “Audience Response to Rape: Chaerea in Terence’s Eunuchus,” Helios 21 (1994): 21–38.

  63. 63.

    Zola M. Packman, “Call It Rape: A Motif in Roman Comedy and Its Suppression in English-Speaking Publications,” Helios 20 (1993): 42–55. See also Richard P. Saller, “The Social Dynamics of Consent to Marriage and Sexual Relations: The Evidence of Roman Comedy,” in Consent and Coercion, pp. 83–104. For criticism of the aesthetic sanitization of “heroic” rape, see Diane Wolfthal, Images of Rape: The “Heroic” Tradition and Its Alternatives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 1–35.

  64. 64.

    Terence, Eunuchus lines 645, 647, 659; trans., p. 387.

  65. 65.

    Patricia Watson, “Puella and virgo,” Glotta: Zeitschrift für griechische et lateinische Sprach 61 (1983): 120–23. Terence, Eunuchus lines 645–46, cf. 820.

  66. 66.

    Terence, Eunuchus lines 1035–36, 1047.

  67. 67.

    Marjorie O’Rourke Boyle, “Augustine in the Garden of Zeus: Lust, Love, and Language,” Harvard Theological Review 83 (1990): 117–39.

  68. 68.

    Confessions 1.16.26. For citations from memory, see James J. O’Donnell, “Augustine’s Classical Readings,” Recherches augustiniennes 15 (1980): 144–75. For the philology, see Elaine Fantham, “Stuprum: Public Attitudes and Penalties for Sexual Offences in Republican Rome,” Échos du monde classique/Classical Views, 36 (1991): 267–91.

  69. 69.

    Terence, Eunuchus line 1.

  70. 70.

    See Thomas Habinek, The World of Roman Song: From Ritualized Speech to Social Order (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), pp. 120–21, 113–14, 110, 118, 114–15.

  71. 71.

    Boyle, Divine Domesticity, p. 10.

  72. 72.

    Ovid, Metamorphoses 6.113, 11.117.

  73. 73.

    Augustine, De civitate Dei 2.7, ed. Bernard Dombart and Alphonse Kalb, 2 vols. (Turnhout: Brepols), 1981). Citing Terence, Eunuchus 645–46, 648, 659; trans., p. 387. 2.12.

  74. 74.

    Augustine, Epistolae 91.4–5, in Patrologiae cursus completus, series latina, ed. J.-P. Migne, 221 vols. (Paris, 1800–75), 33: col. 315. For abhorrence of the theatrical gods, see also Sabine MacCormack, The Shadows of Poetry: Vergil in the Mind of Augustine (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998), pp. 198–99, 212.

  75. 75.

    Confessions 2.6.14, 2.6.12, 2.2.2, 2.2.3.

  76. 76.

    Catharine Edwards, The Politics of Immorality in Ancient Rome (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 173, 175.

  77. 77.

    See J. Reginald O’Donnell, “The Meaning of silva in the Commentary on the Timaeus of Plato by Chalcidius,” Mediaeval Studies 7 (1945): 8–9.

  78. 78.

    Confessiones 2.2.4, 1.16.26.

  79. 79.

    Aelius Donatus, Commentum Terentii at lines 584–85.

  80. 80.

    Confessiones 2.3.5, 2.6.13, 8.12.28, cf. Terence, Eunuchus line 585.

  81. 81.

    For self-control, see Edwards, Politics of Immorality, p. 5.

  82. 82.

    Terence, Eunuchus line 550. For the rarity, thus impressiveness, of oaths by Jupiter in Roman comedy, see Barsby, ed., Eunuchus, p. 189.

  83. 83.

    Confessiones 3.2.2. Donnalea Dos, The Idea of the Theater in Latin Christian Thought: Augustine to the Fourteenth Century (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004), pp. 12–29; Edwards, Politics of Immorality, pp. 98–136.

  84. 84.

    Augustine’s citation of Terence adds “in pariete” in deference to the fashion of Roman murals, rather than Greek panels. For that art, see Roger Ling, Roman Painting (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 1–11; and for their depiction of myth and history, pp. 101–41. This is the sole reference in Terence to a painting. Charles Knapp, “References to Painting in Plautus and Terence,” Classical Philology 12 (1917): 153–54. For the commonplace, see Barsby, ed., Eunuchus, p. 198. For erotic art as motivational, see Molly Myerowitz, “The Domestication of Desire: Ovid’s parva tabella and the Theater of Love,” in Pornography and Representation, p. 137.

  85. 85.

    Augustine, De trinitate libri XV 11.2.5, ed. W. J. Mountain, 2 vols. (Turnhout: Brepols, 1968). He probably knew this from the physician Vindicianus, the author of Gynaecia. He appears as a friendly advisor to Augustine in Confessiones 4.3.5–6. See also Augustine, Epistulae 138.3, in Patrologia latina, 33: col. 526. See Vindicianus, Gynaecia, in Opera, in Priscianus “Euporiston”: Accedunt Vindicianus Afri quae feruntur reliquiae, ed. Valentin Rose (Leipzig: Teubner, 1894), pp. 426–66. Vindicianus is the more probable source for the anecdote about conception than Pierre Courcelle’s opinion that Augustine read Soranus, Gynaecia 1.39 in the Greek. Courcelle, Later Latin Writers and Their Greek Sources, trans. Harry E. Wedeck (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1969), pp. 195–96.

  86. 86.

    For the ideal, see Karl Kilinski II, “Greek Masculine Prowess in the Manifestations of Zeus,” in Myth, Sexuality, and Power: Images of Jupiter in Western Art, ed. Frances V. Keuren (Providence, R.I.: Brown University Center for Old World Archaeology and Art; Departement d’Archeologie et d’histoire de l’art, College Erasme, Louvain-La-Neuve, Belgium, 1998), pp. 29–50. See also Boyle, “Augustine in the Garden of Zeus.”

  87. 87.

    See Bonner, Roman Declamation, p. 90.

  88. 88.

    Terence, Eunuchus line 859.

  89. 89.

    F. van der Meer, Augustine the Bishop: The Life and Work of a Father of the Church, trans. Brian Battershaw and G. R. Lamb (London: Sheed & Ward, 1961), pp. 135, 181, citing Augustine, Sermones 224.3, in Patrologia latina, 45; Gervase Corcoran, Saint Augustine on Slavery (Rome: Institutum Patristicum “Augustinianum,” 1985), pp. 10, 29–30.

  90. 90.

    Romans 5:14–15. Augustine used the Vetus Latina (Old Latin) Bible for all Pauline citations. H. A. G. Houghton, Augustine’s Text of John: Patristic Citations and Latin Bible Manuscripts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 84. However, for this verse the phrase is identical to the Vulgate.

  91. 91.

    Confessiones 8.12.29, reading Rom. 13:13–14.

  92. 92.

    Augustine, Expositio quarumdam propositionum ex Epistola ad Romanos, in Patrologia latina, 35:2063, with further reference to 1 John 3:20. See also Confessiones 4.19.14. Augustine, Epistolae ad Romanos inchoata expositio, in Patrologia latina, 35:2087–2106, treats only the first chapter.

  93. 93.

    Confessiones 5.3.3, 5.

  94. 94.

    Augustine, Contra Faustum 19.2, ed. Joseph Zycha (Vienna: F. Tempsky, 1891), p. 497.

  95. 95.

    Confessiones 15.26.

  96. 96.

    Ibid. 7. 9.14.

  97. 97.

    Aristotle, Categoriae 5 2a–4a.

  98. 98.

    Ibid. 4.16.28–29.

  99. 99.

    Ibid. 2.4.9.

  100. 100.

    Without reference to Augustine, see Edwards, Politics of Immorality, p. 4. See also Wolfgang Blösel, “Die Geschicthe des Begriffes mos maiorum van den Anfängen bis zu Cicero,” pp. 25–97, in Mos maiorum: Untersuchungen zu den Formen der Identitätsstiftung und Stabilisierung in der römischen Republik, ed. Bernard Linke and Michael Stemmler (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2000).

  101. 101.

    Confessiones 2.3.8, 2.4.9.

  102. 102.

    Ibid. 2.4.9.

  103. 103.

    Terence, Eunuchus lines 383–87.

  104. 104.

    Confessiones 2.3.7, 2.8.16. 2.2.9, cf. Terence, Eunuchus line 839. Confessiones 2.9.17, 2.8.16.

  105. 105.

    Aristotle, Ethica Eudemia 7.1.7 1235a.

  106. 106.

    Erasmus, Adagia, in Opera omnia, ed. Jean Leclerq, 11 vols. (Leiden: Petrus van der Aa, 1703–6), 2:509; trans. R. A. B. Mynors, in The Collected Works of Erasmus (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974–), 33:169–70. Adagia, ed. M. L. van Poll-van de Lisdonk et al., in Opera omnia (Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1971): 2–1:236–38; trans. Margaret Mann Phillips, Collected Works of Erasmus, 31:165–66. See also Adagia, pp. 38–42. See also Kathy Eden, Friends Hold All Things in Common: Tradition, Intellectual Property, and the “Adages” of Erasmus (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2001).

  107. 107.

    Michael Pakaluk, “The Egalitarianism of the Eudemian Ethics,” Classical Quarterly 48 (1998): 411, 423–24. See also Anne Marie Dziob, “Aristotle’s Friendship: Self-Love and Moral Rivalry,” Review of Metaphysics 46 (1993): 781–801; Alex J. London, “Moral Knowledge and the Acquisition of Virtue in Aristotle’s Nicomachean and Eudemian Ethics,” Review of Metaphysics 54 (2001): 553–83.

  108. 108.

    Aristotle, Ethica Eudemia 7.1.7 1235a.

  109. 109.

    Cicero, De officiis 2.39–40; On Duties, trans. M. T. Griffin and E. M. Atkins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 77–78. Against theft, see also 3.5.21.

  110. 110.

    Andrew R. Dyck, A Commentary on Cicero, “De officiis” (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), p. 418, who suggests Panaetius’s inspiration is Plato, Respublica 351c. See also Aristotle, Rhetorica 1397b.

  111. 111.

    See Bonner, Education, pp. 261–62, 266.

  112. 112.

    Cicero, De re publica 3.22 is frequently cited. For Jupiter, see Cicero, De legibus 2.4.10.

  113. 113.

    Brent D. Shaw, “Bandits in the Roman Empire,” Past and Present 105 (1984): 4; Nicholas K. Rauh, Merchants, Sailors, and Pirates in the Roman World (Stroud, Gloucestershire: Tempus, 2003), pp. 169–77.

  114. 114.

    Cicero, De officiis 3.11.49.

  115. 115.

    Cicero, Epistulae ad Atticum 5.20. For gubernatorial responsibility, see Shaw, “Banditry,” pp. 14, 19.

  116. 116.

    For Cilician piracy, see Rauh, Merchants, Sailors, and Pirates, pp. 169–200; Philip de Souza, Piracy in the Graeco-Roman World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 97–148. For revolts in Cilicia still in the fourth century c.e., see Keith Hopwood, “Bandits, Elites and Rural Order,” in Patronage in Ancient Society, ed. Andrew Wallace-Hadrill (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 173.

  117. 117.

    de Souza, Piracy, pp. 135–36, 149–57, with citation of Cicero, In 2 Verrem 5.76 at p. 156.

  118. 118.

    Augustine, De magistro 5.16, ed. K.-D. Daur, in Contra academicos, De beata vita, De ordine, De magistro, De libero arbitrio, ed. W. M. Green et al. (Turnhout: Brepols, 1970).

  119. 119.

    Cicero, De officiis 3.107; On Duties, trans., p. 141.

  120. 120.

    de Souza, Piracy, p. 132.

  121. 121.

    Rauh, Merchants, Sailors, and Pirates, pp. 194–95.

  122. 122.

    See above, pp. 49–50.

  123. 123.

    Rauh, Merchants, Sailors, and Pirates, pp. 196–97.

  124. 124.

    Shaw, “Bandits,” pp. 10–12, 8–9, 22, 50, 6–7, 24–27, 19, 23. For the vocabulary, see also de Souza, pp. 12–13. For outsiders, see also Ramsay MacMullen, Enemies of the Roman Order: Treason, Unrest, and Alienation in the Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1966), pp. 192–219.

  125. 125.

    Rauh, Merchants, Sailors, and Pirates, pp. 165, 168, 187, 189.

  126. 126.

    Shaw, “Bandits,” pp. 20–21.

  127. 127.

    De civitate Dei 4.4. Cited by Shaw, “Bandits,” p. 3; Rauh, Merchants, Sailors, and Pirates, p. 195. By this date Augustine’s knowledge of their habits may owe also to Apuleius, Metamorphoses 3.27–4.22, with sharing the loot at 3.28 and disguises at 4.14–15, 7.8. For the vocabulary, see Werner Riess, Apuleius und die Räuber: Ein Beitrag zur historischen Kriminalitätsforschung (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2001), pp. 32–44. See also Vincent Hunink, “‘Apuleius, qui nobis Afris Aer est notior’: Augustine’s Polemic against Apuleius in De civitate Dei,” Scholia: Studies in Classical Antiquity 12 (2003): 82–95. For other fictional authors on the pirate share, see de Souza, Piracy, p. 216. For piracy in Homer, whom Augustine read in school, see pp. 17–21.

  128. 128.

    De civitate Dei 4.1.

  129. 129.

    See de Souza, Piracy, p. 199.

  130. 130.

    Plutarch, Pompey 24.3; Vitae, trans. Bernadotte Perrin, 11 vols. (London: William Heinemann, 1914–26), 5:175. Rauh, Merchants, Sailors, and Pirates, p. 198. See also N. R. E. Fisher, “Hybris”: A Study in the Values of Honour and Shame in Ancient Greece (Warminster, Wiltshire: Aris and Phillips, 1992), pp. 156–60, 162, 164, 178.

  131. 131.

    Confessiones 2.6.12, 2.6.14, 2.4.9.

  132. 132.

    See Terence, Eunuchus line 326; trans., p. 349; ed. Barsby, p. 147.

  133. 133.

    Henry A. Ormerod, Piracy in the Ancient World: An Essay on Mediterranean History (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1978), pp. 68–72.

  134. 134.

    E.g., Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quijote, part two, chapter 60, cited by the Oxford Dictionary of English Proverbs, 1948 ed., s.v.

  135. 135.

    Ormerod, Piracy in the Ancient World, pp. 13–14, 207; Shaw, “Banditry,” p. 39.

  136. 136.

    Possidius, Vita 1, in Patrologia latina, 32. Geoffrey Rickman, The Corn Supply of Ancient Rome (Oxford: Clarendon, 1980), pp. 13, 50–52, 67–71, 112, 167–69, 204–6, 231–35.

  137. 137.

    de Souza, Piracy, pp. 213, 214, 224, 229, 231.

  138. 138.

    Confessiones 7.21.27, 5.8.15. Othmar Perler with Jean-Louis Maier, Les voyages de saint Augustin (Paris: Études augustiniennes, 1969), pp. 52–53.

  139. 139.

    Confessiones 3.8.16, 7. 21.17.

  140. 140.

    See James Yates, “Latrunculi,” in A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities, ed. William Smith (London: John Murray, 1875), p. 670, to which may be added the earliest reference, Varro, De lingua latina 10.2.

  141. 141.

    Shaw, “Banditry,” p. 9; Hopwood, “Bandits, Elites and Rural Order,” p. 179.

  142. 142.

    Bonner, Declamation, pp. vi–vii, 6–8, 133; Ormerod, Piracy, pp. 264–66.

  143. 143.

    Ormerod, Piracy, pp. 260–64.

  144. 144.

    Terence, Eunuchus lines 108–18.

  145. 145.

    Without reference to Augustine, see Rauh, Merchants, Sailors, and Pirates, p. 197; de Souza, Piracy, pp. 215–16.

  146. 146.

    Without reference to Augustine, see Julian Pitt-Rivers, “Honour and Social Status,” in Honour and Shame: The Values of Mediterranean Society, ed. J. G. Peristiany (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), pp. 11, 21, 23, 31, 35–36. See also Carlin A. Barton, Roman Honor: The Fire in the Bones (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001).

  147. 147.

    See note 13.

  148. 148.

    Confessiones 2.4.9.

  149. 149.

    Joseph Heinrich, “Cooperation, Punishment, and the Evolution of Human Institutions,” Science 312 (2006): 60–61.

  150. 150.

    William M. Green, “Initium omnis peccati superbia”: Augustine on Pride as the Original Sin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1949).

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    Marjorie O’Rourke Boyle

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Boyle, M.O. (2018). Augustine’s Law of the Heart: Thieves’ Honor. In: Cultural Anatomies of the Heart in Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Calvin, and Harvey. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93653-6_2

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