Both letters, numbers 46 and 47 in the Augustinian corpus, are well known among archaeologists and historians. In his 1993 synthesis on Tripolitania, David Mattingly cited them in a half-dozen different contexts, and he was not the first archaeologist to squeeze the correspondence for information about agriculture, commerce, and military activity on the frontier.809 Whereas traffic of this sort has interested archaeologists and some historians of the Roman army and African economy, historians generally have been more interested in demons, scruples, and figuring out who Publicola was or was not.
Various adjectives have characterized the form and syntax of Publicola’s letter, none of them flattering. Some historians have used the mediocrity of the letter’s style as evidence that this publicola must not be Valerius publicola, Roman senator and father of Melania the Younger, whose family owned extensive property in North africa.810 it should be noted that no extant text is attributed to Valerius Publicola, so no comparison between this letter and a known specimen of the senator’s epistolographic skill is possible. It also should be noted that most of the letters we have from senatorial ranks in the late fourth or early fifth centuries come from individuals renowned for their Latinity, such as symmachus or paulinus of nola. the evolution of the latin language is easily distorted when scholars select “vulgar” specimens and exclude master stylists such as symmachus as anomalies.811 so, conversely, might our expectations of elite culture err when we disallow the existence of educated, wealthy, and powerful men self-secure enough to air worse-than-mediocre literary skills, at least when writing to recently ordained bishops of provincial cities? if different mentalites could coexist in publicola’s and symmachus’ elite circles, as Michele Salzman has demonstrated,812 then why not a mix of epistolary styles, which the harsh selection process of editing, publishing, and preservation has mostly obscured from our view? Anyway, stylistic arguments must remain inconclusive, but they have influenced other areas of the debate.
Claude Lepelley, these letters’ most recent commentator, is inclined to reject the identification of the epistolographer Publicola with the senator Publicola.813 But
Lepelley’s real interest is in religion. He writes that Publicola’s letter betrayed “a crude religiosity and a strongly mediocre intelligence,” an “anxious temperament,” and “neurotic” concerns; he also argues that Publicola’s understanding of oath swearing in particular reflected antiquated “scruples.”814 Lepelley is not alone. Denys Gorce referred to Publicola’s “fragility of conscience verging on scruple.” Andre Mandouze describes Publicola as narrow-minded and suffering from a maladie du scrupule. Elizabeth Clark refers to “the nugatory concerns of epistle 46,” while Frederik Van der Meer might have been the one to put the “scrupular” vocabulary into play, by claiming that Publicola was “pathologically concerned” and a “victim of scruples” and by summarizing his letter as “a pitiful performance, as also is his style, and both express a purely formalistic type of Christianity.”815 So Lepelley’s innovation is not to deride Publicola’s style and scruples or even to elide the two. Instead, it is to suggest that Publicola’s brand of old-fashioned religiosity—marked by a physical, tactile sense of sacredness—was something he shared with many late Roman Christians. This proposal offers compelling possibilities for contextualizing these letters.
Nevertheless, there are problems. First, the evidentiary basis is worryingly thin. If this Publicola is not Melania the Younger’s father, then we know nothing about him beyond Letter 46, much of whose religious content, especially the concerns that may strike us as most trifling, was generic: plenty of Jews and Christians worried over the risk of eating sacrificial food, even while contemplating the Apocalypse (Rev. 2:14, 20)! Publicola well might have been feeding Augustine the sort of questions he thought bishops enjoyed, sweetening the otherwise bland request to approve a mundane swearing practice. Second, just because demons and purity are the letter’s refrain does not mean they accurately or wholly represent its gist. We also should notice the repeated references to prices, credit, and especially fidelity in both Publicola and Augustine’s letters. According to Publicola, the act of swearing stood for public credit.816 It was Publicola, not Augustine, who elevated the subject from a mere frontier matter to one that concerned everyone, when he asked about Christians within the empire whom pagan Romans, happy to swap demon oaths, represented on the frontiers.817 818 819
The bottom line is that Publicola’s sensitivity to the sacred quality of oaths, which we need not doubt, did not hinder him from understanding their moral, legal, and pragmatic importance. Moreover, if a regard for the sacred character of oath swearing signified an archaic sensibility, then Augustine and everyone else in Late Antiquity were as outdated as publicola. the aim here is not to extract anecdotal evidence in order to flesh out poorly understood beliefs or practices at large, as others have done well enough. Instead, a broader context of oath swearing can be used to help us understand better what was bothering publicola and why Augustine took him seriously. For both these letters survive because Publicola’s concern over demon oaths was well placed and settled upon a cluster of weighty, timely issues. The bishop of Hippo grasped the significance of Publicola’s inquiry and would grapple with it for years to come (as would other bishops11). A matter these men treated so seriously deserves our serious attention.
World History
