Augustine in His Own Words (continued)
tigate it carefully, no home would be found where there are not more Christians than pagans. It's true. You agree. You see, therefore, that these bad things would not have happened if Christians weren't willing. No easy answer for that. Bad things might be done on the sly, but they couldn't be done in public—not if Christians were opposed and didn't want it to happen, because each one of you would hold back his slave; each one of you would hold back his son. Young people would be tamed by a father's strictness, an uncle's strictness, a teacher's strictness, a good neighbor's strictness, strictness from greater correction—physically. If this had been done, these bad things would not have so saddened us. . . .
(21) My brothers and sisters, I exhort you, I beg you by the Lord and by his gentleness that you live gently, that you live peacefully. Let the authorities do what belongs to them—for they will have to render an account to God and to their superiors.34
Liberating Captives from Slavery
Augustine retails his congregation's vices more vividly than their virtues. Here we get a different view. In the following account from one of the Divjak letters, we see his congregation's courage of conviction as well as patterns of institutional violence in the late Roman world. Augustine writes his friend and fellow bishop Alypius, recounting the activities of a ring of slave traders from Galatia who made their living by kidnapping free people and selling them into slavery. Augustine's congregation got wind that one of these slave ships was anchored in Hippo's harbor, and broke in and liberated 120 captives, some from the ship, others from a local prison. The slavers had friends in high places and were demanding back their "merchandise." Augustine writes Alypius about a brutal imperial law against those who enslaved free persons. Augustine did not want the legislation to be enforced (since it stipulated whipping with lead-tipped thongs) but simply to keep the slavers from pressing their case, to make sure authorities neither returned the liberated captives to their kidnappers nor harassed those of his congregation who had engineered the escape.35 From Letter 10* (Divjak):
(2) Another matter: There are so many of those in Africa who are commonly called "slavers"36 that they seem to be draining Africa of much of its human population and transferring their "merchandise" to the provinces across the sea. Almost all these are free persons. Only a few are bound to
34. S. 302.10–21 (PL 38:1389–92); my trans. 35. On this case, see Claude Lepelley, "Liberté, colonat et esclavage d'après le Lettre 24*: la jurisdiction épiscopale 'de liberali causa,' " in Les Lettres de saint Augustin découvertes par Johannes Divjak, CEASA 98, ed. Claude Lepelley (Paris: Institut d'Études augustiniennes, 1983), 329–42.
36. "Slave dealers": Augustine uses the slang term mangones.