QUEENS OF A FALLEN WORLD

The Lost Women of Augustine's Confessions. Augustine is a towering figure in the later Roman empire and the history of the Christian Church, and although so distant in time, he is a character whom we can get to know intimately through his memoir The Confessions, the first autobiography of the ancient world. Four women dominated his life, and in this superb book Kate Cooper, professor of history at Royal Holloway College, explores who they were. Augustine's mother Monnica was close to him until his death; the Empress Justina took the side of the Arians in the controversy that dominated the Church in the fourth century, opposing Augustine's mentor, bishop Ambrose of Milan; Augustine's concubine Una, with whom he lived for 15 years, the mother of his son, was unceremoniously abandoned; and finally, Augustine found himself unable to go through with an arranged marriage to the wealthy young aristocratic girl for whom he terminated the relationship with Una. In the Confessions we see the women through Augustine's eyes, but it is possible to pick up clues as to what they were thinking, particularly in the case of Monnica who as a child played with a young slave in her father's household and treated her as an equal. The closing decades of the Roman Empire were a turning point in history, where a religious revolution had taken place under the emperor Constantine. Augustine writes about women's domestic lives, the lives of slaves, and even the lives of imperial women, and his views on love, marriage and the roles of women had a far-reaching influence down the centuries. Una's dignified reaction to his cruel dismissal haunted him for the rest of his life and she emerges as a figure of towering moral dignity. Cooper's fascinating book opens up the power struggles of the ancient world and the lives of women in particular. 290pp, illus.