30. But now, since my pleading
has steered its course out of these rough and broken places, and I have
refuted the charge of heresy which had been urged against me by looking
my accuser freely in the face, I will pass on to the other articles of
charge with which he tries to assail me. The first is that I am a
scurrilous person, a detractor of every one; that I am always snarling
and biting at my predecessors. I ask him to name a single person whose
reputation I have disparaged, or whom, according to an art practised by
my opponent, I have galled by pretended praise. But, if I speak against
ill-disposed persons, and wound with the point of my pen some Luscius
Lanuvinus or an Asinius Pollio of the race of
the Cornelii, if I repel the
attacks of a man of boastful and curious spirit, and aim all my shafts
at a single butt, why does he divide with others the wounds meant for
him alone? And why is he so unwise as to shew, by the irritation of his
answer to my attack, his consciousness that it is he alone whom the cap
fits?
He brings against me the charge
of perjury and sacrilege together, because, in a book written for the
instruction of one of Christ’s virgins, I describe the promise
which I once made when I dreamed that I was before the tribunal of the
Judge, that I would never again pay attention to secular literature, and that nevertheless I have sometimes made mention of the learning which I then condemned. I think that I have here lighted on the man who, under the name of Sallustianus Calpurnius, and through the letter written to me by the orator Magnus, raised a not very great question. My answer on the general subject is contained in the short treatise which I then wrote to him. But at the present moment I must make answer as to the sacrilege and perjury of my dream. I said that I would thenceforward read no secular books: it was a promise for the future, not the abolition of my memory of the past. How, you may ask me, can you retain what you have been so long without reading? I must give my answer by recurring to one of these old books:
’Tis much to be inured in
tender youth.