Ambrogio, Agostino e la Roma repubblicana

Ambrose’s attitude toward the history of Republican Rome and its uiri\r\nexemplares is deeply different from Augustine’s one. They get their information\r\nfrom a common cultural heritage, which was by then accepted without\r\nany critical approach, but Ambrose agrees with Cicero upon admiring\r\nthe Republic prior to its last century (from the Gracchi to Augustus),\r\nupon its military glory, upon the libertas dicendi of the senators, whose\r\nhe as a bishop was the heir, on the contrary Augustine agrees with Sallust\r\nupon his severe, pessimistic opinion of such an iniquitous and corrupted\r\nsociety that the rare attempts in amending it failed and its best men suffered\r\nits ingratitude. Consequently also Augustus’ place is different: both\r\nrefuse the Augustustheologie, but Ambrose only acknowledges that the Augustan\r\npeace fostered the mission of the Apostles, while Augustine ascribes\r\nthe princeps the merit in getting rid of an unfair socio-political system. To\r\nsum up, it seems to me that for the Roman Ambrose the whole history of\r\nRome in all its stages (Roman, Latin, Italian) is of great value, for the African\r\nAugustine it becomes valuable only since the Constitutio Antoniniana,\r\nissued by an Afro-Syrian dynasty, when its Italian features were vanishing\r\nin a melting pot embracing all the provinces of its immense empire.