PHILOSOPHY AND FAITH realm in which a mental and unchangeable form holds them all together in a unity And this is what the Lord Jesus tells us when he says ‘Consider the lilies of the Weld, how they grow; they toil not, neither they spin: and yet I say unto you that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these Wherefore, if God so clothe the grass of the Weld, which today is, and tomorrow is cast into the oven, shall he not much more clothe you, o ye of little faith?’ (DCD X 14; cf Plotinus, Enneads 13; Matt 6: 28–9) But while Augustine is prepared to read Platonism into the Sermon on the Mount, he has little sympathy with attempts to give philosophical and allegorical interpretations of traditional Roman religion The original impetus for the composition of The City of God—which took thirteen years to complete—came from the sack of Rome by Gothic invaders Pagans blamed this disaster on the Christians’ abolition of the worship of the city’s gods, who had therefore abandoned it in its hour of need Augustine devoted the Wrst books of his treatise to showing that the gods of classical Rome were vicious and impotent and that their worship was disgusting and depraving The Romans had long identiWed their senior gods—Jupiter, Juno, Venus, and the like—with the characters of the Homeric pantheon, such as Zeus, Hera, and Aphrodite Augustine follows Plato and Cicero in denouncing as blasphemous the myths that represent such deities as engaged in arbitrary, cruel, and indecent behaviour He mocks too at the proliferation of lesser gods in popular Roman superstition: is heaven so bureaucratized, he asks, so that while to look after a house a single human porter suYces, we need no less than three gods: Forculus to guard the doors, Cardea for the hinges, and Limentinus for the threshold? (DCD IV 18) The identiWcation and individuation of these minor divinities raise a number of philosophical problems, which Augustine illustrates More often he uses against late Roman paganism the weapon of erudite sarcasm that Gibbon, thirteen centuries later, was to deploy so teasingly against historic Christianity A brief, eloquent, survey of the history of the Roman Republic suYces to show that the worship of the ancient Gods does not guarantee security from disasters The eventual unparalleled greatness of the Roman Empire, Augustine says, was the reward given by the one true God to the virtues of the best among the citizens ‘They placed no value on their own wealth in comparison with the commonwealth and the public purse; they shunned