His Books Are Full of Pagan Authors

You see what a new and terrible kind of oath he describes. The Lord Jesus Christ sits on the judgment seat as judge; the angels sit beside him as his counselors and plead for the accused; and there, between the floggings and the tortures, he swears that he will never again keep the works of pagan authors by him or read them. Now look back over the very work we are dealing with, and tell me whether there is a single page of it on which he does not declare himself a Ciceronian all over again, or on which he does not speak of “our Tully,” “our Flaccus,” “our Maro.” As for Chrysippus and Aristides, Empedocles and all the rest of the Greek writers, he scatters their names around himself like a haze or a halo, to impress his readers with his learning and his literary accomplishments. Among the rest, he boasts of having read the books of Pythagoras. Many learned men, indeed, declare that no such books survive. But he, so that he may make good every part of his vow about pagan authors, declares that he has read even those that do not exist in writing. In almost all his works he quotes these men, whom he calls “his own,” far more often and at greater length than the prophets and apostles, who are ours. Even in the works he addresses to girls and weak women, who want, as is right, only to be built up by teaching drawn from our Scriptures, he weaves in illustrations from “his own” Flaccus and Tullius and Maro. [a]