At Bethlehem He Had Pagan Books Copied and Taught Them to Boys

We will move on to clear up another of the charges, if only he will admit, under the pressure of his own guilty conscience, that he stands convicted both of perjury and of making a false defense. If, on the other hand, he tries to deny what I say, I can produce as witnesses any number of my brothers who, while living in the cells I built on the Mount of Olives, copied out most of Cicero’s Dialogues for him. As they wrote them out I often had booklets of these Dialogues in my hands, and I looked them over myself, knowing that he paid them far more than is usually paid for copying other kinds of writing. He himself also came from Bethlehem to see me at Jerusalem, bringing with him a book that contained a single Dialogue of Cicero, and also one of Plato’s in Greek. He will not pretend to deny that he gave me that book and that he stayed with me for some time. But what is the use of lingering so long over a matter clearer than daylight? To all I have said, this must be added, after which no further comment is needed. After he had settled in the monastery at Bethlehem, and that not so long ago, he took up the post of a teacher of grammar. He explained “his own” Maro, and the comic poets, the lyric poets and the historians, to young boys who had been entrusted to him so that he might teach them the fear of the Lord. So he actually became a teacher and professor of the knowledge of those pagan authors about whom he had sworn that if he so much as read them, he would have denied Christ. [a]