.. Almost the most interesting thing to me about the story of Dido at Carthage is the chapter that St. Augustine, who was taught and taught himself in the University of Carthage, has to say about his reading of the story of Carthage itself:

``For certainty the first lessons, which formed in me the enduring power of reading books and writing what I chose, were better because more solid than the latter, in which I was obliged to learn by heart the wanderings of Aeneas, forgetting my own wanderings, and to weep for the death of Dido, who slew herself for love, while I looked with dry eyes on my own most unhappy death, wandering far from Thee, O God, my life. For what is so pitiful as an unhappy wretch who pities not himself, who has tears for the death of Dido, because she loved Aeneas, but none of his own death, because he loves not Thee?

O God, the light of my heart, Thou hidden bread of my soul, Though mighty husband of my mind and of the bosom of my thought, I loved Thee not. I lived in adultery away from Thee, and all men cried unto me, Well done! well done! For the friendship of this world is adultery against Thee. Well done! well done! men cry, till one is ashamed not to be even as they. For this I had no tears, but I could weep for Dido `slain with the sword and flying to the depths,' while I was myself flying from Thee into the depths of Thy creation, earth returning to earth. And if I was forbidden to read these tales, I grieved; because I might not read what caused me grief. Such lessons were thought more elevating and profitable than mere reading or writing. What madness is this!

``But now Thy truth, O my God, cry aloud in my soul, and say unto me, Not so, not so; the earlier teaching was the better. For lo, I would far rather forget the wanderings of Aeneas, and everthing of the kind, than how to read and write. Truly over the door of the grammar school there hangs a curtain, yet is that curtain the shroud of falsehood, not the veil of mysteries. Let not those, whom no longer I fear, cry out against me, while I confess unto Thee, O my God, the promptings of my soul, and acquiesce in the condemnation of my evil ways, that I may love Thy good ways. Let not the buyers or sellers of grammar cry out against me. Because if I were to ask them whether the poet speaks the truth, when he says that Aeneas came to Carthage, the unlearned would answer that they do not know, the learned that he does not.

``But, if I were to ask how the name of Aeneas is spelled, all who have learned spelling would answer rightly, in accordance with the convention by which men have regulated the use of the alphabet. And again, if I were to ask which it would be most inconvenient to forget, the art of reading or writing, or these poetic fictions, who does not see what answer a man would have to give, unless he had wholly forgotten himself.''

To the Carthaginians of Augustine's time, at any rate, Dido was a woman, not a goddess. And how much more precious the humanness of Augustine than his homilies, even if they did teach the Church her own mind.