More than Thagaste, no doubt, Madaura bore the marks of the building
genius of the Romans. Even to-day their descendants, the Italians, are the
masons of the world, after having been the architects. The Romans were the
building nation above all others. They it was who raised and established
towns upon the same model and according to the same ideal as an oration
or a poem. They really invented the house, _mansio_, not only the shelter
where one lives, but the building which itself lives, which triumphs over
years and centuries, a huge construction ornamental and sightly, existing
as much--and perhaps more--for the delight of the eyes as for usefulness.
The house, the _Town-with-deep-streets_, perfectly ordered, were a great
matter of amazement for the African nomad--he who passes and never settles
down anywhere. He hated them, doubtless, as the haunts of the soldier and
the publican, his oppressors, but he also regarded them with admiration
mixed with jealousy as the true expression of a race which, when it entered
a country, planted itself for eternity, and claimed to join magnificence
and beauty to the manifestation of its strength. The Roman ruins which
are scattered over modern Algeria humiliate ourselves by their pomp--us
who flatter ourselves that we are resuming the work of the Empire and
continuing its tradition. They are a permanent reproach to our mediocrity,
a continual incitement to grandeur and beauty. Of course, the Roman
architecture could not have had on Augustin, this still unformed young
African, the same effect as it has to-day on a Frenchman or a man from
Northern Europe. But it is certain that it formed, without his knowledge,
his thought and his power of sensation, and extended for him the lessons of
the Latin rhetoricians and grammarians.

All that was not exactly very Christian. But from these early school years
Augustin got further and further away from Christianity, and the examples
he had under his eyes, at Madaura were hardly likely to strengthen him