from this dependence and display originality of form and ideas in
his works. Of these the two most significant are the _Confessions_ and _On
the City of God_. The _Confessions_ reveal the story of his inner life,
the struggle of good and evil in his own soul. The work _On the City of
God_ was inspired by the sack of Rome by Alaric in 410 and the accusation
of the pagans that this was a punishment for the abandonment of the
ancient deities. In answer to this charge Augustine develops a
philosophical interpretation of history as the conflict of good and evil
forces, in which the Heavenly City is destined to triumph over that of
this world. His work prepared the way for the conception of the Roman
Catholic Church as the city of God.

*Boethius (d. 524 A. D.) and Cassiodorus (c. 480-575 A. D.).* Between the
death of Augustine and the death of Justinian the West produced no
ecclesiastical literary figure worthy of note. However, under the
Ostrogothic regime in Italy, profane literature is represented by two
outstanding personalities--Boethius and Cassiodorus. The patrician Boethius
while in prison awaiting his death sentence from Theoderic composed his
work _On the Consolation of Philosophy_, a treatise embued with the finest
spirit of Greek intellectual life. Cassiodorus, who held the posts of
quaestor and master of the offices under Theoderic, has left valuable
historical material in his _Variae_, a collection of official letters
drawn up by him in the course of his administrative duties. His chief
literary work was a history of the Goths, of which unfortunately only a
few excerpts have remained. In his later years Cassiodorus retired to a
monastery which he founded and organized according to the Benedictine
rule. There he performed an inestimable service in fostering the
preservation of secular as well as ecclesiastical knowledge among the
brethren, thus giving to the Benedictine monks the impulse to intellectual
work for which they were so distinguished in medieval times.

*Greek Christian literature; Religious prose.* It was in the fourth
century that Greek Christian prose literature reached its height. Among
its leading representatives were Athanasius, the bishop of Alexandria who
fought the Arian heresy; Eusebius, bishop of Caesarea, the founder of
church history; Gregory of Nazianzus, church orator and poet; and Basil,
bishop of Caesarea in Cappadocia, the organizer of Greek monasticism.
Above them all in personalit