Augustine's City of God, written in the aftermath of the Gothic sack of Rome in AD 410, is one of the key works in the formation of Western culture. This book provides a detailed running commentary on the text, with chapters on the political, social, literary, and religious background. Through a close reading of Augustine's masterpiece the author provides an accessible guide to the cosmology, political thought, theory of history, and biblical interpretation of the greatest Christian Latin writer of late antiquity.

This title was first published in 2001. A collection of fifteen studies which explore topics in the psychology and philosophy of mind of Plotinus, Augustine, and Boethius, as well as the development of Augustine's views on history and Roman religion.

The most influential of Augustine's works, City of God played a decisive role in the formation of the Christian West. Augustine wrote City of God in the aftermath of the Gothic sack of Rome in AD 410, at a time of rapid Christianization across the Roman Empire. Gerard O'Daly's book remains the most comprehensive modern guide in any language to this seminal work of European literature. In this new and extensively revised edition, O'Daly takes into account the abundant scholarship on Augustine in the twenty years since its first publication, while retaining the book's focus on Augustine as a writer in the Latin tradition. He explores the many themes of City of God, which include cosmology, political thought, anti-pagan polemic, Christian apologetic, theory of history, and biblical interpretation. This guide, therefore, is about a single literary masterpiece, yet at the same time it surveys Augustine's developing views through the whole range of his thought. As well as a running commentary on each part of the work, O'Daly provides chapters on the themes of the work, a bibliographical guide to research on its reception, translations of any Greek and Latin texts discussed, and detailed suggestions for further reading.

Prudentius is often considered the greatest Latin poet of late antiquity. In this volume, O'Daly looks at Prudentius' lyric poems, the Cathemerinon, Poems for the Day, which were published early in the fifth century AD. Reflecting the religious concerns of the increasingly Christianized western Roman Empire in the age of the emperor Theodosius and Ambrose of Milan, the Cathemerinon are above all the writings of a private person, and of the ways in which his religious beliefs colour his everyday life. They speak of bird-song and morning light, they are about about the taking of food, about lighting lamps as dark sets in, and about the night's sleep. Rich in biblical themes and narratives, images and symbols (including paradise and the Fall, Exodus, Jonah, Daniel, and the Magi), they also celebrate Christ's miracles and the feasts of Christmas and Epiphany. However, while they exploit the themes of the Bible, they are also written in the classical metres of Latin poetry and make use of its vocabulary and metaphors. They achieve a remarkable creative tension between the two worlds that determined Prudentius' culture: the beliefs and practices, sacred books, and doctrines of Christianity; and the traditions, poetry, and ideas of the Greeks and Romans. A good part of the attractiveness of these poems comes from the interplay between these two worlds. The volume includes the Latin texts, English translations, and critical essays on each of the twelve poems.