Like all the great cosmopolitan centres at that time, Rome was unhealthy. The diseases of the whole earth, brought by the continual inflow of foreigners, flourished there. Accordingly, the inhabitants had a panic fear of infection, like our own contemporaries. People withdrew prudently from those suffering from infectious disorders, who were left to their unhappy fate. If, from a sense of shame, they sent a slave to the patient's bedside, he was ordered to the sweating-rooms, and there disinfected from head to foot, before he could enter the house again.
Augustin must have had at least the good luck to be well looked after, since he recovered. He had gone to the dwelling of one of his Manichee brethren, an _auditor_ like himself, and an excellent kind of man, whom he stayed with all the time he was in Rome. Still, he had such a bad attack of fever that he very nearly died. "I was perishing," he says; "and I was all but lost." He is frightened at the idea of having seen death so near, at a moment when he was so far from God--so far, in fact, that it never occurred to him to ask for baptism, as he had done, in like case, when he was little. What a desperate blow would that have been for Monnica! He still shudders when he recalls the danger: "Had my mother's heart been smitten with that wound, it never could have been healed. _For I cannot express her tender love towards me_, or with how far greater anguish she travailed of me now in the spirit, than when she bore me in the flesh." But Monnica prayed. Augustin was saved. He ascribes his recovery to the fervent prayers of his mother, who, in begging of God the welfare of his soul, obtained, without knowing it, the welfare of his body.
As soon as he was convalescent, he had to set to work to get pupils. He was obliged to ask the favours of many an important personage, to knock at many an inhospitable door. This unfortunate beginning, the almost mortal illness which he was only just recovering from, this forced drudgery--all that did not make him very fond of Rome. It seems quite plain that he never liked it, and till the end of his life he kept a grudge against it for the sorry reception it gave him. In the whole body of his writings it is impossible to find a word of praise for the beauty of the Eternal City, while, on the contrary, one can make out through his invectives against the vices of Carthage, his secret partiality for the African Rome. The old rivalry between the two cities was not yet dead after so many centuries. In his heart, Augustin, like a good Carthaginian--and because he was a Carthaginian--did not like Rome.