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Abstract
The Cassiciacum dialogues are directed to a readership that is capable of decoding the images and codes of the Manichaean religion. In this paper I focus on the scenery of De beata vita, staging Augustine’s birthday on the Ides of November 386. Apart from the proem and its metaphor complex of seafaring and harbours, the dialogue is pervaded with a series of metaphors related to eating and drinking while the question of the happy life is equated with starving and thirsting. The aim of this approach is to show to what extent these metaphors and the real situation presented in the dialogue—the world of ‘things’—can be understood as a statement vis-à-vis Manichaean dietary rules and hence also vis-à-vis Manichaean ontology and cosmology.