an old bitch gone in the teeth

The thing that most stood out in today's reading was the sincerity of Jerome's grief over the fall of Rome. In Peter Brown's biography of Augustine, he contrasts the former's attitude with the latter's ambivalent see-sawing between dismay at the decline of classical culture and satisfaction at the deserved end of paganism. But Jerome is simply heartbroken, the best measure of which is his interweaving of biblical texts with Virgil. There was something almost modernist about the seamless combination of Christianity and classical literature to produce a lament for a dying civilization--one thinks of The Waste Land or Pound's "Who gave their lives for a botched civilization, an old bitch gone in the teeth." Deep feeling was the keynote of today's passage in general; the description of Principia's actions at Marcella's death was particularly moving. For all his bile, Jerome remains very much both a man of culture and simply a man.
(From Sam)