St. Augustine's Confessions is a combination of several genres: autobiography, philosophy, theology... Currently it's his most popular work because of its deeply personal narration of his journey from a life of sinfulness to turning to God. Augustine's dates are 354 to 430, a transitional period within the Roman Empire, or rather the century of its decline and ultimate fall, and for an archaeologist it's an interesting description of life in the last parts of the Roman Empire: being born in a North African province, moving to Rome to find success, returning to North Africa once he found God. It's particularly delightful because Augustine's job was an orator, so he writes in the very flowery and dramatic style of his age.

And then there's this gem:

From the mud of my fleshly desires and my erupting puberty belched out murky clouds that obscured and darkened my heart until I could not distinguish the calm light of love from the fog of lust. The two swirled about together and dragged me, young and weak as I was, over the cliffs of my desires, and engulfed me in a whirlpool of sins .... In that same year, my sixteenth, my studies were interrupted, and .... I began to spend time in my parents' company. The thorn-bushes of my lust shot up higher than my head, and no hand was there to root them out. Least of all my father's; for when at the baths one day he saw me with unquiet adolescence my only covering and noted my ripened sexuality, he began at once to look forward eagerly to grandchildren, and gleefully announced his discovery to my mother.^*

I don't know about you, but if I saw my son with a hard on in the baths, the last thing that would come to my mind is to rush home and tell my wife, "HONEY! OUR BOY IS READY FOR FUCKING! WE'RE GONNA HAVE GRANDCHILDREN SOON!!" It's not the type of thing I'd spread the word about. Imagine for a moment our society was like that: That we all go to communal baths, and through those awkward teenage years your dad is scrutinizing your penis to see if your balls have dropped and you're popping erections. And then it becomes the family gossip once you do. Augustine doesn't mention what happened after that, but I'm assuming the next logical step in this progression is for his dad to start lining up prostitutes.

^* Augustine of Hippo, The Confessions, trans. by Maria Boulding, ed. by John E. Rotelle (Hyde Park, New York: New City Press, 1997): pp. 33, 35.