Thagaste, Carthage, and Milan
Aurelius Augustinus was born on November 13, 354, at Thagaste, a small town in the Roman province of Numidia in North Africa, now Souk Ahras in Algeria. His father, Patricius, was a pagan town councilor of modest means who was baptized shortly before he died. His mother, Monica, was a devout Christian who prayed for her son for years. Much of what we know of his early life comes from his own Confessions, written in his forties.
As a boy Augustine was enrolled as a catechumen, a learner preparing for baptism, but he was not baptized. When he fell gravely ill as a child he begged for baptism and his mother prepared for it, but when he recovered it was put off. Infant baptism was spreading in North Africa by then, yet a devout Christian mother of the 350s could still treat baptism as something for later, a reminder that the practice was not universal.
Augustine studied at Madauros and then at Carthage, where he lived with a woman whose name he never gives and with whom he had a son, Adeodatus, around 372. At nineteen he read Cicero's Hortensius and was set on fire with a love of wisdom. He turned to the Bible but found its style crude beside Cicero, and he joined the Manichaeans, a dualist sect, as a hearer for some nine years. He taught rhetoric at Thagaste and Carthage, moved to Rome in 383, and in 384 became the official professor of rhetoric at Milan, then a capital of the empire.
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