ABSTRACT
Nine years before Julian died, a boy was born in the town of Thagaste in North Africa, the son of a woman named Monica and a man named Patricius. Members, barely, of the curial class, the boy’s parents were resolved that their child take advantage of the best education they could afford, and advance in society.1 Although both were Christian, they had no doubt but that the road out of Thagaste was paved with the classics of Latin literature. So it was that their son, when not stealing apples, became a devotee of the classics. He loved Virgil, he wept for the death of Dido, and scored his first competitive triumph at school with his version of the speech that Juno might have made when she watched Aeneas sail from Carthage to Italy.2
When he was fifteen, the boy moved to another town to study with superior rhetoricians. The next year the family ran short of money, so he had to come home, where he objected so strenuously to the marriage that his parents tried to arrange for him that they dropped the idea. At the age of seventeen he was able to return to school, this time at Carthage.3 He now received assistance from a wealthy man of Thagaste, who supported able boys who might enhance his own status by climbing the ranks of the imperial bureaucracy.4
