ABSTRACT
For a writer who was one of the chief creators of the tradition of western LatinChristianity, we know disappointingly little about the life of Quintus Septimius Florens Tertullianus. No contemporary mentions him, not even Cyprian, the bishop of Carthage in the mid-third century, whose indebtedness to some of his works is obvious and who (so Jerome recorded) read him every day. He flourished between about 190 and 220, but the years of his birth and death are unknown. Jerome, in his Who Was Who of early Christian writers, composed in 392/3, could report merely that ‘he is said to have lived to a decrepit old age’ (Famous Men [De viris illustribus] 53; Barnes 1985: 3-29, 323-5).
