ABSTRACT
Some time in the summer or early fall of 384, the prefect of the city of Rome, the famous orator Q. Aurelius Symmachus, convened a panel of judges for what one imagines as a congenial task, to advise on a recommendation for the vacant chair of rhetoric in the city of Milan. Among the candidates (he may have been the only one to reach this point in the procedure) was an aspiring young man from Thagaste in Numidia, whose curriculum vitae included a public appointment in his home town and private teaching at Carthage and Rome (the careers of young academics were evidently as stressful then as they are now); and it was the African, Aurelius Augustinus, whom Symmachus, after hearing him deliver an oration on a set topic, dispatched to Milan with a permit to use the imperial transport service. ‘And I came to Milan, and to Ambrose the bishop’, wrote Augustine of his success (Conf. 5.13.23). If Symmachus had known that he was issuing a travel warrant to the author, not only of the Confessions, from which we know most of this (the selection procedure is added from a letter of Symmachus on a different occasion),1 but of the City of God, in which Symmachus’ entire cultural inheritance was to be dismantled, he might have had second thoughts, but this is to read far into the future. Nor am I persuaded that, even as recommended to Symmachus by his Manichean contacts at Rome, Augustine was part of an undercover campaign conducted by the prefect against his adversary the Catholic bishop; this was far too indirect and ambiguous a mode of intervention to have been sure of success without a corresponding risk to Symmachus’ own good standing. Taking him as he was in 384, Augustine was just another ambitious young man enjoying Symmachus’ support on the way to higher things.2
