A naturally offensive stance earns him many critics, especially among the educated Romanised elites, each of them eager to turn his poor, provincial, Punic origins against him. Combined with his sexually liberal years as a Manichean cultist, there is no shortage of ammunition to use against him when he was ordained, in 391, as presbyter of Hippo. Allusions to his treacherous ‘Carthaginian’ nature punctuate the work of his opponents, from the biblical scholar Jerome to the excommunicated aristocrat, Bishop Julian, who readily derides him as a ‘Punic pamphleteer’ of oriental disposition.The book under review is Catherine Conybeare, Augustine the African (Blackstone, 2025). I noted another review of it here.
Cross-file under (Neo-)Punic Watch.
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