other · 297 · Sicca Veneria
Jerome tells the story in two sentences and it is the only account there is: Arnobius taught rhetoric with great success at Sicca in Africa, and having been brought to believe by dreams, could not obtain credit for his faith from the bishop, because he had always been an enemy of it — so he composed splendid books against his former religion, and gave them at last as a pledge of his loyalty. The books bear the story out. He knows pagan mythology in enormous and unflattering detail, quotes Lucretius and Plato and Varro constantly, and is scathing about the argument that the gods must be real because the empire prospers. He is much less sure about Christianity itself: he says almost nothing about the Old Testament, is vague about the soul's immortality, and gets several things wrong that a catechumen would not have. That is not a defect in the record, it is the record — a man arguing his way in from the outside, whose teacher's trade shows on every page and whose pupil, Lactantius, would do the same job far more smoothly a decade later.
To convince a bishop who would not take his conversion seriously — by writing, at length, against everything he had been paid to defend.
Seven books that survive, and a convert's apology written before he had learned much Christianity.