Patricius is baptised at Thagaste and dies, his son's fees unpaid

THAGASTE, Numidia, 371 AD — Patricius, one of the men of the town council at Thagaste, was baptised this year at the end of his life, and died. His son, Saint Augustine, is sixteen, and reached the schools at Carthage towards the end of last year to study rhetoric. There are years of that course still to be paid for.

Patricius was one of the curiales (the town councillors) of Thagaste, and the family was respectable rather than rich. The rank made a man answerable out of his own money for the town’s share of the emperor’s taxes: the council advanced that sum to the provincial governor and recovered what it could afterwards from the townsmen. As the sums grew, men looked for ways out of serving. The emperors fixed eighteen as the youngest age at which a man could be made to serve, and took the power to force any man with property enough into the rank. On top of that standing liability Patricius had taken on the training of a son for the bar. It cost him more than he had.

The boy had done well. He learned grammar at Thagaste and was sent on to the schools of Madaura, and his success there settled his father on Carthage and a career at the bar. The money was the difficulty. Fees went into the hand of the individual master, and a professor’s living was the sum of what his pupils brought him. Patricius spent several months collecting what a residence at Carthage would cost. So in 369 AD, between Madaura and Carthage, his son stayed at home with nothing to do, because the family could not yet afford to send him. Patricius did not have the money, and he raised it anyway. Men in Thagaste with more than he had spent less on their own sons. Part of the cost had been carried from the beginning by Romanianus, a rich man of the town and a friend of Patricius, who had been helping with the schooling since Thagaste and Madaura.

During those months at home Patricius saw his son at the public baths and realised the boy had grown up. He went home pleased and told his wife, Saint Monica, a Christian, that the boy was a man now, and he was already looking ahead to grandchildren. What he wanted out of the schools was a speaker. Whether the boy was growing towards God, and whether he was chaste, did not trouble him, so long as his son could speak well. He was warm with his friends and had a violent temper. Even so, in a town where wives showed one another in private the marks their husbands had left on their faces, the other women of Thagaste remarked that he had never once struck his wife.

Patricius had become a catechumen only a short time before — enrolled for instruction in the Church, not yet baptised. Baptism was routinely deferred, on the reasoning that sin committed after it was the graver sin. He was baptised this year, at the close of his life. St. Monica had borne his unfaithfulness for years without ever picking a quarrel over it, waiting for him to believe. After the baptism she had no more of it to bear. He died at Thagaste this year.

St. Augustine stayed at the schools at Carthage. From this year the fees are met out of St. Monica’s own means and by the help of Romanianus.