📍Thagaste (now Souk Ahras), Algeria
354 – 430“I was born Aurelius Augustinus around 354 AD in Thagaste in Roman North Africa — now Souk Ahras in Algeria. My mother Monica was devoutly Christian; my father Patricius was a pagan. I was educated in Carthage in rhetoric, lived a sensual life I later described with unflinching honesty in the Confessions, and fathered a son with a woman I loved. I heard Ambrose preach in Milan and was baptised in 387. I became Bishop of Hippo and served there until the Vandals besieged the city in 430, dying as they closed in. The Confessions and The City of God shaped Western Christianity more than any other texts after the Bible. The North African childhood gave me the heat and the light and the restlessness that runs through everything I wrote.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📷 Location image · via Wikimedia Commons
Sources: Brown, P. Augustine of Hippo (1967, new edition 2000), University of California Press; Augustine. Confessions (397 AD, translated Henry Chadwick 1991)