Gaius Marius Victorinus

Here was a man who reached a learned old age, skilled in all the liberal arts, one who had read all the philosophers and could sift their worth, who had taught many of the most distinguished senators, had even earned and accepted the honor of having his statue raised in the Roman forum (a thing citizens of this world so highly prize) because of the great worth of his instruction, yet was also, deep into his years, a cultist of idols, the celebrant of evil rights, with which almost all the nobility had grown giddy--with a spawn of misbegotten mongrel deities... all this Victorinus, into old age, had defended with earthshaking eloquence, yet he did not, finally, blush to become a child of your Christ, an infant at your font, 'humbling his neck under your yoke' and branding his vanquished forehead with your cross. (St. Augustine, Confessions, Book VIII)

In 4th century Rome, Gaius Marius Victorinus was a celebrity--if not the Einstein of the Roman Empire. A Neoplatonist, grammarian, and official rhetor of the city of Rome, Victorinus stunned the intellectual class--in which paganism was revived under the emperor Julian the Philosopher--when he resigned his position as rhetor and announced his conversion to Christianity.

In ancient Rome, newly baptized converts to Christianity were required to profess the Creed before the multitude of the faithful. According to St. Augustine, in his Confessions, "As he climbed to the place for reciting the creed, all those who recognized him--and who did not?--raised the glad outcry: Victorinus! Then the whole rejoicing crowd repeated in low whispers: Victorinus!"

His radical departure from the prevailing intellectual order was greatly influential to St. Augustine, and many scholars have attributed Victorinus' conversion as foreshadowing the Christian conversions of Roman intellectuals in the subsequent decades. It must be noted that Victorinus did not abandon his Platonist philosophy; rather, his efforts to synthesize Platonism and Christianity was influential to St. Augustine's similar (albeit much more well-known) efforts.