was not even formally a Christian at this stage, he called his son Adeodatus (“given by God”), the Latin equivalent of the Greek Theodoros (Theodore). Years later, after his conversion, he sent his mistress away but he kept his son, who was very precious to him. Not long after this, as he was honing his rhetorical skills by reading Cicero’s Hortensius—a work now lost—Augustine was struck by the beauty not only of Cicero’s language but also of his ideas, and he fell in love with philosophy. Among