Augustine (354-430 CE) stands with Homer, Plato, and Aristotle among the pre-eminent authorities in Western culture, and his Confessions is the only literary work from the early Christian centuries (aside from the New Testament) that is still widely read today. Long recognized as an outstanding Christian theologian, he has in recent decades also acquired a reputation as an exceptional exponent of the culture of the late Roman world, one whose texts vividly bring the era to life.

This companion is the first to present Augustine as a historical figure within an expanded world of late antiquity. State-of-the-art essays by leading specialists in this field provide orientation to his material, social, and intellectual milieu; his life and career; his writings; issues of the day with which he was engaged; and the main phases of his latter-day reception and influence. Each chapter pulls together resources for readers who want to anchor historically important Augustinian ideas and impulses in the complex realities of the author's life and afterlife. The result is a multifaceted portrait of Augustine in action in his own and later times.

Mark Vessey is Professor of English and Principal of Green College at the University of British Columbia. He is the author of Latin Christian Writers in Late Antiquity and Their Texts (2005), and has edited Augustine and the Disciplines: From Cassiciacum to Confessions (2005) and The Calling of the Nations: Exegesis, Ethnography, and Empire in a Biblical-Historic Present (2011).