Gaius Marius Victorinus

Marius Victorinus was the most celebrated teacher of rhetoric in fourth-century Rome — so eminent that a statue was raised to him in the Forum of Trajan — and a Neoplatonist philosopher. Late in life, an old man, he was converted to Christianity; and after hesitating to profess it openly, he at last made a bold public confession of faith before the whole Roman congregation. Augustine tells the story at length in his Confessions, for it stirred his own heart. Victorinus went on to write the first Latin commentaries on the letters of St Paul and to defend the Trinity with the tools of Greek philosophy.