Augustine was born in the ancient North African city of Thagaste, in modern-day Algeria. There he lived until the age of seventeen when he traveled to Carthage to study rhetoric. In that great metropolis he immersed himself enthusiastically in “a hissing cauldron of lust.”27 As T. S. Eliot put it in his poem The Waste Land, To Carthage then I came Burning burning burning burning28
