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This Levantine rhetorician had an immense success in the capital of the Empire. His renown had got beyond academical and fashionable circles and crossed the sea. Augustin admired him on trust, like everybody else. It is clear that, at this time he could not imagine a more glorious fortune for himself than to become, like Hierius, orator to the City of Rome.
Probably he had already this plan in his head when he sent his treatise On the Beautiful to Hierius, orator to the City of Rome; he thought that by this politeness he might depend, later, on the backing of the well-known rhetorician. Lastly, his friends, Honoratius, Marcianus, and the others, earnestly persuaded him to go and find a stage worthy of him at Rome.
Thou knowest, O Lord, for it is gone from me; for I have them not, but they are strayed from me, I know not how. But what moved me, O Lord my God, to dedicate these books unto Hierius, an orator of Rome, whom I knew not by face, but loved for the fame of his learning which was eminent in him, and some words of his I had heard, which pleased me?
It was also from literary ambition that about the same time he wrote a book on aesthetics called Upon the Beautiful and the Fit, which he dedicated to a famous colleague, the Syrian Hierius, "orator to the City of Rome," one of the professors of the official education appointed either by the Roman municipality or the Imperial treasury.
One recognizes in this passage, not only the Platonist, but the traveller and art-lover, who had gazed upon some of the finest specimens of ancient statuary. This first book had hardly any success. Augustin does not even say whether the celebrated Hierius paid him a compliment about it, and he has an air of giving us to understand that he had no other admirer but himself.
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