According to Suetonius (Augustus, 94) he foretold the greatness of the future emperor on the day of his birth, and Apuleius (Apologia, 42) records.
Lucian and Apuleius give descriptions of the beggar-priests who went round the great cities with an image of the goddess on an ass and collected money.
Nevertheless, the Roman functionaries, the army and the colonists from Italy soon brought the Latin element into Africa, where it flourished with such vigour that, in the 3rd century, Carthage became the centre of a Romano-African civilization of extraordinary literary brilliancy, which numbered among its leaders such men as Apuleius, Tertullian, Arnobius, Cyprian, Augustine and many others.
These names were known not only to Jewish but also to heathen writers, such as Pliny and Apuleius.
Some general information as to the Platonic doctrines (chiefly in a Neoplatonic garb) was obtainable from the commentary with which Chalcidius (6th century) accompanied his translation, from the work of Apuleius (2nd century) De dogmate Platonis, and indirectly from the commentary of Macrobius (c. 400) on the Somnium Scipionis of Cicero, and from the writings of St Augustine.