And at the same time that he lost his taste for speculative thinking, new annoyances in his profession put the finishing touch on his discouragement. If the Roman students were less noisy than those of Carthage, they had a deplorable habit of walking off and leaving their masters unpaid. Augustin was ere long victimized in this way: he lost his time and his words. As at Carthage, so at Rome, he had to face the fact that he could not live by his profession. What was he to do? Would he have to go back home? He had fallen into despair, when an unforeseen chance turned up for him. The town council of Milan threw open a professorship of Rhetoric to public competition. It would be salvation for him if he could get appointed. For a long time he had wanted a post in the State education. In receipt of a fixed salary, he would no longer have to worry about beating up a class, or to guard against the dishonesty of his pupils. He put his name down immediately among the candidates. But no more in those days than in ours was simple merit by itself enough. It was necessary to pull strings. His friends the Manichees undertook to do this for him. They urged his claims warmly on the Prefect Symmachus, who doubtless presided at the competitive trials. By an amusing irony of fate, Augustin owed his place to people he was getting ready to separate from, whom even he was soon going to attack, and also to a man who was in a way the official enemy of Christianity. The pagan Symmachus appointing to an important post a future Catholic bishop--there is matter for surprise in that! But Symmachus, who had been Proconsul at Carthage, protected the Africans in Rome. Furthermore, it is likely that the Manichees represented their candidate to him as a man hostile to Catholics. Now in this year, A.D. 384, the Prefect had just begun an open struggle with the Catholics. He believed, therefore, that he made a good choice in appointing Augustin. So a chain of events, with which his will had hardly anything to do, was going to draw the young rhetorician to Milan--yes, and how much farther!--to where he did not want to go, to where the prayers of Monnica summoned him unceasingly: "Where I am, there shall you be also." When he was leaving Rome, he did not much expect that. What he chiefly thought of was that he had at last won an independent financial position, and that he was become an official of some importance. He had a flattering evidence of this at once: It was at the expense of the city of Milan and in the Imperial carriages that he travelled through Italy to take up his new post. III THE MEETING BETWEEN AMBROSE AND AUGUSTIN Before he left Rome, and during his journey to Milan, Augustin must have recalled more than once the verses of Terence which his friend Marcianus had quoted by way of encouragement and advice the night he set sail for Italy: "This day which brings to thee another life Demands that thou another man shalt be."