Victorinus, at some unknown point, left his home of North Africa to live permanently in Rome (hence some modern scholars have dubbed him Afer), probably for a teaching position, and had great success in his career, eventually being promoted to the lowest level of the senatorial order.
Victorinus' religious conversion to Christianity (c. 355), "at an advanced old age" according to Jerome, made a great impression on Augustine of Hippo, as recounted in Book 8[2] of the latter's Confessions.
The emperor, wanting to purge the schools of Christian teachers, published an edict in June 362 mandating that all state appointed professors receive approval from municipal councils (the emperor's accompanying brief indicated his express disapproval of Christians lecturing on the poems of Homer or Virgil with their religion being incongruous with the religion of Homer and Virgil).
He continued writing treatises on Trinitarianism to defend the adequacy of the Nicene Creed's definition of Christ the Son being "of the same substance" (Gr.
His writings illustrate a crucial fusion of Neo-Platonic philosophy and Christian theology, in which Victorinus effectively weaponized the former to prove and disprove arguments of the various Trinitarian debates raging during the fourth century.
Although it seems from internal references that he wrote commentaries on Romans and the Corinthians letters as well, all that remains are works, with some lacunae, on Galatians, Ephesians, and Philippians (the comments from the first 16 verses of this latter are missing).