DŌROTHEOS IN THE SIXTH CENTURY remarks that a man who was great and a leader (meg as kai prōtos) in Gaza would be a lesser figure in Caesarea, a peasant (paganos) in Antioch, and in Constantinople a poor man (penēs) . The observation is not in itself especially original, but is as good an introduction as any to one of the issues most crucial to the understanding of how élites work: that they vary depending on where they are, on where one is looking at them from, on who the people are who make up the non-élites around them. These points have been often stressed in the articles in this book. The force of the terminology of élites- rather than the more restricted terminology of aristocracies-is that there can be as many élites as there are hierarchical structures in societies (see John Haldon’s Introduction). In looking for élites, one is also seeking to pin down hierarchies: how t hey work, how they are legitimised, and how stable they are. Further, once one has identified a variety of networks of élites, one can also look at how they overlap, how easy it is for a single person to be part of many élites, how easy it is to move from one to another. Augustine of Hippo was born to one élite, the curial aristocracy of Thagaste: big in T hagaste, but not of much status outside. His parents, however, saved to buy him, through education, into the koine of the imperial-level élites. He moved relatively easily thereafter , first into the intellectual and rhetorical élite of imperial-level cities like Carthage and Milan; from there, he could have reached the administrative élite of the palatine bureaucracy had he wished, given his talents. When he chose the church, he ended up back in a provincial town (though a relatively important one), with an ecclesiastical élite membership that was African rather than imperial-level, but his intellectual contacts remained Mediterranean-wide, and he never lost the political influence (with popes, for example) t hat his intellectual élite membership brought him.Augustine thus straddled four worlds, without more than occasional moments of existential doubt . Probably the move out of Thagaste was the hardest; the more modest a family, the more talented -or well-connected, or lucky̶its scions had to be to succeed. But the crucial points are that there were several worlds for Augustine to straddle, for the late Roman world had any number of hierarchies, each with its own procedures; and that it was indeed possible to move between them, and to be part of several at once.