According to this authority Jovinian in 388 was living at Rome the celibate life of an ascetic monk, possessed a good acquaintance with the Bible, and was the author of several minor works, but, undergoing an heretical change of view, afterwards became a self-indulgent Epicurean and unrefined sensualist.
At first a sensualist, like Condillac and Locke, next an intellectualist, he finally shows himself a mystical theosophist.
Accordingly, in the Republic he has no objection to trying the question of the intrinsic superiority of philosophic or virtuous' life by the standard of pleasure, and argues that the philosophic (or good) man alone enjoys real pleasure, while the sensualist spends his life in oscillating between painful want and the merely neutral state of painlessness, which he mistakes for positive pleasure.