These extracts from one of Jerome's early letters show that friendship was something of which he had intense experience and which he valued highly in his youth; yet this is a view of him which is easily obscured by his later experiences and writings, offering a portrait of this brilliant but difficult man as one suspicious, sensitive and closed to the charms of friendship, a man for whom the saying ‘Loyalty is rare among men’ became as it were a personal motto. Throughout his life, it would seem, Jerome was able to engage in close relationships only with people who were willing to show him due respect and who would not contradict him. Woe betide anyone who criticised Jerome or refused to fit in with his way of thinking! But as a young man, at home in Stridon (in what is probably now Croatia), while studying at Rome, and then at Trier (one of the new cities of imperial residence) and Aquileia, Jerome was surrounded by a number of close friends who apparently shared his interests and his way of life, men such as Bonosus (the friend referred to in the first quotation above), Heliodorus, Rufinus, Chromatius and the aristocratic Pammachius.