Curated playlist
4th-century Romans
- EusebiusEusebius of Caesarea died on the 30th of May AD 339, and what he chose not to write may matter as much as what he did. In one of his own works he warns that he will relate nothing about the martyrs of his time except the things in which he…
- Augustine of HippoAugustine of Hippo was born on the 13th of November 354 in Thagaste, a small town in Roman North Africa that today is Souk Ahras, Algeria. He died on the 28th of August 430 as the Vandals were laying siege to his city. In the seventy-five…
- Saint GeorgeSaint George died on the 23rd of April 303, beheaded at Lydda in Palestine after refusing to renounce his Christian faith before the Roman emperor Diocletian. He was a soldier, possibly a member of the elite Praetorian Guard, of…
- PrudentiusPrudentius drew Luxuria as a warrior entering combat: "Flowershod and swaying from the wine cup, every step a fragrance." Those lines appear in a poem he composed after leaving behind a long public career. He was born in 348 in the…
- Gregory of NazianzusGregory of Nazianzus once compared himself to the Prophet Jonah, begging to be thrown overboard. "Seize me and throw me," he told a council of 150 bishops in 381, offering to sacrifice his own office for the sake of unity. He was, by then,…
- LactantiusLactantius, born Lucius Caecilius Firmianus around the year 250, came from Berber stock in North Africa and rose to become one of the most celebrated Latin stylists of the early Christian world. He wound up as an advisor to the Roman…
- MacrobiusMacrobius Ambrosius Theodosius flourished around AD 400, and yet for centuries after his death, medieval scholars kept copying his books. He was a Roman provincial who arrived at the edges of a crumbling empire and left behind texts that…
- JeromeJerome, the early Christian priest and scholar also known as Saint Jerome, once described crawling through the catacombs beneath Rome. He wrote of crypts dug deep in the earth, their walls lined on either side with the bodies of the dead,…
- ClaudianClaudian, the Latin name for the poet Claudius Claudianus, arrived in Rome from Alexandria in 394 with a mother tongue of Greek and an ambition that would reshape how power was spoken about in the dying years of the Western Roman Empire.…
- Ammianus MarcellinusAmmianus Marcellinus once described himself, in Latin, as "miles quondam et graecus" - a former soldier and a Greek. That self-description holds something quietly remarkable. He was a Greek-speaking man from the eastern reaches of the…
- Mardonius (philosopher)Mardonius offered the young Julian a choice. "Do you long for horse races?" he asked. "There is one very cleverly described in Homer. Take up the book and study it!" Born a Goth and raised in slavery, Mardonius became a philosopher,…