Lactantius

• 1. Introduction

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  Lactantius, 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 emperor Constantine I himself, shaping the earliest stages of the empire's turn toward Christianity. How does a man born into a pagan family in a provincial corner of North Africa end up tutoring an emperor's son and preserving the story of Constantine's famous vision? The answers run through persecution, poverty, and a literary reputation so dazzling that Renaissance scholars reached across more than a thousand years to call him the Christian Cicero.

• 2. A Pagan Education

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  Arnobius of Sicca Veneria was Lactantius's teacher, and the city itself was no backwater. Sicca Veneria was an important city in the region of Numidia, in what is now Tunisia near the modern city of El Kef. From that foundation, Lactantius went on to teach rhetoric in his home district, possibly Cirta, also in Numidia, where an inscription records the name "L. Caecilius Firmianus."

  The Roman emperor Diocletian himself noticed Lactantius's talent and summoned him to serve as an official professor of rhetoric at Nicomedia, the imperial capital in the east. Lactantius later described the sea voyage from Africa in a poem called Hodoeporicum, now lost to time. At the court in Nicomedia he moved in a distinguished circle that included the administrator Sossianus Hierocles and the Neoplatonic philosopher Porphyry. It was also in Nicomedia that he first encountered two men who would define his later life: the future emperor Constantine, and Constantine's rival Galerius, whom Lactantius would later portray as a villain in the Christian persecutions.

• 3. Persecution and Poverty

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  On the 24th of February, 303, Diocletian issued his first Edict against the Christians. Lactantius had already converted to Christianity by that point and had resigned his prestigious professorship before the edict was published, anticipating Diocletian's purging of Christians from the imperial staff. The decision cost him everything financially.

  Saint Jerome, writing afterward, described Lactantius as having lived in poverty after leaving his post. He was a Latin scholar stranded in a predominantly Greek-speaking city, scraping out a living by his pen alone. The persecution eventually forced him to leave Nicomedia entirely, and he may have returned to North Africa during this period. His difficulties did not stop his writing. It was during Diocletian's persecution, in 303 or 304, that he completed De Opificio Dei, a treatise dedicated to a former pupil named Demetrianius, described in the source as a rich Christian. That work's opening outlines the apologetic principles that would run through everything Lactantius wrote. The poverty years finally ended when Constantine became his patron.

• 4. At Court With Constantine

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  Constantine appointed the elderly Lactantius as Latin tutor to his son Crispus in the years 309-310. Crispus was probably between ten and fifteen years old at the time. The role placed Lactantius at the center of a dynasty remaking the Roman world.

  In 317, when Crispus was elevated to the rank of Caesar, or subordinate co-emperor, and dispatched to the city of Trier, Lactantius followed him there. The tutor's proximity to power gave him a front-row seat to world-changing events. His work De Mortibus Persecutorum, on the deaths of the persecutors, is considered a valuable primary source precisely because of where Lactantius stood. In that work he preserves the account of Constantine's vision of the Chi Rho before Constantine's conversion to Christianity. The only surviving complete text of that work is found in a single manuscript bearing the title Lucii Caecilii liber ad Donatum Confessorem de Mortibus Persecutorum. The fate of Constantine's family took a grim turn in 326, when Constantine ordered the execution of Crispus. The time and circumstances of Lactantius's own death remain unknown.

• 5. The Divine Institutes

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  Written between 303 and 311, the Institutiones Divinae stands as Lactantius's most important work. It was the first systematic exposition of Christian theology written in Latin, designed on a scale broad enough, in Lactantius's own conception, to answer all pagan critics at once. Within it, he quoted from the nineteenth of the Odes of Solomon, one of only two known texts of that collection available until the early twentieth century.

  The work attracted admiration and criticism in roughly equal measure across the centuries. Saint Jerome praised the flow of Lactantius's Latin while faulting his grasp of Christian doctrine, writing: "Lactantius has a flow of eloquence worthy of Tully: would that he had been as ready to teach our doctrines as to pull down those of others!" Patrick Healy, a later commentator, drew the same conclusion: that the beauty of the style and the aptness of the terminology could not disguise the author's weak command of Christian principles and his near-total unfamiliarity with Scripture. The work also contains Lactantius's famous mockery of the idea that the earth is round, which Copernicus himself later criticized as "childish."

• 6. Phoenix, Prophecy, and Legacy

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  Lactantius is also widely credited with the Latin poem The Phoenix, which retells the Egyptian and Arabian myth of the bird that dies and is reborn. The poem shows only faint traces of Christian symbolism, though modern scholars have found enough literary evidence to suggest its author read the eastern myth as an allegory for resurrection. That Latin poem later became the principal source for the well-known Old English poem that carries the same modern title.

  In his prophetic writing, Lactantius held a premillennialist view, believing that the second coming of Christ would precede a thousand-year reign on earth. Charles E. Hill described his position as a determined attempt to revive a more genuine form of chiliasm. Lactantius quoted the Sibylline Oracles extensively, even though those texts are now regarded as pseudepigrapha. Book VII of the Divine Institutes shows his familiarity with Jewish, Christian, Egyptian, and Iranian apocalyptic traditions. After his death, his reputation took a strange turn: the Gelasian Decree of the sixth century condemned his works as apocryphal. Renaissance humanists recovered him not as a theologian but as a stylist, and his works were copied in manuscript several times in the fifteenth century. In 1465, the German printers Arnold Pannartz and Konrad Sweynheim produced the first printed edition at the Abbey of Subiaco. That edition was the first dated book printed in Italy, probably the fourth book ever printed there, and the first anywhere to use a Greek alphabet font. A copy sold at auction in the year 2000 for more than one million dollars.