Lucius Caecilius Firmianus Lactantius

Lactantius was a North African, a pupil of the rhetorician Arnobius at Sicca, and good enough at his trade that the emperor Diocletian summoned him east to Nicomedia to be professor of Latin rhetoric in the imperial capital. He was probably still a pagan when he took the job. He was a Christian by the time he lost it.

He lost it in 303. The Great Persecution began in Nicomedia, with the church across from the palace pulled down and the edict torn off the wall by an angry Christian who was burned alive for it. Lactantius resigned or was removed, and Jerome says he was afterward so poor that he lacked the necessities of life. He had been at the top of his profession in the capital of the world, and he ended in want.

In that condition he wrote his major work, the Divine Institutes, in seven books, the first attempt in Latin at a complete, orderly account of the Christian faith aimed at educated pagans. He wrote it as the classically trained man he was, arguing from the philosophers, the poets, and the Sibylline oracles rather than from a Bible his readers did not accept. The Latin is so polished that Renaissance humanists nicknamed him the Christian Cicero. Those same humanists noticed, correctly, that his grasp of doctrine was thinner than his prose.

He also wrote On the Workmanship of God, on the design of the human body as evidence of a designer, and On the Anger of God, arguing that a God who is indifferent to evil is not good.

His most-read book is the shortest and the hardest: On the Deaths of the Persecutors. Lactantius went back through the emperors who had attacked the church, Nero, Domitian, Decius, Valerian, Aurelian, Diocletian, Galerius, Maximinus, and recorded, case by case, what became of each. Valerian captured alive by the Persians and used as a footstool. Galerius eaten by a disease that filled the palace with the smell of it. He wrote it as a Christian who had watched the last of it happen from inside the capital. As a source it is partisan and furious; it is also an eyewitness account of the Great Persecution by a man who was in the room, and historians cannot do without it.

He lived to see the turn. Around 317 Constantine, now emperor in the West, brought the old professor to Trier to tutor his eldest son Crispus. Lactantius died there about 325, in the reign of a Christian emperor, having begun his career serving the man who tried to destroy the church.

Sources: Jerome, On Illustrious Men 80; Lactantius, Divine Institutes and On the Deaths of the Persecutors (Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 7); Philip Schaff, History of the Christian Church, vol. 2.