The Octavius.

        Sixty or seventy years later Minucius Felix, probably a lawyer in Rome, replied to Fronto with the dialogue, the Octavius. It twice mentions Fronto as an assailant of Christianity (chaps. 9 and 31), and it is not unlikely that it reproduces some of his attack in the first third of it, in which the pagan case against Christianity is presented. Fronto's was the only literary attack on Christianity made in Latin.

        The scene of the Octavius is laid in Rome. Minucius, or Marcus, as his friends call him, tells how his friend Octavius has come from Africa to visit him, and, as the weather is fine, they and a pagan friend Caecilius go on a pleasure trip to Ostia for the sea baths. As they go, they pass a statue of Serapis, and Caecilius throws it a kiss. Octavms rebukes his superstition, and Caecilius declares he is ready to defend his attitude, if they will hear him. They agree and sit down, Minucius, as a sort of umpire, sitting between Caecilius and Octavius.

        Caecilius then presents the popular case against the Christians: Christians are too ignorant to know the things they profess to know. As a matter of fact, there is no reason or providence in the universe. Rome flourished as long as it piously worshiped the gods; it is wrong for the Christians to revile them. They themselves worship a crucified man and indulge in hideous, evil, and wanton orgies. They conceal their practices and are really a wretched lot of secretive, ignorant, miserable people, unequal to the demands of this life and utterly unfitted to forecast the life to come (chaps. 5-13).

        Challenged by Caecilius and encouraged by Minucius to reply, Octavius does so. Wisdom and intelligence, he declares, depend upon natural endowment, and the Christians' possession of them 1s not determined by the measure of wealth or advantages they may enjoy. Reasonable men have always seen reason and order m the universe and perceived that these imply a divine ruler controlling it all. Such a ruler is too great to be understood or even named; any name would fall short of him. Poets and philosophers have agreed that he is man's father and that he is one. Against such views, old fables and the worship of dead heroes as gods ought not to weigh at all. The heathen gods were really deified men, images of whom the people worship. The very birds and animals know that these images are not gods. Their rites are grotesque and absurd, even inhuman and immoral. Roman success has been won not by piety but by violence. Demons, not gods, are behind the auguries and oracles, and they inspire the hideous slanders against the Christians-that they worship monsters, devour infants, a~ and indulge in incest at their feasts. It is really the heathen themselves who practice murder and incest. God cannot be contained in a temple. The Jews themselves admit in their writings that they forsook him before he abandoned them. The philosophers have long maintained that the universe will eventually perish, and God, who created man, can bring him back to life, and reward or punish him, as he deserves. What Christians now suffer is not a punishment but a discipline, heroically endured. They avoid pagan shows and practices as impious, cruel, and absurd (chaps. 16-38). Caecilius acknowledges himself defeated by the arguments of Octavius and forthwith accepts Christianity (chaps. 39-41).

        It is generally agreed that in elegance of style Minucius' defense of Christianity decidedly excels Fronto's attack upon it, if we may judge the latter from the clumsy and affected pieces of Fronto discovered in the past century. The absence of scripture or of mention of Christ by name in the Octavius is natural enough in a work addressed to pagan readers, as, of course, the Octavius was.

        We owe the preservation of the Octavius to the fact that it was mistaken in the Middle Ages for the eighth (octavus) book of Arnobius Against the Heathen (Adversus nationes) and preserved as such, appended to the seven books of that work with no title of its own, in the Paris manuscript of the ninth century, which is our sole independent witness to the text of Arnobius. It was first published, as a part of Arnobius, in 1543, but was soon recognized (1560) by Balduinus as the long-lost Octavius mentioned by Lactantius (in his Divine Institutes i. 11 and v. 1, begun about A.D. 303) and by Jerome (On Illustrious Men 58 and Epist. 70:5). Jerome mentions a work On Fate as ascribed to Minucius but says the style is very unlike that of the Octavius. No trace of it has been found.

        No problem in the field of early Christian literature has been more hotly debated than the relative dates of the Octavius and of the Apology (Apologeticus) of Tertullian; more than two hundred articles and monographs have been devoted to it. The Apologeticus was written in A.D. 197 and so much resembles the Octavius in so many points that it is clear that one was strongly influenced by the other. Jerome repeatedly speaks as though Tertullian preceded Minucius, and it would be strange if the Roman writer could think so disparagingly of the state of the empire in the course of the splendid era from Trajan to Aurelius; his attitude accords much better with the days of its palpable decline, in the middle of the third century. In the third century, moreover, the empire was getting into the lawyers' hands, and that might suggest making them the participants in the debate.

        The Octavius was later made use of by Novatian in his work on the Trinity, for example, written toward A.D. zso, and also by Xystus II, bishop of Rome, if he wrote the discourse To Novatian, written between A.D. 253 and 758 and preserved under the name of Cyprian.[92] So the Octavius was probably written sometime between A.D. 238 and 249, when the empire was at a low ebb. If Novatian's work On the Trinity was written about A.D. 245, the Octavius may be dated about 240. Its mention by Lactantius, about A.D. 303, and by Jerome has been noted.

        The Octavius is very different from the Greek apologies; it swings away from the earlier biblical apologetic toward the more sophisticated philosophical Christianity of Lactantius; it is much more like a hearing before a magistrate or, particularly, a philosophical debate before an umpire. It was modeled on Cicero's disputations-the Orator, the Nature of the Cods, and Divination. The pagan side is first presented with brutal frankness, and then the Christian side is just as unsparingly given.

        It seems idle to look for historical characters in the persons who take part. Octavius is introduced as an old friend and teacher from Africa, and he and Caecilius are dead when the book is written, but in a work so full of art all this is probably simply part of the literary guise of the book. The appearance of the latter name, Caecihus Natalis, in a number of Cirta inscriptions of A.D. 211-17, as belonging to a leading citizen there at that time is probably little more than a coincidence.