Other Writings.

        In the years 313 and 314 Lactantius wrote three book: On the Wrath of God, On the Deaths ofthe Persecutors, ands the Epitome ofthe Institutes — probably in that order. The work On the Wrath of God was dedicated to a certain Donatus, who had been in prison for six years, A.D. 305-11, and was probably written shortly after the revision of the Institutes, in A.D. 313. The book On the Deaths ofthe Persecutors, probably to be identified with what Jerome called On Persecution, must have followed almost at once. This extraordinary work, which seems both in general and in detail to show the influence of II Maccabees, tells the fates of the persecuting emperors: Nero, Domitian, Decius, Valerian and Aurelian are briefly sketched, chapters 1-6, and the bulk of the book, chapters 7-52, devoted to contemporary persecutors and what became of them-Diocletian, Maximian, Galerius, and Maximin. The cruelties perpetrated by these emperors against the Christians and others Lactantius recites unsparingly and related with quite understandable if not altogether Christian relsh the dreadful ends which overtook them. Of course, he sees in the fates of these persecuting emperors the judgment of God for their brutality and violence, not only against the church but against many others of their subjects, high and low. And while there may well be exaggeration here, there is no doubt that much of what Lactantius says is true.

        To this time, probably to 314, belongs also the Epitome of the Institutes, written in response to a request from a brother Pentadius. It is a free and bold rehandling of the material of the seven books in a much shorter form but with the inclusion of some y new material as well.

        Harnack suggests that it was the striking work On the Deaths of the Persecutors that led Constantine in 317 to invite Lactantius to Treves in Gaul to become the tutor of Crispus, the emperor's eldest son. Although the authenticity of the book On the Deaths of the Persecutors and the poem On the Phoenix has been seriously doubted, they are probably both the work of Lactantius, most modern scholars are disposed to accept them as his. The story of the phoenix, the bird which lives five hundred years and then makes a kind of cocoon and enters it and dies, only to have another phoenix generated by its decay, is as old as Herodotus (ii. 73), and is told also by Pliny the Elder (natural History X. 2) and by Clement of Rome (To the Corinthians 25). Just when Lactancius wrote it cannot be determined, but it clearly belongs to his Christian period. It was later imitated by the heathen poet Claudian, about A. D. 400, in a poem of the same name.

        Among the lost works of Lactantius are the eight books of his letters: To Probus (four books), To Severus (two books), and To Demetrianus (two books). These were sometimes more like treatises than personal communications; Damasus wrote Jerome that they sometimes ran in length to a thousand lines and complained that they had little to say about doctrine but were about metrical, geographical, and philosophical matters, in which he took little interest. Jerome once speaks (in his commentary on Galatians) of a remark in the eighth book of Lactantius' letters To Demetrianus, so that the three groups of letters — of four, two, and two books — probably circulated as a single collection in eight books. Except for a few fragments, they have disappeared.

        Lactantius expressed an intention of writing a book Against All Heresies (Institutes iv. 30. 14) and another Against the Jews (ibid. vii 1. 26), but he seems never to have carried out these plans. Although he was not a great theologian or much interested in speculative thought, he had read very widely himself, was much used by Jerome, and was read by Augustine. The charm of his style and the wealth of his imagination went far to make up for his doctrinal weakness, and he was called the Christian Cicero.