Lactantius.

        Among those who studied rhetoric under Arnobius at Sicca, in Africa, was Lucius Caecilius Firmianus Lactantius. He came of heathen parents and was born not later than A.D. 250. Probably his first work, written before he became a Christian, was his Symposium, or Banquet, now lost. He was teaching rhetoric at his home in Africa when Diocletian, who was developing Nicomedia in Bithynia as the capital of the eastern section of the empire, summoned him to that city to teach there (Institutes v. 2.2). Lactantius recorded this journey in hexameter verse in his Journey to Nicomedia which is also lost. A third work of his, probably from this early period, and now lost, was his Grammar.

        Whether he became a Christian before or after he left Africa is not certain, but it was probably after. But the outbreak of Diocletian's persecution in n.n. 303 interrupted any public work he was doing at Nicomedia and limited him to writing; he was already at work upon his principal book, the Divine Institutes. But the intensification of the persecution in 305 forced him soon after to leave Bithynia. Galerius' edict of toleration in 311 made it possible for him to return, however, and there he seems to have remained until 317, when the emperor Constantine summoned him to Treves, in Gaul, to become the tutor of Constantine's eldest son Crispus, then about ten years of age. Jerome says Lactantius was by that time “extremely old” and that is why his birth must be dated before or about A.D. 250. There is no record of the date of his death, but it probably occurred not far from A.D. 325.

        Jerome, in On Illustrious Men 8o, gives a list of twelve works written by Lactantius: the Banquet, the Journey, the Grammar, On the Wrath ofGod, the Divine Institutes (in seven books), an Epitome of it, To Asclepiades, On Persecution, Letters to Probus (four books), Letters to Severus (two books), Letters to Demetrianus (two books), and On God's Workmanship. Four of these, which were probably early gathered into a collection, are still extant: On God's Workmanship, the Institutes, the Epitomie and On the Wrath of God.

        Three other works or fragments apparently of Lactantius have come down to us; one is the poem On the Phoenix Bird, another is the remarkable book On the Deaths ofthe Persecutors, and a third is a short fragment On the Emotions. The last is probably part of a letter. The book On the Deaths ofthe Persecutors is probably to be identified with the work that Jerome calls On Persecution. Of thirteen works of Lactantius, therefore (aside from the little fragment On the Emotions), we possess six — On God's Workmanship, the Institutes, the Epitome, the Wrath of God, the Deaths ofthe Persecutors, and the Phoenix Bird.

        If we seek to relate these books chronologically to the life of Lactantius and the history of the times, the Banquet, the Journey, and probably the Grammar come first and, it is very likely, belong to the time before his conversion. The book On God's Workmanship was probably written in Nicomedia in A-D- 304, after the persecution began but before its intensification in 305. It deals its much detail with the constitution of the human frame which some said was inferior to that of the beasts, especially in its liability to disease; Lactantius points out the enormous advantage man has in the possession of mental and spiritual faculties.