Lactantius (1), Lucius Caelius (or Caecilius) Firmianus, a well-known Christian apologist of the beginning of the 4th cent.: "Rhetor erat ille, non theologus: neque inter ecclesiae
doctores locum unquam obtinuit," as bp. Bull
says of him (Del. Fid. Nic. ii. 14, 4, and iii. 10, 20). Lactantius, enumerating previous Christian apologists, seems only conscious of three—Minucius Felix, Tertullian, and St. Cyprian—but this is explained by supposing that he limits himself to his countrymen, viz. African apologists. St. Jerome mentions an Itinerary written by him, in hexameter verse, of his route from Africa to Nicomedia, as though he were then leaving home for the first time. The African church produced, as did no other country, a succession of learned advocates or rhetoricians, men of the world, who embraced Christianity from conviction, and wrote vigorously in its defence, culminating in St. Augustine, each employing Latin with the freedom of a vernacular, and in the case of Lactantius with so much purity as to have procured for him the title of the Christian Cicero; while Italy produced no Christian apologists and, till St. Ambrose, no great theologian. Divines and men of letters, as well as emperors, had to be sought in the provinces. In all his empire Constantine could find no better preceptor for his eldest son Crispus, then destined to succeed him at Rome, than this African Latin. This brought him to Gaul c. 313, the first date we can fix in his career on any tangible grounds. Lactantius had previously been invited to set up a school of rhetoric at Nicomedia. There, doubtless, he was converted on witnessing the superhuman constancy displayed by the Christians, and by his "best beloved" Donatus in particular, on whose sufferings in the tenth and savagest persecution, under Diocletian, he dwells with so much tenderness (de Morte Persecut. cc. 16, 35, and 52). Donatus, he tells us himself, had lain in prison six years when the edict of Galerius, published 311, procured his release. In Gaul, Lactantius died, perhaps in the year of the Nicene council, 325. To judge from his extant writings, he must have been somewhat austere, soured it may be by failures, as he had no mean estimate of his own powers (de Opif. Dei, c. 1; Inst. v. 1–4): a man of few and warm rather than of many friends; thoughtful, learned, conscientious, and pure. Eusebius (Chron. 319) speaks of him as having always been so poor as frequently to have lacked the necessaries of life. St. Jerome says it was his ill-success in getting pupils at Nicomedia, from its being a Greek city, that induced him to write. St. Jerome gives a list of his writings, but whether in the order in which they were published or not he omits to say. The first he names is the Symposium, which he calls a youthful performance; the second is the Itinerary; the third, the Grammarian. Then comes the well-known treatise de Irâ Dei, still extant, which St. Jerome calls pulcherrimum; next, his Institutions, in seven books, extant also, on which his fame principally rests; next, his own epitome of the same work, In Libro uno acephalo ("a compendium of the last three books only," as Cave explains it; but the first half was claimed by Pfaff to have been recovered 1712 from a Turin MS., and its genuineness, though disputed, is still maintained). The seventh work named by St. Jerome was in two books, addressed to Asclepiades; both are now lost. The eighth, which had disappeared also, was claimed by Baluze as recovered by him; it was published in 1679 at the commencement of his second book of Miscellanies, but with the title Liber ad Donatum Confessorem de Mortibus Persecutorum, instead of de Persecutione Liber unus, which is that of St. Jerome. Judged by its contents, the first is the more accurate title. His four books of letters to Probus, two to Severus, and two to his pupil Demetrian, which St. Jerome regards as eight consecutive books (in Gal. ii. 4), are lost. The twelfth and last work assigned to him by St. Jerome is de Opificio Dei, vel Formatione Hominis. The tract de Morte Persecutorum ends with the joint edict of Licinius and Constantine, published at Nicomedia by the former, 313, at which the author lays down his pen in celebrating the triumph of God, with thankful joy and prayers day and night for its continuance. He could not have written thus after the differences between Licinius and Constantine had commenced, and the former joined the ranks of the persecutors; he therefore probably published it when leaving Nicomedia for Gaul.