On the Deaths of the Persecutors

Lactantius was a teacher of Latin rhetoric from North Africa whom Diocletian had called to Nicomedia, the emperor’s residence, and he was living there when the persecution began in 303. He wrote this work soon after it ended, for a fellow Christian named Donatus who had suffered in it. Most of it deals with events of his own lifetime, and he says at the close that he relates them on the authority of well-informed persons (52).

The book has a thesis: that God brought the persecuting emperors to miserable deaths. Its portraits of Diocletian, Galerius and Maximinus are drawn to prove that, and should be read as the work of an enemy. Its documents are another matter. It gives the edict by which Galerius ended the persecution in 311 (34) and the letter on freedom of worship that Licinius had posted at Nicomedia in June 313 (48), the text commonly called the Edict of Milan. It also gives an early account of Constantine’s dream before the battle at the Milvian Bridge (44). The work survives in a single manuscript.