Of The Manner In Which The Persecutors Died

Of The Manner In Which The Persecutors Died, in Latin De Mortibus Persecutorum, is one of Lactantius’s major historical works, written sometime around 318 or 319 in the immediate aftermath of the conversion of Constantine and the formal end of the great persecution of Christians under Diocletian. The text is one of the most important primary sources for the political and religious history of the early fourth century, providing detailed accounts of the persecuting emperors and their fates that no other contemporary source covers in the same depth.

Lactantius works through the various Roman emperors who had directed persecutions against the Christian community, from the earlier persecutions of Nero, Domitian, and others through the systematic campaign launched by Diocletian in 303 and continued by his successors. For each persecuting emperor, Lactantius describes the policies, the violence inflicted on the Christian community, and the manner of the emperor’s death. The thesis of the work, made explicit in the structure as well as the argument, is that the various persecutors all came to bad ends as divine punishment for their attacks on the church. Lactantius presents the deaths in vivid detail, with some of his accounts being among the most graphic surviving descriptions of how late Roman political violence actually worked.

The work has obvious polemical purposes. Lactantius was writing to vindicate the cause of Christianity in the moment when it had finally emerged from centuries of legal vulnerability, and his presentation of the persecutors’ fates was meant to demonstrate that the apparent power of the Roman state to suppress the faith had ultimately failed against divine providence. Modern historians treat the text with appropriate critical attention to its polemical purposes, but they also rely on it as one of the most detailed contemporary sources for the period. Many of the historical details Lactantius reports are not available in any other surviving text from the era.

For students of late antiquity, of early Christianity, of Roman political history, or of the broader transition from pagan to Christian Rome that Constantine inaugurated, De Mortibus Persecutorum is essential. The English translation is generally readable. Anyone working with the text in a serious way will want a good edition with the kind of historical and textual notes that the dense material requires.