Lactantius, a Christian apologist of the early 4th century ( deeply hating Decius for the persecution of Christians resulted from his edict on sacrifices ) described the emperor's demise as following:

For example, Lactantius wrote that Diocletian " by various taxes he had made all things exceedingly expensive, attempted by a law to limit their prices.

* Lactantius, De mortibus persecutorum, from Christian Classics Ethereal Library

Lactantius has written of the perverse accompaniments to the edict ; of goods withdrawn from the market, of brawls over minute variations in price, of the deaths that came when its provisions were enforced.

This argument was a type favoured by the ancient Greek skeptics, and may have been wrongly attributed to Epicurus by Lactantius, who, from his Christian perspective, regarded Epicurus as an atheist.

The friendship of the Emperor Constantine raised him from penury and he became tutor in Latin to his son Crispus, whom Lactantius may have followed to Trier in 317, when Crispus was made Caesar ( lesser co-emperor ) and sent to the city.

Modern scholars such as Tom Harpur and Joseph Campbell favor the derivation from " bind, connect ", probably from a prefixed, i. e. re ( again ) + ligare or " to reconnect ," which was made prominent by St. Augustine, following the interpretation of Lactantius.

However, it appears that some contemporary and later writers, such as the Christian author Lactantius, and Sextus Aurelius Victor ( who wrote about fifty years later and from uncertain sources ), misunderstood the Tetrarchic system in this respect, believing it to have involved a stricter division of territories between the four emperors.

This type of trilemma argument ( God is omnipotent, God is good, but Evil exists ) was one favoured by the ancient Greek skeptics, and this argument may have been wrongly attributed to Epicurus by Lactantius, who, from his Christian perspective, regarded Epicurus as an atheist.

This attempt to make Apollonius a hero of the anti-Christian movement provoked sharp replies from bishop Eusebius of Caesarea and from Lactantius.

* Edictum Mediolanense, as in Lactantius, De mortibus persecutorum, from The Roman Law Library at the University of Grenoble

According to Lactantius, a Latin historian of North African origins saved from poverty by the patronage of Emperor Constantine I ( r. 306 – 337 ) as tutor to his son Crispus, Constantine had dreamt of being ordered to put a " heavenly divine symbol " () on the shields of his soldiers.

Several fragments of oracles taken from the works of Theophilus and Lactantius, printed in the later editions, show that even more Sibylline oracles formerly existed.

The Edict was criticized by Lactantius, a rhetorician from Nicomedia, who blamed the emperors for the inflation and told of fighting and bloodshed that erupted from price tampering.

According to another theory suggested by the testimony of Lactantius, St. Jerome, and St. Isidore, the Christians, being ignorant of the date of Christ's coming, thought he would return during the middle of the night, and most probably the night of Holy Saturday or Easter Sunday, at or about the hour when he arose from the sepulchre.

The earliest extant manuscripts of the Odes of Solomon date from around the end of the 3rd and the beginning of the 4th century: the Coptic Pistis Sophia, a Latin quote of a verse of Ode 19 by Lactantius, and the Greek text of Ode 11 in Papyrus Bodmer XI.

Denis Van Berchem, of the University of Geneva, proposed that Eucherius ' presentation of the legend of the Theban legion was a literary production, not based on a local tradition ; by isolating its hagiographic conventions from the anachronisms of local narrative elements, he sought to demonstrate that Eucherius derived his formulas from Lactantius and Orosius and that the decimation was an anachronism: the practice of decimation had not been practiced for at least a century ( see Ammianus Marcellinus for Julian's misinterpretation of decimation ) and that service by Christians in the legions before Emperor Constantine I was relatively rare.

The sibyls of Antiquity were increased to ten in Lactantius ' Divine Institutions ( i. 6 ) a 4th century work quoting from a lost work of Varro, ( 1st century BCE ).

The most important ancient sources for the battle are Lactantius, De mortibus persecutorum 44 ; Eusebius of Caesarea, Ecclesiastical History ix, 9 and Life of Constantine i, 28-31 ( the vision ) and i, 38 ( the actual battle ); Zosimus ii, 15-16 ; and the Panegyrici Latini of 313 ( anonymous ) and 321 ( by Nazarius ).

There are suggestions in the Panegyrici Latini and Lactantius ' account that Diocletian arranged plans for his and Maximian's future retirement of power in Rome.

Lactantius and Rome: The Making of a Christian Empire.

It was further alleged by Lactantius that it was only after a later Persian defeat against Rome that his skin was given a cremation and burial.

Other early premillennialists included Pseudo-Barnabas, Papias, Methodius, Lactantius, Commodianus Theophilus, Tertullian, Melito, Hippolytus of Rome, Victorinus of Pettau and various Gnostics groups and the Montanists.

Lactantius criticized Diocletian for an excessive increase in troop sizes, declaring that " each of the four strove to have a far larger number of troops than previous emperors had when they were governing the state alone ".

The commentary has been misattributed to the Christian author Lucius Caelius Firmianus Lactantius, even though the commentator appears to have been Mithraic.

The point of the work is to describe the deaths of the persecutors of Christians: Nero, Domitian, Decius, Valerian, Aurelian, and the contemporaries of Lactantius himself, Diocletian, Maximian, Galerius, and Maximinus.

* Lactantius Placidus, Commentarii in Statii Thebaida II. 222.

Diocletian was conservative in matters of religion, a man faithful to the traditional Roman pantheon and understanding of demands for religious purification, but Eusebius, Lactantius and Constantine state that it was Galerius, not Diocletian, who was the prime supporter of the purge, and its greatest beneficiary.

Diocletian was demonized by his Christian successors: Lactantius intimated that Diocletian's ascendancy heralded the apocalypse, and in Serbian mythology, Diocletian is remembered as Dukljan, the adversary of God.

In Lactantius ' account, when Diocletian announced that he was to resign, the entire crowd turned to face Constantine.

Altogether, Diocletian effected a large increase in the number of bureaucrats at the government's command ; Lactantius was to claim that there were now more men using tax money than there were paying it.

Lucius Caecilius Firmianus Lactantius was an early Christian author ( ca.

Lactantius, a Latin-speaking native of North Africa, was a pupil of Arnobius and taught rhetoric in various cities of the Eastern Roman Empire, ending in Constantinople.

Lactantius was not born into a Christian family.

Crispus was put to death in 326, but when Lactantius died and in what circumstances is not known.

Lactantius states that, in the night before the battle, Constantine was commanded in a dream to " delineate the heavenly sign on the shields of his soldiers " ( On the Deaths of the Persecutors 44. 5 ).

Lactantius describes the death of Maxentius in the following manner: " The bridge in his rear was broken down.

An early Christian source, Lactantius, maintained that for some time prior to his death Valerian was subjected to the greatest insults by his captors, such as being used as a human footstool by Shapur when mounting his horse.

It has been alleged that some of Lactantius ' account is motivated by his desire to establish that persecutors of the Christians died fitting deaths ; the story was repeated then and later by authors in the Roman Near East fiercely hostile to Persia.

The Christian rhetor Lactantius suggested that Maximian shared Diocletian's basic attitudes but was less puritanical in his tastes, and took advantage of the sensual opportunities his position as emperor offered.

Some sources ( Lactantius, Epitome ) state that Galerius hated Maxentius and used his influence on Diocletian that Maxentius be ignored in the succession ; maybe Diocletianus also thought that he was not qualified for the military duties of the imperial office.

While he was not counted under the persecutors of the Christians by early sources like Lactantius, under the influence of the official propaganda later Christian tradition framed Maxentius as hostile to Christianity as well.

In late antiquity, the Thebaid which was by then a classic received a commentary by a Lactantius Placidus.