ABSTRACT
The 170-line poem telling the story of the mythical phoenix, translated here in full, has been convincingly attributed to Lactantius,1 the Christian writer born in North Africa around the middle of the third century, who was converted to Christianity, survived the persecutions under the Emperor Diocletian at the beginning of the fourth century, and ended up as tutor to the Emperor Constantine’s son at Trier during the very first years when Christianity was becoming an officially accepted religion. He is famed not so much for this poem as for his prose works of Christian apologetics written in an urbane style that appealed to the humanists of the Renaissance who referred to him as ‘the Christian Cicero’. His prose writings include the Divinae Institutiones (The Divine Institutes) and works entitled De Ira Dei (The Anger of God), De Opificio Dei (The Workmanship of God), and De Mortibus Persecutorum (The Deaths of the Persecutors) in which Lactantius, more of a rhetorician than a theologian, is concerned to show the inaccuracy of pagan philosophical views regarding the nature of God and of human beings, and to discuss the question of where true wisdom and virtue are to be found.
