Z.'s study of De mortibus persecutorum (DMP) makes a welcome contribution to the ongoing study of Lactantius and his role in early Christianity in the Roman Empire. Invited from Carthage to Nicomedia under Diocletian, the Christian orator and apologist became an eyewitness to his court and the persecution that bears his name. In writing DMP, Lactantius made himself a principal source for the historical understanding of the troubled years that led to Constantine's rise. Z. gives to DMP, Lactantius’ major historical work, the same kind of attention that others have devoted to his major apologetic work, The Divine Institutes. She rightly takes the notion of ‘violence’ as DMP's unifying theme and explores Lactantius’ presentation of the events and characters he means to relate and critique. The result is a literary analysis that reveals DMP's underlying argument. Z. hopes her reading can provide a new starting place for judgements about Lactantius and the history he portrays.
Z.'s work comprises seven chapters of rather unequal length. Chapter 1 introduces and justifies her use of ‘close-reading’ as an interpretative method grounded in ‘New Criticism’ (p. 6). She provides a decade-by-decade account of scholarship on Lactantius and then evaluates the genre of DMP. Historians have used DMP to reconstruct elements of the Constantinian turn, but often without due consideration for the genre and argument of a complex and carefully crafted source. She studies the work on its own terms in order to provide a firmer basis for historical scholarship. Z. concludes that DMP is a work of mixed genre combining historical narrative with formal elements of an ancient letter and the apologetic intention of proving ‘the plausibility of Christianity in the face of the persecution’ (p. 38). Lactantius’ history aims to encourage his addressee(s) and defend persecuted Christians.
In Chapter 2 Z. takes Lactantius’ claim (DMP 1.2–3) that the tetrarchs are adversarii and tyranni as programmatic for DMP and works to establish the notion of tyranny his narrative means to reveal. She excavates the Virgilian vocabulary of virtus and pietas (pp. 41–3) that Lactantius often uses to portray each tetrarch as an anti-Aenaes, whose regime constitutes a dominatio, rather than a restoration of the Roman state (pp. 42–3). For Lactantius, the tetrarchs are impius, not only because they refuse to acknowledge the true God of the Christians, but also in the classical sense of failing their sacred obligations to gods, country and elders (p. 43). After Augustus, emperors claimed to rule through common and distinctive virtutes, but the tetrarchs exhibit collective and individual vices. Diocletian is greedy but especially fearful, Maximian dominated by his lust. The supreme tyrant (‘Gipfel der Tyrannei’) Galerius is a barbaric anti-Roman (p. 85), whose boundless cruelty expresses the greed and pride that embrace him (pp. 85–91). Maximinus Daia is a half-barbarian, who increases taxes to enrich non-Romans, while violating every norm of social order (p. 112). Lactantius’ portraiture (pp. 120–3) argues that the tetrarchy, not Christians, represent an existential threat to the traditional Roman order. As Z. says, ‘The polemic against Christianity is inverted into a polemic against paganism’ (p. 56). Her close reading reveals the argumentative thesis latent in DMP's use of historical analogy and literary reference.
Chapters 3–4 review each of the four tetrarchs in order of succession – Diocletian, Maximian, Galerius, Maximinus Daia. Z. traces the distinctive forms of violence they first practise and later suffer. She finds these linked to each man's individual character. Each exhibits specific vices that eventually determine the form of his death (p. 182). Her discussion of Diocletian exemplifies the method and argument. For Z., DMP begins by characterising the Edict on Maximum Prices as a form of violence because it results in people's deaths (p. 123). Diocletian next violates the traditional rights of Roman citizens by having them beaten (pp. 125, 129). Later, his soldiers invade churches in scenes that suggest a regime making war on its own people (p. 127). The eventual burning of a church evokes Nero's infamous fire at Rome (p. 129). These actions demarcate a pattern: the senior Augustus progressively resorts to more severe forms of violence as he is pushed by fear of losing his reputation and position; his vicious character drives him to overturn ancient precedents. Although the category of violence can seem stretched occasionally to include a wide range of actions, Z.'s reading is attentive to detail and well argued. In Chapter 4 Z. shows that DMP offers a kind of late antique contrapasso. Lactantius portrays each emperor's death as fitted specifically to his vices. After he undertakes a journey to Ravenna and then Nicomedia, Diocletian falls ill. In DMP's portrait the journey was only necessary because Diocletian could not tolerate the Romans’ traditional ‘freedom of speech’. The illness is exacerbated by the journey's great length, which was caused only by his choice to move the capital from Rome. The emperor's illness thus results from his betrayal of ancient precedents (pp. 183–5). Diocletian recovers only to witness his damnatio memoriae, when Constantine removes his imperial portraits along with those of Maximian. The experience is a kind of living death for Diocletian, whose grief and sickness mimic the progress of his violence. Diocletian progresses from grief to madness and then death, as God visits upon him a judgement corresponding to his sins. All the tetrarchs come to similarly fitting ends. Maximian's lust and rape end with an effeminate suicide that recapitulates Virgil's Amata (pp. 195–7). Galerius’ ravenous cruelty results in a stinking infection that makes his death a kind of inverted martyrdom (p. 212). The ambitious and barbaric Maximinus Daia gluttonises on food and wine in a suicide that inverts the philosophical death of Socrates and Seneca (p. 228). Lactantius’ characterisation reveals divine providence supporting the persecuted Christians.
Chapter 5 shows that Lactantius traces the same pattern of divine judgement in the history of Rome's earlier persecuting emperors. The two-page Chapter 6 should be read alongside Z.'s introductory discussion of genre. She uses ‘collective memory theory’ to emphasise that Lactantius understood his work as a true historical account, which aimed to curate his audience's memory of a period many would have themselves experienced. Although she does not advance the point, her overall analysis might authorise us to borrow a term from G. Sterling (Historiography and Self-Definition: Josephos, Luke-Acts, and Apologetic Historiography [1992]) by describing the DMP as a kind of ‘apologetic historiography’. Lactantius seems to expand upon the evangelists’ project of writing the story of God's judgement in history both to confirm Christians in their faith and invite others to acknowledge it. Z.'s occasional comparisons with earlier Christian literature – 2 Maccabees, Tertullian, Matthew's Gospel – do suggest precedents for his work. Chapter 7 reviews and summarises Z.'s findings. The index, table of contents and free digital edition from De Gruyter make her work easily searchable for specific topics and language.
Z.'s volume delivers precisely what it promises. She shows that DMP is a surgical reconstruction of imperial history that serves Lactantius’ apologetic and political aims. DMP is not therefore falsified, but it aims to shape future generations’ memory of a pivotal period in Roman history – and with some success. Individual readers may object to particular conclusions Z. teases from Lactantius’ manipulation of the tradition. Perhaps he was not thinking of Socrates and Seneca when he portrayed Maximinus Daia's suicide? Maybe Lactantius’ description of the palace fire does not evoke Nero's burning of Rome? Such disagreement only confirms Z.'s fundamental argument, since any such debate must enact the procedure of examining the tetrarchs against a background of Roman history and literature, which Z. has shown to be Lactantius’ true work and deepest intention in writing. Her analysis thus provides a new basis for understanding the ideological judgements that unify Lactantius’ portraits of Christianity and the Roman Empire during the pivotal era of Constantine's rise.
