ABSTRACT
The first assessment of Tertullian’s rhetorical ability was offered by the first writer ever to mention his name: his fellow North African Christian, the rhetorician Lactantius, who rose to prominence about a century after Tertullian under Diocletian and Constantine.1 He claimed that Tertullian ‘was skilled in literature of every kind; but in eloquence he had little readiness, and was not sufficiently polished, and very obscure’ (Divine Institutes 5.1.21). It is sometimes claimed that Tertullian was a rhetorician, a teacher of rhetoric (Kennedy 1994:264). I do not believe there is any evidence to support this claim. Quasten wrote that ‘[i]t is not right to represent Tertullian as a lawyer and rhetorician with a leaning towards sophism’ (Quasten 1953:248). We need not assert that he was a teacher of rhetoric, only that he had been a student of it.
