ABSTRACT
This chapter is concerned with two works by Lactantius, On the Deaths of the Persecutors and On the Anger of God. The martyr (unlike the Stoic) acknowledges that he is afraid and that he may be moved to anger. But he focuses his fear not on the persecutors but on God and he attempts to look at what is happening to him from God’s point of view. Historiographical principles more complex than simple triumphalism underlie the narrative of On the Deaths of the Persecutors, and from the treatise On the Anger of God we can see that distinctively Christian methods of managing pain and suffering informed the resilience of the martyrs and their supporters during the Great Persecution, and the political turmoil from which Constantine the Great emerged as the first Christian Roman emperor.
