ABSTRACT
Arnobius and Lactantius are the foremost Christian apologists of the early fourth century, the former being the teacher of the latter but a latecomer to Christianity. In his Against the Nations, Arnobius concentrates on questions concerning religion which have engaged the philosophers – divine susceptibility of emption, the legitimacy of images and of sacrifice, the possibility of redeeming myth through allegory. Lactantius in his Divine Institutes sets out to show that true justice presupposes the worship of the true God without deference to polytheism or idolatry; at the same time, both here and in On the Wrath of God, he argues against the Stoics and Epicureans that it is intellectually coherent to credit God with both anger and compassion, notwithstanding the common opinion of philosophers that pity is a vice.
