Professor of Latin rhetoric at the court of Diocletian in Nicomedia, author of the first comprehensive defence of Christianity in the Latin language and tutor to Constantine's son Crispus, Lactantius is a crucial witness to the political and intellectual history of the Roman Empire under the Tetrarchy and Constantine. In this book, Blandine Colot aims to restore this oft-neglected author to his rightful place in the development of Christian thought, by presenting a multi-faceted portrait of Lactantius as ‘rhéteur et philosophe chrétien, théologien politique et théologien de l'histoire’ (viii). C.’s study is divided into two three-chapter parts. The first part examines Lactantius' attempts to win over pagan readers and encourage hesitant Christians in his seven-book apologetic magnum opus, Divinae institutiones, the second, his original contributions to Roman and Christian thought. Each chapter focuses on a theme drawn from Divine Institutes: 1: Lactantius' response to pagan exaltation of Roman religion; 2: the rôle of iustitia in Lactantius' defence of Christians from pagan persecution; 3: Lactantius' engagement with Cicero's views on pietas and iustitia; 4: Lactantius' political theology; 5: his history of religions; and 6: his Christian redefinition of religio and superstitio in Div. inst. 4.28.

The choice of subjects is sound, but C.’s analysis, written in heavy prose, tends to meander without a clear argumentative thread; tellingly, the key theses of each chapter are typically given succinct statement only at the outset of the following chapter. Despite her desire to prove Lactantius' wide-ranging importance (an aim that suggests an audience of non-specialists), C. assumes throughout that her readers are deeply familiar with his work and with the minutiae of Lactantian scholarship, on which she frequently digresses. The introduction is a case in point: following two pages on Lactantius' biography and the Divine Institutes, C. devotes most of the next twenty-five to detailed discussion of recent work on Lactantius and Christian-pagan interaction, before finally listing the author's works and when he wrote them (xxxvii–xxxix). The sketch is hardly detailed enough for readers unfamiliar with Lactantius, who must wait until ch. 2 to receive a basic outline of Divine Institutes (75–80).

A similarly disproportionate focus on secondary literature dogs the rest of the book. C. rightly aims to put Lactantius in historical context, but her arguments do not engage closely enough with the fourth-century sources. A particularly striking example is offered by ch. 1, which takes as its theme Lactantius' response to ‘Romideologie’, the fundamental pagan conviction that Rome owed its dominion to its people's worship of the gods. Lactantius himself amply illustrates early fourth-century pagan piety, yet C. frames her discussion not with direct analysis of his portrayal of contemporary civic religion, or of the Tetrarchic legislation that he and Eusebius preserve, but with an abstracted view of late imperial paganism drawn from recent Francophone scholarship. Most of the chapter is actually devoted to Lactantius' approach to theological topics and matters of authorial self-presentation that are (though important) loosely related to paganism. Only at the end does C. even touch — for one page — on Lactantius' complicated attitude towards Rome and its earthly dominion. More extensive engagement with Lactantius' attacks on Roman gods and historical figures such as Caesar and Scipio Africanus in Div. inst. 1, as well as with Rome's rôle in his eschatology, would have produced a sharper picture of his response to contemporary paganism.

Nevertheless, C. grants clear recognition to important features of Lactantius' thought that recent scholarship has sometimes overlooked. Above all, she is right to emphasize Lactantius' pervasive engagement with Cicero, which modern speculation has often downplayed, reading Divine Institutes instead as a response to Porphyry of Tyre, who bears little resemblance to the unnamed philosopher attacked in Div. inst. 5.2. Ch. 3, the strongest and most unified of the first three, contrasts Lactantius' presentation of iustitia (a key concept in Divine Institutes, especially Books 5 and 6) with Cicero's own. As in ch. 5 (the best of the second half), C. is at her strongest when engaging closely with Lactantius' text, and it is regrettable that she did not examine Lactantius' many Ciceronian quotations and allusions as closely: what C. provides, ultimately, is a modern reading of Cicero set alongside a modern reading of Lactantius, rather than an analysis of Lactantius' own transformation of Ciceronian thought.

Other points in the study will be of interest to specialists. In a close discussion of Lactantius' vocabulary for the Church in ch. 2, C. observes that Lactantius' tendency to downplay the sacramental and mystical aspects of the Church parallels (and so helps to explain) the near-total absence of the Holy Spirit from his theology, which has been an enduring problem of Lactantian scholarship. Similarly, C.’s comparison of Lactantius' and Eusebius' views on Rome in ch. 4 deserves (as C. herself notes in her conclusion, 323) to be developed at greater length, though again in closer dialogue with the text of Eusebius' orations.

C. is right: late antique historians and Patristics scholars still need an analysis that shows what Lactantius contributed to Roman and Christian thought at a pivotal point in the history of both Church and Empire. In the end, though C. has useful observations on individual points, her arguments are too diffuse, and their historical frame too vaguely drawn, to succeed in restoring Lactantius to what C. thinks (and this reviewer agrees) is his rightful place in the canon of late imperial literature.