subject in his Martyrs of Palestine. Around the same time,
Lactantius devoted his treatise On the Deaths of the Persecutors
to recounting Roman hostility to the Christians and, equally to
the point, the ignominious demises suffered by those emperors
who oppressed the church. Both Eusebius and Lactantius saw
oppression of Christianity culminating in their own day with the
so-called ‘great’ persecution initiated in 303–4 by the tetrarchic
emperor Diocletian (284–305), which was swiftly followed by
the conversion of Constantine (306–37). These narratives are
supplemented by other texts, such as the letters of Cyprian of
Carthage and the acts (from acta, meaning the records of court
proceedings) of various martyrs. The spectre of persecution
almost seems to haunt the literary output of early Christianity.
Taken together, such sources often paint a bleak picture of a time
when it seemed that the empire was waging a war against the
Christians. Indeed, the Greek word for war, polemos, is used by
Eusebius of Caesarea to describe the persecutions (Ecclesiastical
History1.1.2; 8.13.10).
Although the information given in such accounts is useful,
the overall picture it yields is problematic. Some descriptions
of persecution appear in texts that were written as critiques of
Christians who had given in too easily to demands from the impe-
rial authorities to offer sacrifice to the pagan gods, or against
heretics who denigrated the value of martyrdom. These polemi-
cal contexts of early Christian accounts of persecution need to be
weighed carefully if the texts themselves are not to mislead. For
example, Eusebius’ descriptions of persecutions in his Eccle-
siastical Historywere far from transparent, but were calibrated to
support his thesis that the Roman empire had a positive role to
play in God’s plan for humankind. When Christians were allowed
to live in peace, he argued, the empire flourished (Ecclesiastical
History8.13.9–13). Prudent emperors were opposed to indis-
criminate persecution (Trajan at 3.33; Hadrian at 4.9; Antoninus
Pius at 5.13; Gallienus at 7.13). By contrast, those emperors
who persecuted were clearly tyrants. Thus Eusebius introduced
his narrative of Nero’s persecution by emphasizing the emperor’s
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