Stefan Freund , Wolfram Schröttel , Wolfram Winger, Laktanz: “Divinae institutiones”: Einleitung, Text, Übersetzung und Anmerkungen, Franz Steiner Verlag, 2025.
Lactantius’ Divinae institutiones (“Divine Institutes” or “Textbook of Theology”) was written between 303 and 311, during the last great persecution of Christians, and was revised again in 324/325. The author offers a comprehensive presentation of Christianity for an educated Roman audience in seven books. The work is fundamental to the history of Christian apologetics and is an important testimony to Christianity’s engagement with ancient culture as well as to the understanding of the Constantinian shift. Later authors praised Lactantius for his Latin as ‘Cicero Christianus’. He was and is valued as a mediator of otherwise lost texts. In fact, the work preserves a wealth of fragments from both Roman (e.g., Cicero and Seneca, as well as Varro, Ennius, and Lucilius) and Greek (especially from the Corpus Hermeticum and the Sibylline Oracles) literature. This edition includes an introduction, the original text, a translation, and notes. It is the first bilingual edition of the Divinae institutiones and also the first German translation since 1818.
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