Joannes Columbus, De libro hoc testimonia et judicia aliquot

Some Testimonies and Judgements concerning this Book.

Jerome in the Catalogue of Ecclesiastical Writers.

Among the other works of Lactantius, he mentions one book On Persecution. Following Jerome are Freculphus,

Honorius of Autun, Abbot Trithemius, and others.

From a letter of Nicolaas Heinsius, dated at Vianen on the Lek, in the year 1680, on 20 January, to J. C. at Uppsala:

« I have recently received from France a good many books that are by no means to be despised, and among them a most elegant little book of Lactantius on the deadly and violent end of the Roman Caesars who had persecuted the Christians from the reign of Nero down to his own times. The distinguished Baluze was the first to publish it, inserted in a volume of his Miscellanea. »

From a letter of Gisbert Cuper to Constantijn Huygens, secretary to the most exalted and most serene Prince of Orange, on 30 December in the year 1682:

« That book of Lactantius is quite elegant; and since it pleased me wonderfully by its novelty and by the variety of its most illustrious matters, I began to examine various passages with more diligent scrutiny, etc. »

The same, in a letter to J. C. written at The Hague on 3 October of the same year:

« In thinking of editing Lactantius you do rightly; for his little book is worthy to be read even by the young, so that from their tender years they may see that Christ, God thrice best and thrice greatest, is the true Saviour, Defender, Champion, Protector and Preserver (titles which are undeservedly given to the counterfeit gods of the Gentiles) of the Church, which He redeemed with His own blood. »

Étienne Baluze, in the Preface to the second book of the Miscellanea:

« We give you, reader, the second book of our Miscellanea, in which the first place is rightly and deservedly held by the book of Lactantius On the Deaths of the Persecutors,

now published for the first time from a very ancient manuscript codex of the Colbertine library; about the excellence of this book there is no need to say more at present, since this subject has been abundantly dealt with in our Notes on it. »

The same, at the beginning of the notes:

« Among the many and various manuscript codices which Jean-Baptiste Colbert, a man most devoted to letters and to men of letters and most excellent in every kind of merit, gathered from all Europe, Asia and Africa for the public benefit of learning, one was found worth its weight in gold, in which is contained the book of Lucius Caecilius Firmianus Lactantius on persecution, etc. »

Louis Moréri, in the Historical Dictionary published in the French language at Lyon in the year 1681:

« M. Baluze has published in the 2nd volume of his Miscellanies a treatise of Lactantius which we had lost. It is the book to Donatus the Confessor, On the Deaths of the Persecutors. He has added to it some very fine Notes of his own making. »

Antoine Pagi, in the Hypatic Dissertation, or On the Imperial Consuls, calls the testimonies of this book to his support in many places, and nowhere doubts that it is Lactantius'.

From the Preface to the reader, in the Oxford edition:

« We present, namely, our Lactantius' book On the Deaths of the Persecutors, worth its weight in gold, which, missed for more than a thousand years, we have very recently recovered through the zeal of the most learned Baluze. And since it was badly mutilated and quite often gaping with lacunae, we have restored it here and there by conjectures, partly our own, partly those of most learned men, the bishop of St Asaph and Isaac Vossius, etc. »