Life & Wisdom Quote by Lactantius

Even in translation, you can hear the trap being set: Lactantius opens with an imagined heckler. "But some one will say..". isn’t a neutral concession; it’s a rhetorical lasso, yanking a polite objection into the arena so it can be publicly dismantled. The question he puts in his opponent’s mouth - isn’t the supreme creator entitled to worship, and aren’t lesser benefactors owed their own reverence? - sketches the intellectual common sense of a pagan world where gratitude scales upward and outward: gods, demigods, local patrons, household spirits, emperors.

Lactantius’s intent is to sever that continuum. By framing worship as something "entitled" to multiple parties, he exposes the moral math behind polytheism: worship becomes a kind of payment plan, distributed according to benefits received. That’s exactly what early Christian apologists wanted to make look inadequate, even faintly transactional. The subtext is a critique of divided loyalty. If worship can be parceled out like civic honors, then the highest thing you claim about a "supreme Being" has already been compromised; supremacy doesn’t coexist comfortably with a crowded pantheon of junior claimants.

Context matters: writing in the late Roman Empire, Lactantius is arguing Christianity’s exclusivity in a culture where religious practice doubled as social glue and political prudence. His move is strategic: he doesn’t start by insulting pagan worship; he starts by granting the premise of gratitude, then tightening the definition of what worship is until only one being can logically receive it. The elegance is in the forced choice: either the creator is truly supreme, or your worship is just etiquette dressed up as metaphysics.