Life & Wisdom Quote by Lactantius

Lactantius is doing something sly here: he flatters Homer with one hand while disqualifying him with the other. “Able” sounds almost generous, as if the poet simply lacked the right material. But the sentence is a gatekeeping move dressed up as literary criticism, staking a Christian claim on what counts as “truth” and who gets to speak for it. Homer doesn’t fail because he’s inaccurate; he fails because he’s aimed at the wrong target.

The pivot is the hierarchy embedded in “human rather than divine things.” In late Roman Christian polemic, the divine isn’t just a topic; it’s a credential. Lactantius, writing as Christianity is pushing from persecuted sect to imperial worldview, treats pagan epic as a brilliant but fundamentally provincial art: gorgeous narratives about mortals, useless for metaphysical certainty. That’s the subtext: the classics can be admired, even mined for style, but they cannot be allowed to arbitrate reality.

It also reframes authority. Homer, in the Roman imagination, is a cultural pillar, a near-prophet of the old order. Lactantius strips him of that prophetic aura by narrowing “information relating to the truth” to revealed theology. Truth becomes less a matter of observation or moral insight and more a matter of doctrinal access. The rhetorical trick is its apparent modesty: he isn’t attacking Homer’s genius; he’s relocating it to a lower rung. Admire the poet, he implies, but don’t mistake art about people for knowledge about God.