Lactantius and Arnobius produced the first displays of Christian rhetoric whose style and erudition might commend them to a sophist; they did not, however, write only for display. Both, with the pride of Africans, decline to be merely Africans; on the contrary, both make clear that they are Romans, beneficiaries and purveyors of a Roman education. Yet neither employs his eloquence, as a sophist would, to claim a civic privilege since both are freemen of another city. Arnobius tells the Romans that it is they who are barbarians in comparison with this city. Lactantius—more conciliatory, because he is writing earlier—maintains that only Christians show the virtues which the poets have attributed to the pristine state of Rome.
The best way to define the special tone of our apologists is to compare them with the other half of Christendom. The most eminent of the Greek apologists—Justin, Clement, Origen—maintained that sacred truths were widely current in the philosophy and oracles of paganism, but traced their presence to thefts from pagan literature, interpreted indeed by the universal tool of reason, but with little help from any innate conception of the deity. Tertullian, often regarded as a biblical fanatic, is the first to build a case for God’s existence on the intuitive testimony of the soul. Arnobius and Lactantius, like Tertullian, Augustine, and their great contemporary Constantine, had been superbly educated in the literature and arts of the Latin West. They thus belonged to a culture which had only one metropolis. The Greek apologists do not write as members of a city-state, but either to convince their pagan neighbours that their faith is a philosophy, or else to inform the Jews that Christ, not Israel, is the heir to all the prophecies. They have no immediate quarrel with the cities of the empire, and the Church is the New Jerusalem, not the new Alexandria or Athens. None the less, pagan wisdom, like the sanctuary of Zion, could be set in a typological relation to the truth which is revealed to us by the everlasting Word.
Cicero would have said that this was all in the tradition of Greek philosophy, which had left the tasks of statesmanship to others, while it built ideal cities in the clouds. Arnobius and Lactantius were inheritors of a state in which reality was supposed to be at one with the philosophical conception, custodians of a literature that boasted of political supremacy. Christianity was to supersede this culture, as the polity of heaven was to supersede the commonwealth. In God they had both power and truth, in Christ the eternal statesman; the empire built on rhetoric is not to be reconciled with a kingdom founded on the Gospel. Greek culture, where it matters, is an ornament of Rome; and whereas Clement and Origen held that Plato saw the truth, though incompletely, Arnobius mocks his writings, while Lactantius recalls that, by his own confession, Socrates knew nothing. Where Greeks advanced the Gospel as the double consummation of philosophy and prophecy, Latin faith was more inclined to argue that the new world has displaced, and was necessitated by, the contradictions of the old.