FIRMICUS MATERNUS. - Latin writer of the 5th century A.D., under whose name go a treatise on astrology, of pagan sentiments, and a Christian apologetic work.
Of senatorial rank and a native of Sicily, after abandoning his forensic career he became a writer, compiling between 334 and 337, at the suggestion of the Campanian proconsul Lollianus Mavortius, a vast treatise on astrology (Matheis), in which he set out all his own knowledge of Greek and Asiatic astrology, deriving it principally from Manilius. It consists of eight books, to which the first serves as an introduction; in laying there the foundations of the science, F. strives, though sensing its difficulty, to give a surer human meaning to astrology, linking it with morality. With the extinction of astrological science there ceased the practical interest that for many centuries, and especially in the Middle Ages, had caused the treatise to be sought out, and it remains of interest only for the allusions found in it to the morality of the time and as a historical document. In the other work De errore profanorum religionum the Christian content has given rise to a long-debated question because of the difficulty, now overcome, of supposing, in the ten years that elapse between the two works, the conversion of the author of the astrological treatise. In the De errore, which appeared in 346-50, the customary arguments of apologetics are not increased by original polemical motives but are instead kindled with a violent tone hitherto unprecedented. The author does not seek the extinction of paganism through teaching and conversion, but through the intervention of the secular powers, of the emperors Constantius and Constans, to whom the work is addressed, in the name of the mission entrusted to them by God, which will be rewarded by heavenly blessing and by the confiscation of the precious pagan simulacra. The book is divided into two parts: in the one the religions of nature and the mysteries are combated: in the other more particularly the symbola, that is, the signs by which the participants in the mysteries of Dionysus, Mithras, etc., were recognized.
The polemic is therefore directed rather against the Egiai and the other Oriental peoples than against the Romans, perhaps because of the greater dangers presented by the possible confusion between Christian practices and those of the mysteries. The erudition draws from the work useful knowledge concerning the ancient mysteries.