The Instructions of Commodianus

Our author seems to have been a North-African bishop, of whom little is known save what we learn from his own writings. He has been supposed to incline to some ideas of Praxeas, and also to the Millenarians, but perhaps on insufficient grounds. His Millenarianism reflects the views of a very primitive age, and that without the corrupt Chiliasm of a later period, which brought about a practical repudiation of the whole system.

As a poetical work the following prose version probably does it no injustice. His versification is pronounced very crabbed, and his diction is the wretched patois of North Africa. But the piety and earnestness of a practical Christian seem everywhere conspicuous in this fragment of antiquity.