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In 417 CE, the Roman poet Rutilius Namatianus journeyed from Rome back to his homeland of Gaul, not knowing whether there was a home to return to.

One of the later Latin poets of the Empire, Ausonius’ expansive body of work gives us a window into the changing world of fourth-century Roman culture.

Sulpicius Severus’ (c. 363-425) life of St. Martin is one of the great hagiographies – a portrait of a timeless saint, but also of a human being and working bishop.

Athanasius (c. 297-373) wrote a wildly popular biography of the desert hermit St. Anthony, touting the ideals of asceticism and triumph over demonic temptation.

In Carthage, in 203 CE, a Roman noblewoman and her retinue were butchered in an amphitheater. Learn her story, and the earliest history of Christian martyrs.

Learn the documentary history behind how the Catholic Church was founded and set up as an organization, together with some of the works of the earliest church fathers.

Heliodorus of Emesa (3rd/4th century CE) wrote the longest novel to have survived from antiquity, an adventurous romance that reemerged into Europe in the 1500s.

In roughly the 160s CE, the Greek satirist Lucian of Samosata wrote A True Story, one of history’s earliest surviving novels, with strong tinges of what we’d call science fiction.