Career

Arnobius writes dismissively of dreams in his surviving book, so perhaps Jerome was projecting his own respect for the content of dreams. According to Jerome, to overcome the doubts of the local bishop as to the earnestness of his Christian belief he wrote (c 303, from evidence in IV:36) an apologetic work in seven books that Saint Jerome calls Adversus Gentes but which is entitled in the only (9th-century) manuscript that has survived. Jerome"s reference, his remark that Lactantius was a pupil of Arnobius and the surviving treatise are all that we know about Arnobius.

Adversus nationes survived in a single ninth-century manuscript in Paris (and a bad copy of it in Brussels).

The French manuscript also contains the Octavius of Marcus Minucius Felix.