Arnobius of Sicca (died c. 330) was an
Early Christian apologist, during the reign of
Diocletian (284–305). According to
Jerome's
Chronicle, Arnobius, before his conversion, was a distinguished
Numidian rhetorician at
Sicca Veneria (El Kef, Tunisia), a major Christian center in Proconsular
Africa, and owed his conversion to a premonitory dream. 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 St. Jerome calls
Adversus Gentes but which is entitled
Adversus Nationes 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.