The paper discusses the depiction of anti-Christian measures of Roman emperors in the Roman Empire in some crucial texts of the Latin Christian historiography of the 4th and 5th centuries, especially in Lactantius, Orosius and in the Augustine’s City of God. The main point is a comparison between the two most influential models of the persecutions against Christians in the Roman Empire. The first could be traced back to the early Christian apologetics and depicts only those emperors as persecutors who were seen as bad rulers also by pagans. The mentioned theory found its classical form in the Lactantius’ writing How the Persecutors Died. The other paradigm, developed probably by Eusebius, speaks of ten persecutions and lists the “good” emperors as persecutors as well. This theory was given its most influential form by the historian Orosius who also stated that the defeat of the tenth persecution meant the death of the pagan religion and its idols. His version was sharply attacked and refuted by Augustine by insisting that persecutions were a constant constituent of the Church history, an opinion shared also by the Church historian Rufinus. Nevertheless the Orosius’ vision enjoyed extreme popularity in later centuries.