Authors do not agree better even on the vision: the greatest number acknowledged but one, and that in a dream. There is only Eusebius, followed by Philostorgius and Socrates, who speaks of two; the one that Constantine saw in the day-time, and the other which he saw in a dream, tending to confirm the first. Nicephorus Callistus reckons three. The inscription offers new differences: Eusebius says that it was in Greek characters, while others do not speak of it. According to Philostorgius and Nicephorus, it was in Latin characters; others say nothing about it, and seem by their relation to suppose that the characters were Greek. Philostorgius affirms, that the inscription was formed by an assemblage of stars; Arthemius says that the letters were golden. The author quoted by Photius, represents them as composed of the same luminous matter as the cross; and according to Sosomenes, it had no inscription, and they were angels who said to Constantine: "By this sign, gain the victory." Finally, the relation of historians is opposed on the consequences of this vision. If we take that of Eusebius, Constantine, aided by God, easily gained the victory over Maxentius; but according to Lactantius, the victory was much disputed. He even says that the troops of Maxentius had some advantage, before Constantine made his army approach the gates of Rome. If we may believe Eusebius and Sosomenes, from this epoch Constantine was always victorious, and opposed the salutary sign of the cross to his enemies, as an impenetrable rampart. However, a Christian author, of whom M. de Valois has collected some fragments, at the end of Ammianus Marcellinus--relates, that in the two battles given to Licinius by Constantine, the victory was doubtful, and that Constantine was even slightly wounded in the thigh; and Nicephorus says, that after the first apparition, he twice combated the Byzantines, without opposing the cross to them, and would not even have remembered it, if he had not lost nine thousand men, and had the same vision twice more. In the first, the stars were so arranged that they formed these words of a psalm: "Call on me in the day of trouble: I will deliver thee, and thou shalt glorify me;" and the last, much clearer and more brilliant still, bore: "By this sign, thou shalt vanquish all thy enemies."