When Diocletian, the author of crimes and deviser of evils, was ruining all things, not even from against God could he withhold his hand. This man, partly by avarice and partly by timidity, overturned the world. For he made three persons sharers with him in the government. The Empire was divided into four parts, and armies were multiplied, since each of the four princes strove to have a much larger military force than any emperor had had when one emperor alone carried on the government. There began to be a greater number of those who received taxes than of those who paid them; so that the means of the husbandmen were exhausted by enormous impositions, the fields were abandoned, and cultivated grounds became woodlands, and universal dismay prevailed. Besides, the provinces were divided into minute portions and many presidents and prefects lay heavy on each territory, and almost on every city. There were many stewards and masters and deputy presidents, before whom very few civil causes came, but only condemnations and frequent forfeitures, and exactions of numberless commodities, and I will not say often repeated, but perpetual and intolerable, wrongs in the exacting of them. § 56. The Diocletian Persecution The last great persecution was preceded by a number of laws aimed to annoy the Christians. On March 12, 295, all soldiers in the army were ordered to offer sacrifice. In 296 sacred books of the Christians were sought for and burnt at Alexandria. In 297 or 298 Christian persecutions began in the army, but the great persecution itself broke out in 303, as described below. Among other reasons for energetic measures in which Galerius took the lead, appears to have been that prince’s desire to establish the unity of the Empire upon a religious basis, which is borne out by his attempts to reorganize the heathen worship immediately after the cessation of the persecution. In April, 311, the edict of Galerius, known as the Edict of the Three Emperors, put an official end to the persecution. In parts of the Empire, however, small persecutions took place and the authorities attempted to attack Christianity without actually carrying on persecutions, as in the wide-spread dissemination of the infamous “Acts of Pilate,” which were posted on walls and spread through the schools. In the territories of Constantius Chlorus the persecution had been very light, and there was none under Constantine who favored Christians from the first. Additional source material: Eusebius, _Hist. Ec._, VIII, and IX, 9; his little work _On the Martyrs of Palestine_ will be found after the eighth book. Lactantius, _De Mortibus Persecutorum_. The principal texts will be found in Preuschen’s _Analecta_, I, §§ 20, 21; see also R. Knopf, _Ausgewählte Märtyreracten_. (_a_) Lactantius. _De Mortibus Persecutorum_, 12 _ff_. (MSL. 7:213.) The outbreak of the persecution.