The simile was well chosen. Licinius seems to have opened his campaign against the Christians by forbidding the bishops in his provinces to leave their dioceses and take part in their usual synods and councils. They were to remain at home, he said, and mind their own business and not plot treason against their Emperor under the pretext of perfecting the discipline of the Church. Another edict, which came with poor grace from a man whose own excesses were notorious, forbade Christian men and women to meet for common worship in their churches: they were to worship apart, so that their morals might not be exposed to danger. On the same pretext, bishops and priests were only allowed to give teaching and consolation to their own sex; Christian women must find women teachers and advisers. Eusebius tells us[76] that these edicts excited universal ridicule. It was too late to revive the old stories of gross immorality taking place at the communion services, and there was fresh cause for mocking laughter when Licinius forbade the Christians to assemble in their churches within the towns and ordered them to go outside the gates and meet, if they must meet, in the open air. This was necessary, he said, on the grounds of public health; the atmosphere beyond the gates was purer. Licinius’s theory of hygiene was perfectly sound; its application was ludicrous. ----- Footnote 76: _De Vita Constant._, i., 53. ----- These were the first steps leading, as his subjects must have known only too well, straight to persecution. After a time Licinius threw over bodily the Edict of Milan. He purged his court and his army in the old way. The choice was sacrifice or dismissal, and some pretext was usually made to tack on to official dismissal a confiscation of goods. Licinius, says Eusebius, thirsted for gold like a very Tantalus. Aurelius Victor says[77] he had all the mean, sordid avarice of a peasant. And the Christians, of course, were fair game. He pillaged their churches, robbed them of their goods, sentenced them to exile and to the mines, or ruined them just as effectually by insisting on their becoming magistrates. Bloodshed followed, and Licinius aimed his severest blows at the bishops. He accused them of omitting his name in their prayers for the welfare of the Emperor and the State, though they carefully remembered that of Constantine; and, if none were actually put to death, many suffered imprisonment, torture, and mutilation. The story of the martyrs and confessors in the Licinian persecution is very like that of those who suffered under Diocletian and Maximin. But the fate of the forty soldier martyrs of the Twelfth Legion (_Fulminata_) deserves special mention. They had refused to sacrifice, and, by order of their general, were stripped naked and ordered to remain throughout a winter’s night upon a frozen pond, exposed to the elements. At the side of the pond was a building, where the water for the town baths was heated.