The hand which wrote this was the hand which had flung unread into the brazier at Nicæa the incriminating petitions of the bishops. What had taken place in the interval that he should issue an edict worthy of a Domitian? The authorities give not the slightest hint. Was there some great conspiracy afoot, in the meshes of which Constantine feared to become entangled, but so cunningly contrived that the Emperor could only be sensible of its existence, without being able to lay hands on the intriguers? Was paganism restless in the East as we have seen it restless in Rome, at the triumph of its once-despised and always detested rival? We do not know. Quite possibly it was, though with the downfall of Licinius its prospects seemed hopeless. Unless, indeed, there was some member of the Imperial Family upon whom paganism rested its hopes and to whom it looked as its future deliverer! Was Crispus such a prince? Again we do not know. There is not a scrap of evidence to bear out a theory which has only been framed as a possible explanation of the dark mystery of his fate. Eutropius, whose character sketches, for all their brevity, usually tally well with known facts, calls Crispus a prince of the highest merit (_virum egregium_). Why then did Constantine turn against him? We may, perhaps, see the first sign of the changed relationship in the fact that in 323 the Cæsarship of Gaul was taken from Crispus and given to the young Constantius, then a child of seven. So far as is known, no compensating title or command was offered in exchange, which looks as though Constantine was disinclined to trust his eldest son any longer and preferred to keep him in surveillance by his side. The father may have been jealous of the prowess and popularity of the son; the son may have been ambitious, as Constantine himself had been in his young days, and have deemed that his services merited elevation to the rank of an Augustus. According to the system of Diocletian, twenty years of sovereignty were held to be long enough for the welfare alike of sovereign and of the Empire. Constantine’s term was running out. The system was not yet formally abandoned; is it unreasonable to suppose that Crispus considered he had claims to rule, or that Constantine, resolved to keep what he had won, became estranged from one whom he knew he was not treating with generosity or with justice?