(“Who will care to seek the golden age of Saturn? Ours is the age of jewels, but jewels of Nero’s setting.”) If Constantine, like Saturn, had devoured his children and had lapsed for the moment into a savage tyrant of Nero’s pattern, it was not for Eusebius to judge him. He was writing for edification. Constantine had averred his willingness to cast his cloak over a sinning bishop lest scandal should arise; ought not an ecclesiastical historian to cast the cloak of charitable silence over the crimes of a most Christian Emperor? When, therefore, Eusebius describes[111] how, after the death of Licinius, men cast aside all their former fears, and dared to raise their long-downcast eyes and look up with a smile on their faces and brightness in their glance; how they honoured the Emperor in all the beauty of victory and “his most orderly sons and Heaven-beloved Cæsars”; and how they straightway forgot their old troubles and all unrighteousness, and gave themselves up to an enjoyment of their present good things and their hope of others to come; it is a healthy corrective to recall the murderous outbreak of ungovernable wrath which made Rome shudder as it listened to the whispered tale of what was taking place in the recesses of the Palatine. The entire subject is one on which it is as fascinating as it is easy to speculate. On the whole, it seems most likely that Constantine’s fears had been worked upon to such an extent that he believed himself surrounded by traitors in his own family, that the Empress Fausta had been the leading spirit in the plot to ruin Crispus, and that when the Emperor discovered his mistake he turned in fury upon his wife. It may be, as Eutropius suggests, that his mental balance had been upset by his extraordinary success, that his prosperity and the adulation of the world had been too much for him.[112] That is a charitable theory which, in default of a better, we, too, may as well adopt. ----- Footnote 110: ii., c. 4. Footnote 111: _De Vita Const._, ii., p. 19. Footnote 112: _Verum insolentia rerum secundarum aliquantum Constantinus ex illa favorabili animi docilitate mutavit_ (x., p. 6). -----