The movement seems gradually to have spread from the provinces of Galerius to those of Maximian. At Tangiers, Marcellus, a centurion of the Legion of Trajan, threw down his centurion’s staff and belt and refused to serve any longer. He did so in the face of the whole army assembled to sacrifice in honour of Maximian’s birthday. A similar scene took place in Spain at Calahorra, near Tarraco, where two soldiers cast off their arms exclaiming, “We are called to serve in the shining company of angels. There Christ commands His cohorts, clothed in white, and from His lofty throne condemns your infamous gods, and you, who are the creatures of these gods, or, we should say, these ridiculous monsters.” Death followed as a matter of course. Looking at the evidence with absolute impartiality, one begins to suspect that the process of clearing the Christians out of the army was due quite as much to the fanaticism of certain Christian soldiers eager for martyrdom, as to any lust for blood on the part even of Galerius and Maximian. But what we have to account for is the rise of a fierce anti-Christian spirit which induced Diocletian—for even Lactantius admits that he was not easily persuaded—to take active measures against the Christians. It is certainly noteworthy that about this time the only school of philosophy which was alive, active, and at all original, was definitely anti-Christian. We refer, of course, to the Neo-Platonists of Alexandria. Their principal exponent was the philosopher Porphyry, who carried on a violent anti-Christian propaganda, though he seems to have borrowed from Christianity, and more especially from the rigorously ascetic form which Christianity had assumed in Egypt, many of his leading tenets. The morality which Porphyry inculcated was elevated and pure; his religion was mystical to such a degree that none but an expert philosopher could follow him into the refinements of his abstractions; but he had for the Christian Church a “theological hatred” of extraordinary bitterness. The treatise—in fifteen books—in which he assailed the Divinity of Christ apparently set a fashion in anti-Christian literature. We hear, for example, of another unnamed philosopher who “vomited three books against the Christian religion,” and the violence with which Lactantius denounces him as “an accomplished hypocrite” makes one suspect that his work had a considerable success. Still better known was Hierocles, Governor at one time of Palmyra, and then transferred to the royal province of Bithynia, who wrote a book to which he gave the name of _The Friend of Truth_, and addressed it, “To the Christians.” Its interest lies chiefly in the fact that its author compares with the miracles wrought by Christ those attributed to Apollonius of Tyana, and denies divinity to both. Lactantius tells us that this Hierocles was “author and counsellor of the persecution,”[11] and we may judge, therefore, that there existed among the pagans a