_Christiani tollantur et voluptas constat; Per caput Augusti Christiani non sint._ ----- We rarely hear of the courts being packed with anti-Christian crowds, or of the judges being incited by popular clamour to pass the death sentence. The reports of the trials shew us silent, orderly courts, with the judges anxious not so much to condemn to death as to make a convert. If Diocletian had wanted blood he could have had it in rivers, not in streams. But he did not. He wished to eradicate what he believed to be an impious, mischievous, and, from the point of view of the State’s security, a dangerous superstition. There was no talk of persecuting for the sake of saving the souls of heretics; that lamentable theory was reserved for a later day. Diocletian persecuted for what he considered to be the good of the State. He lived to witness the full extent of his failure, and to realise the appalling crime which he had committed against humanity, amid the general overthrow of the political system which he had so laboriously set up. [Illustration] ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [Illustration] CHAPTER III THE ABDICATION OF DIOCLETIAN AND THE SUCCESSION OF CONSTANTINE On the 1st of May, in the year 305, Diocletian, by an act of unexampled abnegation, resigned the purple and retired into private life. The renunciation was publicly performed, not in Rome, for Rome had ceased to be the centre of the political world, but on a broad plain in Bithynia, three miles from Nicomedia, which long had been the Emperor’s favourite residence. In the centre of the plain rose a little hill, upon which stood a column surmounted by a statue of Jupiter. There, years before, Diocletian had with his own hands invested Galerius with the symbols of power; there he was now to perform the last act of a ruler by nominating those whom he thought most fit to succeed him. A large platform had been constructed; the soldiers of the legions had been ordered to assemble in soldier’s meeting and listen to their chief’s farewell. Diocletian took leave of them in few words. He was old, he said, and infirm. He craved for rest after a life of toil. The Empire needed stronger and more youthful hands than his. His work was done. It was time for him to go.