Nor had the victor pity even for two ladies of imperial rank, whose misfortunes and sufferings excited the deepest compassion in that stony-hearted age. These were Prisca, the wife of Diocletian, and her daughter Valeria, the widow of the Emperor Galerius. On his death-bed Galerius had entrusted his wife to the care and the gratitude of Maximin, whom he had raised from obscurity to a throne. Maximin repaid his confidence by pressing Valeria to marry him and offering to divorce his own wife. Valeria returned an indignant and high-spirited refusal. She would never think of marriage, she said,[57] while still wearing mourning for a husband whose ashes were not yet cold. It was monstrous that Maximin should seek to divorce a faithful wife, and, even if she assented to his proposal, she had clear warning of what was likely to be her own fate. Finally, it was not becoming that the daughter of Diocletian and the widow of Galerius should stoop to a second marriage. Maximin took a bitter revenge. He reduced Valeria to penury, marked down all her friends for ruin, and finally drove her into exile with her mother, Prisca, who nobly shared the sufferings of the daughter whom she could not shield. Lactantius tells us that the two imperial ladies wandered miserably through the Syrian wastes, while Maximin took delight in spurning the overtures of the aged Diocletian, who sent repeated messages begging that his daughter might be allowed to go and live with him at Salona. Maximin refused even when Diocletian sent one of his relatives to remind him of past benefits, and the two unfortunate ladies knew no alleviation of their troubles. When the tyrant fell, they probably thought that the implacable hatred with which Maximin had pursued them would be their best recommendation to the favour of Licinius. Again, however, they were disappointed, for Licinius, in his jealous anxiety to spare no one connected with the families of his predecessors in the purple, ordered the execution of Candidianus, a natural son of Galerius, who had been brought up by Valeria as her own child. In despair, therefore, the two ladies, who had boldly gone to Nicomedia, fled from the scene and “wandered for fifteen months, disguised as plebeians, through various provinces,”[58] until they had the misfortune to be recognised at Thessalonica. They were at once beheaded and their bodies thrown into the sea, amid the pitying sympathy of a vast throng which dared not lift a hand to save them. ----- Footnote 57: _De Mort. Persec._, c. 39. Footnote 58: _De Mort Persec._, c. 51. -----