It would be attributing to Maximian a quality which he did not possess, were we to give him credit for loving a residence so admirably situated, through any taste for the beautiful. The splendor of the buildings, which he had still further adorned, or possibly the facility of running out of the city for the chase of boar and wolf, was the motive of this preference. A native of Sirmium, in Sclavonia, a reputed barbarian therefore of the lowest extraction, a mere soldier of fortune, without any education, endowed with little more than a brute strength, which made his surname of Herculeus most appropriate, he had been raised to the purple by his brother-barbarian Diocles, known as the emperor Dioclesian. Like him, covetous to meanness, and spendthrift to recklessness, addicted to the same coarse vices and foul crimes, which a Christian pen refuses to record, without restraint of any passion, without sense of justice, or feeling of humanity, this monster had never ceased to oppress, persecute, and slay whoever stood in his way. To him the coming persecution looked like an approaching feast does to a glutton, who requires the excitement of a surfeit to relieve the monotony of daily excess. Gigantic in frame, with the well-known features of his race, with the hair on his head and face more yellow than red, shaggy and wild, like tufts of straw, with eyes restlessly rolling in a compound expression of suspicion, profligacy, and ferocity, this almost last of Rome’s tyrants struck terror into the heart of any beholder, except a Christian. Is it wonderful that he hated the race and its name? In the large basilica, or hall, then, of the Ædes Lateranæ,[110] Maximian met his motley council, in which secrecy was ensured by penalty of death. In the semicircular apse at the upper end of the hall, sat the emperor, on an ivory throne richly adorned, and before him were arranged his obsequious and almost trembling advisers. A chosen body of guards kept the entrance; and the officer in command, Sebastian, was leaning negligently against it on the inside, but carefully noted every word that was spoken. Little did the emperor think, that the hall in which he sat, and which he afterwards gave, with the contiguous palace, to Constantine, as part of the dowry of his daughter, Fausta, would be transferred by him to the head of the religion he was planning to extirpate, and become, retaining its name of the Lateran Basilica, the cathedral of Rome, “of all the churches of the city and of the world the mother and chief.”[111] Little did he imagine, that on the spot whereon rested his throne, would be raised a Chair, whence commands should issue, to reach worlds unknown to Roman sway, from an immortal race of sovereigns, spiritual and temporal.