While the barbarians are now beginning to press down on the northern frontiers of the Empire and the Christians beginning to rapidly and swiftly permeate the vast domain, there is little but a bloody chronicle of making and unmaking of emperors up to Diocletian. Even when persecuted and proscribed, says Ortolan, Christianity had a liberalizing and softening effect on the progress of jurisprudence and legislation. The softening effect was also the effect of a new understanding. Trajan, one of the greatest of the humane emperors, had come from Spain, and Diocletian, who temporarily braced up the Roman legions, put energy into the government, and held the barbarians in check, was himself from a family of freedmen. The best of the patrician blood had become thoroughly impregnated with Stoic ideas, although it was true that the jurists who had obtained their philosophy from Greece and were given the task of defending existing law and institutions were still against the new religion. Though the persecutors under Diocletian were unusually severe, theirs was the final burst of oppression before the new religion was to triumph in having the head of the great Roman Empire, Diocletian’s own successor, Constantine, accept the despised faith. It matters little whether Constantine’s conversion was a political move, based on a desire to absorb a growing and powerful organization. This was a century in which things were happening and his was a reign (306 or 313–337) that marked a long turn in the road in the attitude of the State toward the child. Despite the progress that had been made, the practice of murdering and exposing new-born children was becoming more and more frequent in the provinces, and especially in Italy.[362] It was due to poverty, says Gibbon,[363] and the principal causes of distress were the unendurable taxes. The historian declares that “moved by some recent and extraordinary instances of despair,” Constantine addressed an edict[364] to all the cities of Italy and afterward to those of Africa, directing that immediate and sufficient aid be given by magistrates to parents who produced children that they were too poor to bring up. Against the opinion of Gibbon is set that of Godefroy that it was not some unusual bit of misery, some “Mary Ellen case,” that moved the Emperor to take this significant step.