On a wide plain near Nicomedia the army assembled on May 1st, 305, for the unexampled ceremony of the abdication of an Emperor. A little hill in the centre was surmounted by a lofty throne and a statue of Jupiter, and the ageing Emperor--he was in his fifty-ninth year--surrendered the power he had wielded so well for more than twenty years. By a previous arrangement, Maximian was abdicating on the same day at Milan. The two Cæsars became Augusti, and two new Cæsars were appointed. In their selection we recognize the partial and unskilful hand of Galerius. He handed his own Cæsarean dignity to a rustic nephew, Daza--“who had just left his herds in the forest,” Lactantius scornfully says--and sent a loyal and undistinguished friend to receive that of Maximian in Italy. From that selfish act would develop one of the greatest civil wars since the founding of the Empire. In the ranks of the officers by the platform was the tall, handsome, gifted, and disappointed young man who would one day be known as Constantine the Great. Diocletian retired to Salona, in his native province of Dalmatia, and built, close to the town, what was for the age a magnificent palace. Valeria remained in the palace of Galerius, and it seems that Prisca stayed with her, as we shall presently find her sharing the hard lot of her daughter. Why the mother, at least, chose to remain in Nicomedia is left to our imaginations. The religion they had favoured was cruelly suppressed, and, if we are to believe Lactantius, their virtue must have been outraged by the unbridled license of the new Emperor. He is described as an ogre, dragging the noblest women of Nicomedia from their husbands, feeding his bears on innocent citizens, and “never taking a meal without a taste of human blood.” Yet Valeria clung to her husband even through the painful and repulsive illness which ended his life; and her name was given by him to a part of his Empire. The picture is evidently overdrawn, yet life in the palace, with Galerius and his boorish relatives, cannot have been very congenial, and the temper of Galerius would be soured by the events that followed.