The last decade of Constantine’s life was inglorious. We might distrust the partial and severe accusations of Zosimus, but the substance of his charge is found in the other authorities. His vast and hurried enterprise in building forced him to lay heavy burdens on his enfeebled Empire, and we have the authority of Ammianus Marcellinus that he “encouraged those about him to open devouring jaws” in a lamentable degree. Conversion was the first right to favour and wealth. The later Emperor Julian, we are not surprised to find, pours acrid satire on him. In the treatise (“Cæsares”) in which he introduces the Emperors of Rome to the Olympic court, he makes Constantine turn to the goddess Luxury, as the one congenial deity, and she introduces him only to her sister Prodigality. He ridicules Constantine’s womanly finery in dress and jewels, his elaborate crown of false hair, his complete lapse into effeminate ways. Aurelius Victor gives us the proverbial judgment of the next generation on Constantine: in his first decade he was admirable, in his second decade thievish, in his third decade a squanderer. He made the final blunder of--without naming a successor--dividing the Empire among his sons and nephews, of gravely unequal character, and died in 337, leaving them and their supporters to engage in a murderous struggle for supremacy. CHAPTER XVIII THE WIVES OF CONSTANTIUS AND JULIAN When the announcement of Constantine’s death had been borne by swift couriers to the distant provinces, and the body, in its golden coffin, had been transferred to Constantinople, there was a nervous rush of aspiring Emperors and Empresses to the capital. The unification of the Empire under Constantine had cost the State some hundred and fifty thousand of its finest soldiers, who perished in civil warfare while powerful nations pressed against its yielding frontiers. In his later years he had so distributed these provinces, whose unity had been so dearly purchased, among his sons and nephews, worthy and unworthy, that dismemberment was certain to follow his death. His eldest son, Constantine, now in his twenty-first year, ruled Gaul and Britain; Constantius, the second son, a youth of twenty, was the Cæsar of the East; the third son, Constans, aged seventeen, held sway over Italy and Africa. His nephew Delmatius, also entitled Cæsar, controlled Thrace, Macedonia, and Greece, and the younger nephew Hannibalian bore the ornate title of King of Kings in Pontus and Cappadocia. The two brothers of Constantine, and the husbands of his two sisters, were not left without a share of the Imperial provision.