As a matter of fact the spread of Christianity in Asia had by that time attained considerable proportions, as is evident from the report sent by Pliny to Trajan and from other records; and as early as the reign of Domitian it had made its way in Rome even to the steps of the throne. But there was certainly no man then living who would have thought it possible that this despised religion of the poor was destined to conquer the world-wide empire, and this disdain is the only explanation we can find for the fact that the first general persecution of the Christians--for the local outbreaks of persecution under Marcus Aurelius, Severus, and Maximinus, confined as they were to a narrow circle, cannot be so called--did not take place until about the middle of the third century. Tertullian may have described too grandiloquently the enormous advance of Christianity throughout the empire; it is nevertheless beyond controversy that by the beginning of the third century it had become a power which serious-minded rulers, solicitous for the maintenance of a national empire, might well imagine that their duty to their country required them to extirpate with fire and sword. In this spirit Decius waged war against Christianity, and so did Diocletian, who assumed the surname of Jovius, after the supreme divinity of Rome, as patron of the national paganism. But it was a hopeless struggle; only ten years later Constantine made his peace with the Christian church by the Milan edict of toleration, and shortly before his death he received baptism. With Constantine the history of ancient Rome comes to an end; the transference of the capital to Byzantium was the outward visible sign that the Roman Empire was no more. The process of dissolution had long been at work; symptoms thereof come to light as early as the first century, and are frightfully apparent under the weak emperor Marcus, whose melancholy _Contemplations_ breathe the utter hopelessness of a world scourged by war and pestilence. The real dissolution of the Roman world, however, did not take place until the middle of the third century. The empire, assailed by barbarians and rent asunder by internal feuds, became the sport of ambitious generals who in Gaul, Mœsia, and Pannonia, placed themselves at the head of their barbarian troops; the time of the so-called Thirty Tyrants witnesses the speedy disintegration of the recently united West. INEVITABLE DECAY