“Behold, my friends, the gods of our fathers, whom we honor as we have been taught to do by them! Our adversary has abandoned them for I know not what strange God, whose infamous standard profanes his army. This battle will decide which of us is in error. “Should the strange God of Constantine, whom we deride, give him the victory, notwithstanding our superiority in numbers, we shall be compelled to recognize him. If, on the contrary, our gods should give us the victory,――of which there can be no doubt,――we will utterly exterminate those wretches who have rejected them.” Eusebius records this speech, saying that he received it from the lips of those who heard it.[182] The battle raged fiercely from dawn till dark. In the night Licinius fled, leaving twenty thousand of his soldiers dead upon the field, and abandoning his camp and all his magazines. Gathering recruits as he retreated, he made another stand on the plains of Thrace. Constantine, who had vigorously pursued, again attacked him, and nearly annihilated his army. From a force of a hundred and thirty thousand men, scarcely three thousand escaped. Licinius fled to the mountains of Macedonia, and sued for peace. Constantine, out of regard to his sister Constantia, treated his brother-in-law generously. He, however, wrested from him nearly all his domains in Europe, leaving him sovereign only in Asia and Egypt. Eight years of comparative tranquillity passed away, when the two emperors again found themselves in arms against each other. Licinius, though an infirm old man, displayed on the occasion amazing energy. He assembled on the fields of Thrace a hundred and fifty thousand infantry and fifteen thousand horse. The Bosphorus and the Hellespont were crowded with his fleet of three hundred and fifty galleys, with three banks of oars. Constantine met them with a hundred and twenty thousand horse and foot and two hundred transports. There was another of those awful scenes of blood and woe called a battle. How faintly can imagination picture the scene!――two hundred and eighty-five thousand men hurling themselves against each other in the most desperate hand-to-hand fight; the cry of onset, the clangor of weapons, the shrieks of death. In a few hours, thirty thousand of the troops of Licinius were dead in their blood. The monarch himself, with the disordered remainder of his troops, fled wildly to Byzantium. There was a long and cruel siege. Constantine was victorious: the world was again under one monarch, and he a nominal Christian. This extraordinary man issued a decree to his subjects, especially to those of his newly-conquered Eastern empire, assuring them of his conviction that the God of the Christians, the true and Almighty God, had given him the victory over the powers of paganism, in order that the worship of the true God might he universally diffused. He also issued the following prayer:――