It was during the persecution of Diocletian and ‘Duke’ Galerius, as Prudentius styles him, that Quirinus, bishop of Siscia, refused to burn incense on the heathen altar at the bidding of the Governor Maximus, on the plea—countenanced, indeed, by inspired writers, but which a little philology would have spared him—‘that all the gods of the Gentiles were demons.’ ‘If you will allow,’ said Maximus, ‘that the gods which the Roman Empire serves are powerful, you shall be made priest to the great god Jove, otherwise you shall be sent to Amantius, præfect of First Pannonia, and receive from him condign sentence of death.’ The stout-hearted bishop, refusing these terms, is sent to Sabaria, where he is tried and condemned in the theatre, and with a millstone round his neck is thrown from the bridge above into the river; when, lo! despite the weight of rock, the water miraculously supports him:— Dejectum placidissimo Amnis vertice suscipit; Nec mergi patitur sibi, Miris vasta natatibus Saxi pondera sustinens, till, having exhorted the faithful and confounded the heathen from his watery pulpit, his spirit ascends and the laws of gravity resume their sway. In the dark period which followed the barbarian invasions, something of her old secular glory was still reflected in the Siscian Church. After the destruction of Sirmium by the Huns in 441, Siscia transferred her ecclesiastical allegiance to Salona. Her decline was more lingering than that of her rival, for her prosperity had rested on a more solid foundation. Her bishops survive the settlement of the Sclaves hereabouts in the time of Heraclius. In the ninth century we find her the residence of a Sclavonic prince; but she suffered from the Frankish invasion, and in the tenth century was finally razed by the Magyars. Now at last the Siscian episcopate dies out, to live again with renewed splendour at Agram.