That Constantia had as her friends and fellows in her retired devout life three of the daughters of the ex-Consul, is not at all unlikely. That he was banished to Alexandria by Julian may be admitted. But this is the utmost. The recomposer of the Acts tried to spice the story to suit the taste of his times, and in doing so fell into extravagances, anachronisms, and absurdities. Constantia may have felt grateful for the disorder that kept her out of the current of public life, and from the intrigues of the palace. Her father, with all his good qualities, was a violent man; and his adoption of Christianity was due to political shrewdness rather than to conviction. In 324 Crispus, her accomplished brother, whose virtues and glory had made him a favourite with the people, was accused of conspiring against his father by his stepmother Fausta, who desired to clear him out of the way to make room for her own son Constantius. Another involved in the same charge was Licinius, a son of the sister of Constantine, and who was also a young man of good qualities. Constantine was at Rome at the time. He went into a fit of blind fury, and had his son put to death, and ordered the execution of Licinius. Then, coming to his senses, and finding that he had acted without having any evidence of the truth of the charges, he turned round on his wife Fausta, and ordered her to be suffocated in a vapour bath. Constantine died in 337. “One dark shadow from the great tragedy of his life reached to his last end, and beyond it,” says Dean Stanley. “It is said that the Bishop of Nicomedia, to whom the Emperor’s will had been confided, alarmed at its contents, immediately placed it for security in the dead man’s hand, wrapped in the vestments of death. There it lay till Constantius arrived, and read his father’s dying bequest. It was believed to express the Emperor’s conviction that he had been poisoned by his brothers and their children, and to call on Constantius to avenge his death. That bequest was obeyed by the massacre of six out of the surviving princes of the imperial family. Two alone escaped. With such a mingling of light and darkness did Constantine close his career.”[2] One of Constantia’s sisters, Constantina, has been already mentioned. Her second husband was Gallus. “She was an incarnate fury,” says Ammianus Marcellinus; “never weary of inflaming the savage temper of her husband. The pair, in process of time, becoming skilful in inflicting suffering, hired a gang of crafty talebearers, who loaded the innocent with false charges, accusing them of aiming at the royal power or of practising magic.” Those accused were all put to death and their goods confiscated. She died of fever in 353.