Several times in the third century this historical necessity fell short of realization. This is seen most plainly under those Syrian emperors whom their quality of foreigners and base origin placed beyond prejudices, and who, in spite of their vices, inaugurated a largeness of ideas and a tolerance hitherto unknown. Those Syrian women of Emesa,--Julia Domna, Julia Mæsa, Julia Mammæa, Julia Soemia,--beautiful, intelligent, perfectly fearless, and held by no tradition or social law, hesitated at nothing. They did what Roman women would never have dared. They entered the Senate, deliberated there, and governed the empire effectively, dreaming of Semiramis and Nitocris. The Roman worship seemed cold and insignificant to them. Not being bound by any family reasons, and their imagination being more in harmony with Christianity than with Italian Paganism, these women amused themselves with the recitals of the deed of the gods upon earth. Philostratus enchanted them with his "Life of Apollonius Tyane." Perhaps they had more than one secret affinity with Christianity. Certainly Heliogabalus was mad; and yet his chimera of a central, Monotheistic worship, established at Rome, and absorbing all the other worships, proved that the narrow circle of ideas of the Antonines was broken. Alexander Severus went still farther. He was sympathetic with the Christians: not content with according them liberty, he placed Jesus in his lararium with a touching eclecticism. Peace seemed to be made, not, as under Constantine, by the defection of one of the parties, but by a large reconciliation. The same thing was seen again under Philip the Arab, in the East under Zenobia, and generally under those emperors whose foreign origin placed them beyond Roman patriotism. The struggle redoubled in rage when those grand reformers, Diocletian and Maximian, animated by the ancient spirit, believed themselves able to give new life for the empire by holding it to the narrow circle of Roman ideas. The Church triumphed through its martyrs. Roman pride was humbled. Constantine saw the interior strength of the Church. The population of Asia Minor, Syria, Thrace, and Macedonia, in a word the eastern part of the empire, was already more than half Christian. His mother, who had been a servant in an inn at Nicomedia, dazzled his eyes with the picture of an Eastern empire having its centre near Nicæa or Nicomedia, whose nerves should be the bishops and those multitudes of poor matriculates of the Church who controlled opinion in large cities. Constantine made the empire Christian. From the Occidental point of view, that was astonishing; for the Christians were still but a feeble minority in the West: in the Orient, the politics of Constantine was not only natural, but commanded.