Two Tyrants, East and West

His son Maxentius, who set himself up as tyrant at Rome, at first pretended to share our faith, to please and flatter the Roman people. In keeping with this he ordered his subjects to stop persecuting the Christians, putting on a show of godliness so that he might seem gracious and far gentler than those before him. [a] Yet in his deeds he did not turn out to be what had been hoped. He plunged into every kind of impiety and left no deed of foulness and licentiousness undone, committing adulteries and corruptions of every sort. He would part lawful wives from their husbands, outrage them most shamefully, and send them back to their husbands; and he did this not to obscure or unknown people but above all, in drunken insolence, to the most eminent of those who held the first places in the Roman senate. All his subjects, peoples and officials, famous and obscure, cowered before him and were worn down by a terrible tyranny. Though they kept quiet and bore their bitter slavery, there was still no relief from the tyrant’s murderous cruelty. Once, on a trifling pretext, he handed the people over to his bodyguards for slaughter, and countless numbers of the Roman people were killed in the middle of the city by the spears and weapons not of Scythians or barbarians, but of their own fellow citizens. As for the senators, it is impossible even to count the murders done through designs on their property, countless of them being killed on one invented charge or another. As the crown of his evils, the tyrant turned to sorcery. In his magic arts he would rip open pregnant women, or search the entrails of newborn babies; he slaughtered lions and performed unspeakable rites to call up demons and to turn war away. For his whole hope was that by these means victory would be won for him. What this tyrant at Rome did to enslave his subjects cannot be told; it went so far that they were reduced to extreme scarcity and want even of the necessities of food, such as people of our time say had never been known at Rome at any other time. [b]

Maximin, the tyrant in the East, secretly made a pact of friendship with the tyrant at Rome, as with a brother in wickedness, and for a very long time took care to keep it hidden. In the end, however, he was found out and paid the penalty he deserved. [c] It was astonishing how he too, a kinsman and brother in wickedness to the tyrant at Rome, or rather how he carried off from him the first place and the victor’s prize for depravity. For the chief sorcerers and magicians were held by him in the highest honor. He had become exceedingly fearful and superstitious and set great store by the error of idols and demons; indeed without divinations and oracles he could not bring himself to move so much as a fingernail, so to speak. That is why he pressed the persecution against us more violently and more relentlessly than those before him. He ordered temples to be built in every city and the sacred precincts that had fallen to ruin over the years to be restored with all speed. He appointed priests of the idols in every place and city, and over them in each province a high priest, one of those in public life who had most conspicuously distinguished himself in every public service, with a troop of soldiers and a bodyguard; and he freely gave governorships and the greatest privileges to all the sorcerers, as though they were devout and dear to the gods. [d] Starting from here, he harassed and oppressed not one city or region but all the provinces under him without exception, with exactions of gold and silver and untold wealth, with the heaviest charges and with fines of one kind and another. He stripped the rich of the property they had inherited from their ancestors and lavished masses of wealth and heaps of money on the flatterers around him. He was carried so far by drunken violence and drink that in his carousals he would lose his reason and be driven out of his mind, and give such orders when drunk as he would regret the next day when sober. He let no one outdo him in debauchery and profligacy, and set himself up as a teacher of wickedness to those around him, rulers and ruled alike. He encouraged the army to grow soft in every kind of luxury and licentiousness, and invited the governors and generals to go after their subjects with plunder and greed, as though they almost shared his tyranny. Why should we recall the man’s shameless deeds of passion, or count the multitude of those he committed adultery with? He could not pass through a city without corrupting women and seizing virgins by any means he could.

In this he succeeded with everyone except the Christians alone. They despised death and set his great tyranny at nothing. For the men endured fire and sword and nailing, wild beasts and the depths of the sea, the cutting off of limbs and burning with hot irons, the piercing and gouging out of eyes and the mutilation of the whole body, and besides all this hunger, the mines and chains. In all of it they showed endurance for godliness rather than exchange the reverence due to God for idols. The women, for their part, were made no less manly than the men by the teaching of the divine word. Some went through the same contests as the men and carried off equal prizes for their courage; others, when they were dragged away to be defiled, gave up their souls to death sooner than their bodies to defilement. [e] Alone among those whom the tyrant set out to violate, a Christian woman of Alexandria, most distinguished and famous, conquered the passionate and licentious soul of Maximin by her most courageous steadfastness. She was renowned in every other way, for wealth, family and education, but she counted all of these second to chastity. He pressed her hard many times, but though she was ready to die he could not bring himself to kill her, because his craving was stronger than his anger. He did punish her with exile, however, and took away all her property. Countless other women, unable even to hear the threat of sexual violation from the provincial governors, endured every form of torture and racking and deadly punishment. These women too are to be admired; but most extraordinarily admirable of all was the woman at Rome, truly the noblest and most chaste of all those whom the tyrant there, Maxentius, acting just like Maximin, tried to outrage. [f] When she learned that the men who served the tyrant in such matters were at the house (she too was a Christian), and that her husband, though he was prefect of Rome, had out of fear allowed them to take her and lead her away, she asked for a little time, as if to adorn her body, went into her room, and when she was alone drove a sword into herself. She died at once and left her corpse to the procurers; but by her deeds, which speak louder than any voice, she has shown to all people, those living now and those yet to be, that the virtue found among Christians is the only possession that cannot be conquered or destroyed. [g]

Such was the tide of wickedness that the two tyrants who had divided East and West between them brought about at one and the same time. Who, searching out the cause of such evils, would hesitate to declare that it was the persecution against us? Especially since this great confusion did not come to an end before the Christians had recovered their freedom.