Licinius Turns Persecutor

Such were the gifts that the divine and heavenly grace of our Savior’s appearing bestowed on us, and so great was the abundance of good things that our peace dispensed to all people. And so our affairs were crowned with rejoicing and festivals. But to envy, which hates the good, and to the demon who loves evil, the sight of these things was unbearable. Nor, as it turned out, were the fates of the tyrants already described enough to bring Licinius to sound reason. His rule was prospering; he had been honored with second rank after the great emperor Constantine, and with marriage into his family and the closest kinship. Yet he fell away from imitating what is good and copied the wickedness of the godless tyrants, and he chose to follow the thinking of those whose end he had seen with his own eyes, rather than to remain in friendship and good will with his better. Envious of the benefactor of all, he waged an unholy and most terrible war against him, sparing no laws of nature, and keeping in mind no oaths, no ties of blood, no treaties. [a]

For Constantine, like the thoroughly good emperor he was, gave him tokens of true good will. He did not begrudge him kinship with himself, nor refuse him a brilliant marriage with his sister. He even judged him worthy to share in the nobility of his fathers and the imperial blood of his ancestors, and he gave him authority to share in the rule over all as his brother-in-law and fellow emperor, granting him the government and administration of no smaller a part of the peoples under Rome than his own. [c] But Licinius did the very opposite. Every day he contrived all kinds of schemes against his better and devised every sort of plot, to repay his benefactor with evil. At first he tried to hide his preparations and pretended to be a friend; and by attacking again and again with fraud and deceit, he hoped to reach his goal easily. But God was Constantine’s friend, protector and guardian. He brought to light the plots devised in secret and darkness, and exposed them. So great is the power of the great armor of godliness, both to ward off enemies and to guard one’s own safety. Fenced about by it, our emperor, most dear to God, escaped the many-stranded plots of that man of evil name.

When Licinius saw that his secret preparations were not going at all as he wished, since God made every plot and villainy plain to the emperor he loved, and when he could no longer conceal himself, he took up open war. And at the same time as he decided to fight Constantine, he was already setting out to do battle against the God of the universe, whom he knew Constantine worshiped. Then, gently and quietly for a time, he began to lay siege to the God-fearing people under his rule, though they had never done his government any harm at all. He did this because his inborn wickedness had driven him into a terrible blindness. [d] So he did not keep before his eyes the memory of those who had persecuted the Christians before him, nor of those whose destroyer and punisher he himself had been appointed, because of the impieties they had committed. Turning from sound reason, plainly out of his mind, he determined to make war on God himself, as Constantine’s ally, instead of on the one God was helping. [e]

First he drove every Christian out of his own household, leaving himself, poor wretch, without the prayers they offered to God for him, prayers which their fathers’ teaching tells them to make for all people. Next he ordered that the soldiers in the cities be weeded out and stripped of the dignity of their rank unless they chose to sacrifice to the demons. And even these were small matters compared with what came after. Why go through everything the God-hater did, one thing at a time and in detail, and how this most lawless man devised lawless laws? He made a law that no one should show kindness to those suffering in the prisons by giving them food, and that no one should pity those dying of hunger in chains. No one was to be good at all, or do any good thing, even when nature herself drew him to feel for his neighbors. This was an openly shameless law, the cruelest of all, overriding every gentle instinct of nature. A penalty was attached to it as well: those who showed pity were to suffer the same as those they pitied, and those who did these kind services were to be shut up in chains and prisons and bear the same punishment as the oppressed. Such were the decrees of Licinius. [f] Why list his innovations about marriage, or his novelties concerning the dying? By them he dared to do away with the ancient laws of the Romans, which had been well and wisely laid down, and to bring in barbarous and savage ones in their place, truly lawless and unlawful laws. He devised countless charges against the subject peoples, every kind of exaction of gold and silver, new surveys of land, and ruinous gains squeezed out of people in the countryside who were no longer living but long since dead. [g]

And why dwell on the banishments that this hater of mankind devised besides, against people who had done no wrong; on the deportations of well-born and respected men, whose wedded wives he tore from them and handed over to certain vile household slaves to be shamefully outraged; and on the many married women and unmarried girls whom he himself, at the very end of old age, abused in his drunken insolence to satisfy the unbridled craving of his soul? Why, I say, dwell on these things, when the excess of his last deeds shows the first to be small and of no account? [h]

In the end his madness turned against the bishops. He judged that they, as servants of the God over all, were opposed to what he was doing. He did not yet move against them openly, out of fear of his better, but once again secretly and craftily he laid his plans, and through the plotting of the governors he put to death the most respected of them. And the manner of their murder was strange, such as had never been heard of before. What was done at Amaseia and the other cities of Pontus outdid every extreme of cruelty. There some of the churches of God were once again thrown down from top to bottom, while others were locked up, so that none of those who used to meet there might assemble, or render to God the worship owed him. [i] For he did not believe the prayers were being offered for him; his bad conscience made him reckon so. He was convinced that we did everything for the emperor dear to God, and that we sought God’s favor for him. So he set out to turn his fury against us.

And so the flatterers among the governors, persuaded that they were doing what the unholy man liked, subjected some of the bishops to the punishments usual for criminals; and men who had done no wrong were led away and punished without any pretext, like murderers. Some now suffered a newer kind of death: their bodies were hacked into many pieces with the sword, and after that savage and most horrifying spectacle they were thrown into the depths of the sea as food for the fish. Then once again the God-fearing fled, and once again the fields and the deserts, the forests and the mountains, took in the servants of Christ. And when this too went as the impious man wished, he finally set his mind on stirring up the persecution against everyone. He would have had his way, and nothing would have kept him from carrying it out, had not God, the champion of the souls that are his own, quickly foreseen what was coming. As in deep darkness and the gloomiest night, he made a great light, a savior for all, suddenly shine out, leading his servant Constantine by the hand into those regions with an uplifted arm. [j]