The Death of Arius

Such was Alexander’s prayer. Meanwhile the emperor, wishing to examine Arius in person, sent for him to the palace and asked him whether he would agree to the decisions of the synod at Nicaea. Without hesitating, Arius said yes, and signed the declaration of the faith in the emperor’s presence, acting with deceit. The emperor, surprised at how readily he complied, made him confirm his signature with an oath. This too he did with the same pretense. The way he got around it, as I have heard, was this: he wrote his own opinion on paper and carried it under his arm, so that he then swore truly that he really held the views he had written. That this is so I have written from hearsay; but that he added an oath to his signature, I have confirmed for myself by examining the emperor’s own letters. [a]

So the emperor was convinced, and he ordered that Arius be received into communion by Alexander, bishop of Constantinople. It was then Saturday, and Arius expected to gather with the church the next day. But divine retribution overtook his daring crimes. As he came out of the imperial palace, surrounded by a crowd of the Eusebian party like a bodyguard, he paraded proudly through the middle of the city, drawing the attention of all the people. As he came near the place called Constantine’s Forum, where the porphyry column stands, a terror arising from remorse of conscience seized him, and with the terror a violent loosening of the bowels. So he asked whether there was a convenient place nearby, and being directed to the back of Constantine’s Forum, he hurried there. Soon afterward a faintness came over him, and along with the evacuations his bowels came out, followed by heavy bleeding and the passing of the smaller intestines; parts of his spleen and liver too were carried out in the flow of blood, so that he died almost at once. The scene of this disaster is still shown at Constantinople, as I have said, behind the meat market in the colonnade; and as people passing by point their finger at the place, a lasting memory is kept of this extraordinary kind of death.

So terrible an event filled the party of Eusebius, bishop of Nicomedia, with dread and alarm, and the report of it spread quickly through the city and throughout the whole world. The emperor, growing more earnest in Christianity and confessing that the confession made at Nicaea had been confirmed by God, rejoiced at what had happened. He was glad also because of his three sons, whom he had already proclaimed Caesars, one at each successive tenth anniversary of his reign. To the eldest, whom he named Constantine after himself, he gave the government of the western parts of the empire when his first ten years were completed. His second son, Constantius, who bore his grandfather’s name, he made Caesar in the eastern part when the second ten years were completed. And Constans, the youngest, he raised to the same rank in the thirtieth year of his own reign.