Constantius, and the Spread of the Faith under Constantine

Under the government of Constantine the churches flourished and grew in number every day. They were honored by the good deeds of a kind and well-disposed emperor, and in other ways God kept them safe from the persecutions and troubles they had met with before. While the churches were suffering persecution in other parts of the world, Constantius, the father of Constantine, alone allowed the Christians to worship God without fear. I know of a remarkable thing he did that deserves to be recorded. He wanted to test the loyalty of certain Christians, excellent and good men, who served in his palaces. He called them all together and told them that if they would sacrifice to idols as well as serve God, they could stay in his service and keep their posts; but if they refused to do as he wished, they would be sent away from the palaces and would barely escape his vengeance. When a difference of judgment had split them into two groups, separating those who agreed to abandon their religion from those who put the honor of God ahead of their present well-being, the emperor decided to keep as his friends and counselors those who had held to their faith. But he turned away from the others, whom he considered cowards and frauds, and sent them out of his presence, judging that men who had so readily betrayed their God could never be true to their emperor. [a]

So it is likely that while Constantius was alive, it was not considered against the law for the people of the countries beyond Italy to profess Christianity, that is, in Gaul, in Britain, and in the region of the Pyrenees as far as the Western Ocean. When Constantine succeeded to the same government, the affairs of the churches became still more splendid. For when Maxentius, the son of Herculius, was killed, his share of the empire also passed to Constantine. Then the peoples who lived along the river Tiber and the Eridanus, which the natives call the Padus, those who lived along the Aquilis, where it is said the Argo was dragged, and the people of the coasts of the Tyrrhenian Sea were allowed to practice their religion without interference.

When the Argonauts fled from Aeetes, they went home by a different route. They crossed the Scythian sea, sailed up some of the rivers there, and so reached the shores of Italy, where they spent the winter and built a city they called Emona. The next summer, with the help of the people of the country, they dragged the Argo overland by machines for a distance of about fifty miles, and so reached the Aquilis, a river that flows into the Eridanus; and the Eridanus itself flows into the Italian sea. [c] After the battle of Cibalis, the Dardanians and the Macedonians, the people living along the banks of the Danube, the people of Greece, and the whole nation of Illyria came under Constantine’s rule. [e]