From Nero to Diocletian

The Lord has heard the prayers you pour out before him all day long, Donatus, dearest of my friends, and the prayers of the rest of our brothers, who by a glorious confession have won an everlasting crown as the reward of their faith. Look: every enemy is destroyed. Quiet has been restored throughout the Roman empire, and the church that was lately crushed is rising again; the temple of God, torn down by wicked hands, is being built with more glory than before. For God has raised up rulers to cancel the godless and bloody edicts of the tyrants and to see to the good of the human race, so that the cloud of the past years is scattered and peace and calm gladden every heart. [a]

After the raging whirlwind and the black storm the sky has gone still, and the light we longed for has shone out. God, who hears prayer, has by his divine help lifted his servants off the ground where they lay beaten down; he has broken up the schemes the wicked had made together, and wiped the tears from the faces of those who mourned. The men who insulted what is divine lie low. The men who threw down the holy temple have fallen in a more terrible ruin. The men who tortured the just have poured out their guilty souls under plagues sent from heaven and under torments they had earned. For God put off punishing them so that by great and astonishing examples he might teach those who come after that he alone is God, and that he carries out judgment on the proud, the godless and the persecutors with the vengeance that fits them.

I have thought it good to publish an account of how those men ended, so that everyone far away, and everyone born after us, may learn how the Almighty displayed his power and his sovereign greatness in rooting out and utterly destroying the enemies of his name. That will be plain once I have told who persecuted the church from the day it was first established, and what punishments the divine Judge in his severity exacted from them.

In the last years of the emperor Tiberius, in the consulship of Rubellius Geminus and Fufius Geminus, on the twenty-third of March — so I find it written — Jesus Christ was crucified by the Jews. After he rose again on the third day he gathered his apostles, whom fear had scattered when he was seized. He stayed with them forty days, opened their hearts, and explained to them the scripture, which until then had been wrapped in obscurity. He appointed them and fitted them to preach his word and his teaching, and he settled everything to do with the ordering of the new covenant. When this was done, a cloud and a whirlwind wrapped him round and carried him up out of human sight into heaven. [e]

At that time his apostles were eleven. Matthias was added to them in place of the traitor Judas, and Paul afterwards. Then they were scattered over all the earth to preach the good news, as the Lord their Master had commanded them; and for twenty-five years, until the beginning of the emperor Nero’s reign, they worked at laying the foundations of the church in every province and every city.

While Nero was reigning, the apostle Peter came to Rome, and by the power of God entrusted to him he worked certain miracles; and by turning many to the true religion he built the Lord a faithful and steady temple. When Nero heard of it, and saw that not only at Rome but everywhere a great crowd was deserting the worship of idols every day, condemning their old ways and going over to the new religion, he — a loathsome and destructive tyrant — leapt up to level that heavenly temple and wipe out the true faith. He was the first to persecute the servants of God. He crucified Peter and killed Paul. He did not get away with it. God looked on the affliction of his people, and so the tyrant was stripped of his authority, thrown down from the height of empire, and suddenly vanished; not even the burial place of that dangerous wild beast could be found anywhere.

That has led some people, whose imaginations have run away with them, to suppose that he was carried off to some distant country and is being kept alive there. They apply to him the Sibylline verses about

as though the first persecutor ought also to be the last, and so be the forerunner of Antichrist. But we should not believe people who say that the two prophets Enoch and Elijah have been carried off to some remote place so that they may attend our Lord when he comes to judgment, and who then imagine that Nero is to appear later as the forerunner of the devil, when the devil comes to lay the earth waste and overthrow the human race.

Some years after Nero’s death another tyrant rose up, no less wicked — Domitian. His government was thoroughly hated, yet for a very long time he ground his subjects down and reigned in safety, until at last he stretched out his godless hands against the Lord. Evil demons set him on to persecute the righteous people; then he was handed over into the power of his enemies and paid the penalty he owed. To be murdered in his own palace was not vengeance enough: the very memory of his name was scrubbed out. He had put up many admirable buildings, rebuilt the Capitol, and left other notable marks of his magnificence; even so the senate hounded his name, leaving no remnant of his statues and no trace of the inscriptions set up in his honor, and by the most solemn and severe decrees it branded him, even after death, with everlasting disgrace. [l]

So the tyrant’s orders were repealed, and the church was not only restored to what she had been but shone with a fresh splendor and grew and grew. In the years that followed, while many deserving rulers held the helm of the Roman empire, she suffered no violent assault from her enemies. She stretched out her hands to the east and to the west, until there was no corner of the earth so remote that the divine religion had not reached it, and no nation of manners so savage that it had not been made mild and gentle by turning to the worship of God.

This long peace, however, was broken later on. Decius appeared in the world, an accursed wild beast, to trouble the church — and who but a bad man would persecute religion? It looks as though he was lifted to the top of the empire for this alone: to rage against God at once, and at once to fall. He undertook a campaign against the Carpi, who had by then taken possession of Dacia and Moesia, and the barbarians suddenly closed around him and killed him, along with a great part of his army. He could not even be honored with burial: he lay stripped and naked, food for wild animals and birds — the fit end of an enemy of God. [n]

Valerian came next, in the same mad temper, and lifted his godless hands to make war on God; and though his time was short, he shed a great deal of righteous blood. But God punished him in a new and extraordinary way, so that later ages might learn that the enemies of heaven always get the recompense their crimes deserve. He was taken prisoner by the Persians. He lost not only the power he had used without restraint but also the liberty he had taken from others, and he wore out the rest of his days in the meanest condition of slavery. For Shapur, the Persian king who had captured him, whenever he wanted to get into his carriage or mount his horse, would order the Roman to stoop and offer his back; and setting his foot on Valerian’s shoulders he would say, with a mocking smile, “This is the truth — not what the Romans paint on boards and plaster.” [p]

Valerian lived a long while under the insults he had well earned from the man who beat him, so that the Roman name was for years a joke and a laughingstock among the barbarians. And this too was added to the weight of his punishment: though he had an emperor for a son, he found no one to avenge his captivity and his utterly abject and slavish state, and he was never so much as asked back. Afterwards, when he had ended that shameful life in such dishonor, he was flayed, and his skin was stripped from the flesh, dyed with vermilion, and set up in the temple of the barbarians’ gods, so that the memory of so remarkable a triumph might last, and so that this sight might always be put before our ambassadors — a warning to the Romans, when they saw the remains of their captured emperor in a Persian temple, not to put too much confidence in their own strength.

Since God punished the sacrilegious like that, is it not strange that anyone afterwards dared to do anything — even to plan anything — against the majesty of the one God who governs and holds up all things?

Aurelian could have remembered what happened to the captured emperor; but he was a violent and headstrong man by nature, and he forgot both the sin and its punishment, and provoked God’s anger by acts of cruelty. He was not allowed to carry out what he had planned, though. Just as he was giving his rage free rein, he was killed. His bloody edicts had not yet reached the more distant provinces when he himself lay on the ground covered in blood at Caenophrurium in Thrace, murdered by his own close friends, who had picked up groundless suspicions against him. [r]

Examples of that kind, and so many of them, ought to have frightened off the tyrants who came after. Instead they were not merely undismayed; in their crimes against God they grew bolder and more presumptuous.

While Diocletian — that author of crimes and contriver of misery — was ruining everything, he could not keep his insults off even God. This man overturned the Roman empire, partly by greed and partly by cowardly policy. He chose three men to share the government with him; and so, the empire having been quartered, the armies were multiplied, and each of the four rulers set out to keep a far larger military force than any single emperor had kept in the past. There began to be fewer men paying taxes than there were men drawing pay. The farmers’ means were drained away by huge levies, the farms were abandoned, plowland turned back into forest, and everyone was in terror. [s]

On top of that, the provinces were cut into small pieces. Governors by the dozen and swarms of lesser officials pressed down on every district and almost on every city, and there were finance officers of every grade besides, and deputies standing in for the governors. Very few civil cases came before them, but there were condemnations daily and confiscations constantly, taxes on more goods than anyone could count — not simply levied again and again but made permanent — and unbearable injustice in collecting them.

Whatever was raised to keep the soldiers fed might have been borne. But Diocletian’s greed had no bottom, and he would never let the money in his treasury be reduced. He was forever piling up extraordinary levies and free gifts so that his original hoard could stay untouched and intact. And when his various extortions had made everything ruinously expensive, he tried by decree to fix what things might cost. Then blood was shed over the smallest trifles; men were afraid to put anything up for sale; and the shortage grew far worse and harder than before, until at last, after the decree had destroyed a great many people, sheer necessity forced its repeal.

Add to this an endless passion for building, and with it endless demands on the provinces for the wages of workmen and craftsmen, for wagons, and for whatever else the projects he had in hand required. Public halls here, a racecourse there; a mint here and an arms factory there; a residence in one place for his wife and in another for his daughter. Soon a great part of the city was emptied, and everyone moved out with their wives and children as though the town had been taken by an enemy. And when those buildings were finished, at the cost of whole provinces, he would say, “They are not right. Have them done another way.” Then they had to be pulled down or altered — and perhaps pulled down again after that. This was the folly by which he kept trying to make Nicomedia the equal of the city of Rome in magnificence.

I say nothing of how many died on account of their property or their money. Such things happened so often that their very frequency made them look almost lawful. But this was peculiar to him: whenever he saw a field unusually well farmed or a house of uncommon elegance, a false charge and a death sentence were ready at once for the owner — as though Diocletian could not rob a man without also shedding his blood.

And what sort of man was his partner in the empire, Maximian, called Herculius? Not unlike Diocletian. Indeed, for their friendship to be as close and loyal as it was, there must have been in them the same inclinations and aims, a matching will and one mind in judgment. In this alone they differed: Diocletian was greedier and less resolute; Maximian was less greedy but bolder in spirit, and inclined not to good but to evil. He held Italy, the chief seat of the empire itself, and very rich provinces such as Africa and Spain lay close at hand; yet he took little trouble to keep the treasure he had every chance to amass. Whenever he needed more, the wealthiest senators were promptly charged, on the word of bribed witnesses, with aiming at the throne — so that the leading lights of the senate were put out one after another, day after day. And so the treasury, which took delight in blood, overflowed with wealth got by crime. [w]

Add to all this the unbridled lust of that plague of a man — not only in defiling males, which is hateful and disgusting, but in violating the daughters of the leading men of the state; for wherever he travelled, unmarried girls were suddenly torn out of their parents’ presence. He took his highest pleasure in outrages of that kind, and in his own judgment the happiness of his reign lay in indulging his lust and his shameful appetites to the utmost.

I pass over Constantius, a ruler unlike the rest, and one who deserved to have had the government of the whole empire to himself.

But the other Maximian — Galerius, whom Diocletian chose for a son-in-law — was worse than either of the two rulers our own age has known; worse, indeed, than all the bad rulers of earlier days. In this wild beast there lived a native barbarity and a savagery foreign to Roman blood, and no wonder: his mother was born beyond the Danube, and it was a raid of the Carpi that forced her to cross over and take refuge in New Dacia. His body matched his character. He was tall, gross with flesh, swollen to a horrible bulk of fat; and by his speech, his gestures and his looks he made himself a terror to everyone who came near him. Even his father-in-law was desperately afraid of him. [x]

The reason was this. Narses, king of the Persians, following the example his grandfather Shapur had set him, gathered a great army and aimed at making himself master of the eastern provinces of the Roman empire. Diocletian, who tended to lose heart and take fright at any disturbance, and who dreaded an end like Valerian’s, would not face Narses in person; he sent Galerius by way of Armenia, while he himself halted in the eastern provinces and watched anxiously to see what would happen. It is the custom among the barbarians to take everything they own with them into the field. Galerius set an ambush for them and easily overthrew men encumbered with crowds of followers and with their baggage. He put Narses to flight and came back with a great deal of plunder — and after that his own pride and Diocletian’s fears both grew enormously.

After that victory he rose to such a pitch of arrogance that he refused the title of Caesar. When he heard that title in letters addressed to him, he would cry out, with a grim look and a terrible voice, “How long am I to be Caesar?” Then he began to behave extravagantly. As though he were a second Romulus, he wanted to pass for the offspring of Mars and to be called so; and so that he might look like the child of a god, he was willing to have his mother Romula shamed with the name of adulteress. But I will not confuse the order of events, and so I put off the account of his doings; for it was afterwards, when Galerius had taken the title of emperor and his father-in-law had been stripped of the imperial purple, that he became altogether ungovernable and boundlessly arrogant.

While Diocles — for that was Diocletian’s name before he came to power — was busy in this company and by these methods pulling the commonwealth to pieces, there was no evil his crimes did not deserve. All the same, he reigned with great prosperity as long as he kept from staining his hands with the blood of the just. What reason he had for persecuting them I will now explain.

Diocletian, being of a fearful disposition, was a searcher into the future; and while he was living in the East he began killing victims so that he might get a forecast of events out of their livers. While he was sacrificing, some of his attendants who were Christians stood by, and they put the immortal sign on their foreheads. At that the demons were driven off and the holy rites were thrown into confusion. The diviners shook; they could not find the usual marks on the entrails of the victims. They repeated the sacrifices again and again, as though the earlier ones had been unfavorable; but the victims, killed one after another, gave no signs to read. At last Tages, the chief of the diviners, said — either from guessing or because he had seen it for himself, “There are profane persons here, obstructing the rites.” [aa]

Then Diocletian, in a furious rage, ordered that not only everyone assisting at the ceremonies but everyone living inside the palace should sacrifice, and that any who refused should be flogged. He went further: by letters to the commanding officers he ordered that all soldiers be forced into the same impiety, on pain of being discharged from the service. His anger went that far and no further; at that season he did nothing more against the law and religion of God. Some time later he went to spend the winter in Bithynia, and Galerius Caesar came there, burning with rage and meaning to stir up the rash old man to press on with the persecution he had begun against the Christians. I have learned that the cause of his fury was this.