The Death of Galerius

But Maximian knew what Galerius was like when his temper was up. He worked out that Galerius, once he heard that Severus was dead, would be wild with rage and would march into Italy, and that Daia might well join him and bring a force into the field too strong to be resisted. So Maximian fortified Rome and made careful provision for a defensive war, and then went off to Gaul to give his younger daughter Fausta in marriage to Constantine and win that prince over to his side. [a]

Meanwhile Galerius gathered his troops, invaded Italy, and advanced on Rome, meaning to wipe out the senate and put the whole population to the sword. He found everything shut and fortified against him. There was no hope of taking the place by storm, and to besiege it was an enormous undertaking, since he had not brought an army large enough to ring the walls. He had probably never seen Rome, and imagined it was not much bigger than the cities he knew. Then some of his legions, disgusted at the whole business — a father-in-law making war on his son-in-law, Romans on Rome — renounced his authority and carried their standards over to the other side. The rest of his soldiers had already begun to waver. Galerius, dreading a fate like Severus’, his arrogance broken and humbled, threw himself at his soldiers’ feet and went on begging them not to hand him over to the enemy until he won them round with the promise of enormous bonuses. Then he pulled back from Rome and fled in complete disorder. He could easily have been cut off on the way if anyone had pursued him even with a small force. He knew his danger, and he let his soldiers scatter to plunder and destroy far and wide, so that if there were any pursuers they would find nothing to live on in a ruined country. So the parts of Italy through which that plague of a column passed were laid waste. Everything was looted, married women and unmarried girls were raped, parents and husbands were tortured until they told where they had hidden their goods and their wives and daughters, and flocks and herds were driven off as though they were spoils taken from barbarians.

And so the man who had once been a Roman emperor, and was now the ravager of Italy, withdrew into his own territory, having brought the miseries of war on everyone alike, without distinction. Long before this, from the very time he came to sovereign power, he had declared himself the enemy of the Roman name, and had proposed that the empire should be called not the Roman but the Dacian empire.

After Galerius fled, Maximian came back from Gaul and held power jointly with his son. But the young man was obeyed more than the old one. Maxentius had the greater power and had held it longer, and it was to Maxentius that Maximian owed his imperial rank on this occasion. The old man could not bear being denied sole and unchecked rule; he envied his son with a childish spirit of rivalry, and so he began working out how to drive Maxentius out and take back his old dominion. It looked easy, because the soldiers who had deserted Severus had originally served in his own army. [e]

He called an assembly of the people of Rome and of the soldiers, as though he meant to make a speech about the disastrous state of public affairs. He talked at length on that subject, then stretched out his hands toward his son, charged him with being the author of every evil and the first cause of the state’s troubles, and tore the purple from his shoulders. Maxentius, stripped, leaped headlong down from the platform and was caught in the arms of the soldiers. Their fury and their shouting left the unnatural old man dumbfounded, and he was driven out of Rome like a second Tarquin the Proud.

Then Maximian went back to Gaul. After staying in that region for a while he went to Galerius, his son’s enemy, supposedly so that the two of them could confer about settling the affairs of the commonwealth. His real purpose was to use the cover of reconciliation to find a chance to murder Galerius and seize his share of the empire in place of his own, from which he had been shut out everywhere. [f]

Diocles was at the court of Galerius when Maximian arrived. Galerius meant now to invest Licinius with the insignia of supreme power in Severus’ place, and had lately sent for Diocles to be present at the ceremony. So it was carried out with both of them there, and thus there were six men ruling the empire at one and the same time.

Now that his designs had come to nothing, Maximian took flight, as he had done twice before, and returned to Gaul with a heart full of malice, intending to get the better of Constantine by treachery — Constantine, who was not only his own son-in-law but the son of his son-in-law. And so as to deceive him more successfully, he laid aside the imperial purple. The Franks had taken up arms. Maximian advised Constantine, who suspected nothing, not to lead all his troops against them; a few soldiers, he said, would be enough to put those barbarians down. He gave that advice so that an army would be left behind for him to win over to himself, and so that Constantine, with too few men, could be overwhelmed. The young prince thought the advice sound, because it came from an aged and experienced commander, and he followed it, because it came from his father-in-law. He marched out, leaving the greater part of his forces behind. Maximian waited a few days. As soon as, by his own reckoning, Constantine had crossed into barbarian territory, he suddenly put the imperial purple back on, seized the public treasury, handed out lavish gifts to the soldiers in his usual way, and put about the story that Constantine had met the very disasters that were soon to fall on himself. Constantine was told at once what had happened, and by astonishingly rapid marches he came flying back with his army.

Maximian was not yet ready to face him and was caught off guard, and the soldiers returned to their duty. He had taken possession of Marseilles — he had fled there — and shut the gates. Constantine came up, and seeing Maximian on the wall, spoke to him with no harshness and no hostility, asking what he meant by this, and what it was that he wanted, and why he had acted in a way so peculiarly unworthy of him. But Maximian, from the wall, poured out abuse and curses at Constantine without stopping. Then all at once the gates on the far side were unbarred and the besiegers were let into the city. The rebel emperor, the unnatural parent, the treacherous father-in-law, was dragged into Constantine’s presence, heard his crimes recited to him, was stripped of the imperial robe, and, after that reprimand, was granted his life.

Maximian had thus thrown away the respect owed to an emperor and a father-in-law. He grew impatient at his humbled condition, and, made bold by going unpunished, he laid new plots against Constantine. He went to his daughter Fausta and, by pleading and by coaxing flattery alike, tried to get her to betray her husband. He promised to obtain a more distinguished marriage for her than the one she had with Constantine, and he asked her to let the emperor’s bedroom be left open and only lightly guarded. Fausta undertook to do everything he asked — and told her husband the whole thing at once. [j]

A plan was laid to catch Maximian in the very act of his crime. They put a worthless eunuch there to be murdered in the emperor’s place. In the dead of night Maximian got up and saw that everything favored his treachery. There were few soldiers on guard, and those few some distance from the bedroom. Still, to prevent suspicion, he spoke to them and said that he had had a dream he wanted to tell his son-in-law. He went in armed, killed the eunuch, sprang out in triumph, and announced the murder. At that moment Constantine showed himself on the other side with a body of soldiers. The corpse was carried out of the bedroom, and the murderer, taken in the act and appalled, “stood like a stone, silent and unmoving,” while Constantine reproached him for his impiety and his monstrous guilt. In the end Maximian obtained leave to choose the manner of his own death, and he hanged himself.

So that mightiest ruler of Rome — who had reigned so long and with such surpassing glory, and who had celebrated his twentieth year in power — that most arrogant of men had his neck broken, and ended his loathsome life by a death that was base and disgraceful.

From Maximian, God — the avenger of his own worship and of his people — turned his eyes to Galerius, the man behind that accursed persecution, so that in punishing him too he might show the power of his majesty.

Galerius was planning to celebrate his own twentieth anniversary. He had already ground down the provinces with new taxes payable in gold and silver, using that celebration as the pretext; and now, so that he could pay them back by actually holding the festival he had promised, he used the same pretext to repeat the extortion. Who could describe in fit terms the methods used to torment people in collecting the tax, above all in the matter of grain and the other produce of the land? The agents — executioners, rather — of all the different magistrates seized on each individual and would never let go their hold. No one knew whom he was supposed to pay first. There was no exemption for men who had nothing; they were required to pay on the spot, on pain of assorted tortures, however unable they were. Guards were posted all around. No one was given time to breathe, and at no season of the year was there the least relief from the levies. Different magistrates, or the officers of different magistrates, frequently quarreled over the right to collect the tax from the same people. There was no threshing floor without a tax collector on it, no grape harvest without a watchman, and nothing left to feed the farmer. That food should be snatched from the mouths of the men who had earned it by their labor was hard enough; the hope of relief afterward might have made that hardship bearable. But everyone who appeared at the anniversary festival had to provide robes of every kind, and gold and silver besides. One might well have said, “How am I to supply those things, you senseless tyrant, if you carry off the whole crop from my ground and violently seize what it has not yet produced?” So all through the territories of Galerius men were stripped of their property, and everything was raked together into the imperial treasury, so that the emperor could keep his vow to celebrate a festival he was fated never to celebrate.

Maximin Daia was enraged that Licinius had been named to the rank of emperor. He would no longer be called Caesar, or let himself be ranked third in authority. Galerius sent message after message begging Daia to give way and accept the arrangement — to yield to age and to respect Licinius’ grey hair. But Daia only grew more insolent. He argued that since it was he who had taken the purple first, seniority of possession gave him the higher rank, and he set at nothing both the pleas and the orders of Galerius. That brute of an animal was stung to the quick, and bellowed, when the mean creature he had himself made Caesar — expecting complete obedience from him — forgot the great favor he had been shown and set himself impiously against the requests and the will of his benefactor. [m]

In the end Galerius gave in to Daia’s stubbornness. He abolished the junior title of Caesar, gave himself and Licinius the title of the Augusti, and gave Daia and Constantine the title of sons of the Augusti. Some time later Daia took occasion, in a letter to Galerius, to remark that at the last general review his army had hailed him with the title of Augustus. Galerius, vexed and grieved at this, ordered that all four should be called emperor.

And now, when Galerius was in the eighteenth year of his reign, God struck him with an incurable disease. A malignant ulcer formed low down in his genitals and spread little by little. The doctors tried to cut it out, and closed up the place affected. But the sore, once it had skinned over, broke out again; a vein burst, and he lost so much blood that his life was in danger. The bleeding was stopped, though with difficulty. The doctors had to begin their operations over again, and at last they got the wound to scar over. Then some slight movement of his body tore it, and the blood streamed more freely than before. He grew thin, pale and feeble, and the bleeding stopped again. The ulcer stopped answering to the remedies applied to it, and gangrene took hold of everything around it. The more the rotten flesh was cut away, the wider the disease spread, and everything used as a means of cure served only to make it worse. [n]

“The masters of the healing art withdrew.” Then famous physicians were brought in from every quarter, but no human means had any success. Apollo and Aesculapius were begged and begged for remedies. Apollo did prescribe — and the disease grew worse. It was already coming to its deadly crisis, and it had taken over the lower part of his body: his intestines came out, and his whole anus rotted away. The luckless doctors, though they had no hope of overcoming the disease, went on applying warm dressings and giving him medicines. The fluids were driven back inside, the disease turned on his intestines, and worms bred in his body. The stench was foul enough to fill not only the palace but the whole city — no wonder, since by that time the passages from his bladder and his bowels had been eaten through by the worms and no longer kept apart, and his body, in unbearable agony, dissolved into a single mass of rot.

They applied the warm flesh of animals to the main seat of the disease, so that the heat would draw out those tiny worms; and sure enough, when the dressings were taken off, a countless swarm poured out — and still the breeding disease had hatched far greater swarms to feed on his intestines and eat them away. By now, through one disorder on top of another, the different parts of his body had lost their natural shape. Above the waist he was dry, wasted and haggard, and his ghastly-looking skin had settled deep among his bones; below, he was swollen out like a bladder, and no joints could be made out at all. This went on for a full year. At last, beaten down by his sufferings, he was forced to acknowledge God, and in the gaps between his fits of raging pain he cried aloud that he would rebuild the church he had torn down and would make amends for what he had done. And when he was near his end, he published an edict which ran as follows.

“Among the other measures we have taken for the lasting benefit of the commonwealth, we have until now tried to bring everything into line with the ancient laws and the public discipline of the Romans. “We have been concerned in particular that the Christians too, who had abandoned the religion of their forefathers, should come back to sound sense. For such willfulness and folly had somehow taken hold of them that, instead of keeping to those ancient institutions which their own forefathers had perhaps established, they made laws for themselves as they pleased and drew together into separate societies great numbers of men of widely different persuasions. “After we published our edict ordering the Christians to return to the observance of the ancient institutions, many of them were brought into line by fear of danger, and many more were put in danger of their lives. Yet since great numbers still hold to their opinions, and since we have observed that at present they neither pay the gods the reverence and worship that are due, nor worship their own God either, therefore, in keeping with our constant clemency in granting pardon to all, we have thought it right to extend our indulgence to these men as well: to allow them to be Christians again, and to re-establish the places where they hold their religious meetings — provided they do nothing against public order. “By another instruction we intend to inform the magistrates how they are to conduct themselves in this matter. “It will therefore be the duty of the Christians, in return for this toleration of ours, to pray to their God for our welfare, and for the welfare of the state, and for their own — that the commonwealth may be kept safe on every side, and that they themselves may live secure in their homes.” [s]

This edict was published at Nicomedia on the last day of April, in the eighth consulship of Galerius and the second of Maximin Daia. Then the prison gates were thrown open, and you, my dearest Donatus, together with the other confessors of the faith, were set free from a jail that had been your home for six years. [u]

Galerius did not, however, win God’s forgiveness by publishing this edict. A few days later he was consumed by the horrible disease that had brought the rot over his whole body. As he was dying he commended his wife and son to Licinius and handed them over into his hands. The news was known at Nicomedia before the end of the month. His twentieth-anniversary celebration was to have been held on the first of March following.