Constantine at the Milvian Bridge

When the news reached Daia, he raced up from the East with relays of post-horses to seize Galerius’ territory, and, while Licinius was still lingering in Europe, to claim everything as far as the straits at Chalcedon. On entering Bithynia he cancelled Galerius’ tax, to everyone’s delight, meaning to make himself popular at once. Bad feeling grew between the two emperors and came close to open war. They stood facing each other with their armies on opposite shores. But peace and friendship were arranged on certain terms: Licinius and Daia met at the straits, made a treaty, and shook hands on it. [a]

Then Daia, thinking everything was secure, went back to Nicomedia, and in his new territory he was what he had been in Syria and Egypt. First he took away the toleration and general protection Galerius had granted the Christians. To do it, he quietly arranged for petitions from various cities asking that no Christian church be built inside their walls; in this way what he had chosen himself would look as though it had been forced on him by public demand. In answer to those petitions he brought in a new way of managing religion. For each city he created a chief priest, chosen from among its most distinguished men. Their work was to sacrifice daily to all their gods and, with the help of the old priesthood, to stop the Christians from putting up churches or worshiping God in public or in private. He gave them authority to force Christians to sacrifice to the idols, and, if they refused, to hand them over to the civil magistrate. As if that were not enough, in every province he set a supervising priest over them, one of the most eminent men in the state; and he ordered all these newly created priests to appear in white robes, white being the most honored dress there was.

As for the Christians themselves, he intended to go on as he had in the East. Putting on a show of mercy, he forbade the killing of God’s servants, and ordered them mutilated instead. So those who confessed the faith had their ears and nostrils slit, their hands and feet cut off, and their eyes dug out of the sockets.

While he was busy with this plan, letters came from Constantine that put him off carrying it through, so for a while he hid what he intended. Even so, any Christian who fell into his hands was quietly thrown into the sea. Nor did he give up his habit of sacrificing every day in the palace. It was his own invention to have every animal used for food killed not by cooks but by priests at the altars, so that nothing was ever served up until it had been tasted beforehand, consecrated, and sprinkled with wine by pagan rite. Anyone invited to dinner had to come away from it unclean and defiled. [e]

In everything else he was his teacher Galerius over again. Whatever Diocles and Maximian happened to have left untouched, Daia carried off, greedily and without shame. By now every man’s granary was shut and every warehouse sealed, and taxes not yet due were collected in advance. The result was famine, since nobody bothered to farm, and prices raised beyond all measure. Herds and flocks were driven off their pasture for the daily sacrifice. He stuffed his soldiers so full of sacrificial meat that they came to despise their usual grain ration and threw it away for the fun of it.

Meanwhile Daia repaid his bodyguard, who were very numerous, with costly clothing and gold medallions; he made cash bonuses in silver to the common soldiers and the recruits, and handed out gifts of every kind to the barbarians serving in his army. As for the grants he made to his favorites out of the property of living men, whenever they cared to ask for what belonged to someone else — I do not know whether the same thanks are owed him that we give to merciful robbers, who plunder without murdering.

But the thing that marked his character, and in which he outdid every emperor before him, was his appetite for ruining women. What else am I to call it but blind and headstrong lust? And even words like those are too weak for the anger I feel in setting down what he did. The size of the guilt overwhelms my tongue and leaves it unequal to its work. [g]

Eunuchs and procurers searched everywhere, and the moment a good-looking face was found, husband or parents had to withdraw. Married women of rank and unmarried girls were stripped of their clothes and their bodies examined all over, in case any part of them should be unworthy of the emperor’s bed. If a woman resisted, she was put to death by drowning — as though, under this adulterer’s rule, chastity were treason. There were men who, seeing the rape of wives they loved for their goodness and faithfulness, could not bear the agony of it and killed themselves. While this monster ruled, nothing but sheer ugliness could shield a woman’s honor from his savage wants.

At last he brought in a rule forbidding marriage without the emperor’s permission, and he used it as an instrument for his own lechery. After he had violated freeborn girls he handed them over as wives to his slaves. His counts imitated their emperor and took the beds of their own dependants without punishment. For who was there to punish such things? The daughters of middle-rank families were simply seized by anyone who wanted them. Women of high rank, who could not be taken by force, were petitioned for and granted by the emperor as an outright gift. A father could not oppose it: once the imperial warrant was signed, he had no choice but to die or to take some barbarian for a son-in-law. For there was hardly anyone in the lifeguard except men of that people who, driven from their homes by the Goths in the twentieth year of Diocletian, had surrendered to Galerius and entered his service. It was a bad thing for the human race that men who had run from slavery under barbarians should come to lord it over Romans. Ringed round by guards like these, Daia crushed and insulted the Eastern empire.

Now Daia, in feeding his lusts, made his own will the measure of what was right, and so he would not hold back even from soliciting Galerius’ widow, the empress Valeria, whom he had lately given the title of mother. After her husband’s death she had come to Daia, thinking she could live more safely in his territory than anywhere else, especially as he was a married man; but the shameless creature caught fire for her at once. Valeria was still in mourning; her time of mourning was not yet up. He sent her a message proposing marriage, and offering, if she agreed, to put away his wife. [i]

She sent back, frankly, an answer such as she alone would have dared to give. First, that she would not discuss marriage while she was in mourning, and while the ashes of Galerius — her husband, and by adoption Daia’s father — were still warm. Next, that he was acting wickedly in proposing to divorce a faithful wife to make room for another, whom he would throw over in her turn. And last, that for a woman of her title and standing to marry a second time was indecent, unheard of, and against the law.

When this bold answer was reported to Daia, his desire turned at once into rage and fury. He sentenced the princess to forfeit what she had, seized her goods, took away her attendants, tortured her eunuchs to death, and banished her along with her mother Prisca — but he named no particular place for her to live while in exile. So he drove her out, insultingly, from every lodging she took in the course of her wanderings; and, to finish it off, he had the women closest to her friendship and confidence condemned to death on a made-up charge of adultery.

There was a certain woman of high rank who already had grandchildren by more than one son. Valeria loved her like a second mother, and Daia suspected that it was her advice that had produced Valeria’s refusal of his offer of marriage. So he ordered the governor Eratineus to have her put to death in a way that would ruin her good name. Two others, just as noble, were added to her. One of them had a daughter who was a Vestal virgin at Rome, and she had kept up a secret correspondence with the exiled Valeria. The other, married to a senator, was a close friend of the empress. Great beauty and great goodness were the cause of their death. [k]

They were dragged before a court — not an upright judge’s, but a robber’s. And in fact there was no accuser at all, until a certain Jew, himself charged with other offenses, was talked into giving false evidence against innocent women in the hope of a pardon. This fair and watchful magistrate had him taken out of the city under guard, in case the crowd stoned him. The whole performance was staged at Nicaea. The Jew was put to the torture until he should say what he had been coached to say, while the torturers used blows to keep the women from speaking in their own defense. The innocent were condemned to death.

Then came weeping and wailing — not only from the senator, who was attending the wife who had deserved so well of him, but from the onlookers too, whom this disgraceful and unheard-of business had drawn together. To keep the crowd from tearing the condemned women out of the executioners’ hands by force, officers followed with light infantry and archers. And so, under an armed guard of soldiers, they were led out to punishment. Their household slaves had been forced to run, and the bodies would have gone unburied if friends had not buried them in secret, out of pity. Nor was the promised pardon made good to the pretended adulterer: he was nailed up on the execution beam, and then he gave away the whole plot, and with his last breath swore to everyone watching that the women had died innocent.

But the empress, an exile somewhere in the deserts of Syria, got word secretly to her father Diocletian of the disaster that had come on her. He sent messengers to Daia asking that his daughter be sent to him. He could not get it. He asked again and again; still she was not sent. In the end he used a relative of his own, a soldier high in power and authority, to beg Daia by the memory of past favors. This messenger did no better in his negotiation than the others, and reported back to Diocletian that his prayers were wasted.

About this time, by Constantine’s order, the statues of Maximian Herculius were pulled down and his portraits taken away; and since the two old emperors were generally painted in one piece, the portraits of both came down together. So Diocletian lived to see a disgrace that no emperor before him had ever seen. Under the double load of a mind full of vexation and a body full of illness, he decided to die. He tossed from side to side, his soul churning with grief; he could neither eat nor rest. He sighed, he groaned, he wept again and again, throwing himself into one position after another, now on his couch, now on the ground. So the man who for twenty years had been the most fortunate of emperors, once he had been cast down into the obscurity of private life, treated with utter contempt, and driven to loathe his own life, lost the ability to take food, and, worn out with anguish of mind, died. [n]

Of the enemies of God there was still one left, and it is his overthrow and his end that I have now to relate.

Daia had been jealous of Licinius, and had wished him ill, from the time Galerius gave Licinius the preference; and those feelings still held, in spite of the peace treaty the two had lately made. When Daia heard that Constantine’s sister was engaged to Licinius, he took it that the two emperors meant to use the marriage tie to league against him. So he quietly sent envoys to Rome asking for a friendly alliance with Maxentius, and wrote to him warmly as well. The envoys were courteously received, friendship was settled, and as a token of it the portraits of Maxentius and Daia were set up together in public view. Maxentius took hold of this gladly, as if it were help from heaven, for he had already declared war on Constantine, supposedly to avenge the death of his father Maximian. Out of this show of a son’s loyalty a suspicion arose that the detestable old man had only pretended to quarrel with his son so as to have an opening to destroy his rivals for power, and so clear the way for himself and his son to hold the whole empire. But there was nothing in the guess: what he had really meant to do was destroy his son and the others, and then put himself and Diocletian back in sovereign power.

And now civil war broke out between Constantine and Maxentius. Maxentius kept himself inside Rome, because the diviners had foretold that if he went out of it he would die, but he ran the campaign through capable generals. He had more troops than his opponent: not only his father’s army, which had deserted from Severus, but his own as well, which he had lately drawn together out of Mauretania and Italy. They fought, and Maxentius’ troops had the better of it. At last Constantine, steady in courage and with a mind ready for whatever came, led his whole force up to the outskirts of Rome and camped opposite the Milvian bridge. The anniversary of Maxentius’ reign was coming on — October 27 — and the fifth year of his reign was drawing to an end. [o]

Constantine was directed in a dream to have the heavenly sign marked on his soldiers’ shields, and so to go into battle. He did as he had been commanded. He marked on their shields the letter X, with a vertical line drawn through it and curled round at the top: the monogram of Christ. With this sign his troops stood to arms. The enemy advanced, but without their emperor, and crossed the bridge. The armies met and fought with all the courage they had, and both sides firmly held their ground.

Meanwhile a riot broke out at Rome. Maxentius was abused as a man who had thrown away all concern for the safety of the state; and suddenly, while he was putting on the races in the Circus for the anniversary of his reign, the people cried out with one voice:

“Constantine cannot be overcome!”

Shaken by this, Maxentius burst out of the stands, called some senators together, and ordered the Sibylline books to be searched. In them it was found that “on the same day the enemy of the Romans would perish.” Led by this answer to hope for victory, he took the field. The bridge behind him had been broken down. At the sight of that the fighting grew hotter. The hand of the Lord prevailed, and the forces of Maxentius were routed. He fled toward the broken bridge, but the crowd pressing on him drove him headlong into the Tiber.

With that ruinous war ended, Constantine was acknowledged emperor, to great rejoicing, by the senate and people of Rome. And now he came to know how treacherous Daia had been, for he found the letters written to Maxentius and saw the statues and portraits of the two allies that had been set up together. The senate, as a reward for Constantine’s courage, voted him the title Maximus, the Greatest — a title Daia had always claimed for himself. When Daia heard that Constantine had won and Rome was free, he showed as much grief as if he had been beaten himself; but afterward, when he heard of the senate’s decree, he lost all control, declared himself Constantine’s enemy, and made the title of the Greatest a subject for abuse and mockery.

Constantine settled everything at Rome and went to Milan about the beginning of winter. Licinius came there too, to receive his wife Constantia. When Daia understood that they were busy with the wedding, he moved out of Syria in the depth of a hard winter, and by forced marches came into Bithynia with an army badly worn down; for he had lost every one of his pack animals, of whatever kind, to torrential rain and snow, muddy roads, cold, and exhaustion. Their carcasses scattered along the roads looked like an image of the disasters of the coming war and a sign of the same sort of destruction waiting for the soldiers. [s]

Daia did not halt in his own territory. He crossed the Thracian Bosporus at once and came up to the gates of Byzantium as an enemy. There was a garrison in the city, put there by Licinius to check any invasion Daia might make. Daia first tried to entice the soldiers with the promise of a cash bonus, then to frighten them by assault and storm. Neither promises nor force did any good. After eleven days had gone by — time enough for Licinius to learn how the garrison stood — the soldiers surrendered, not through treachery, but because they were too weak to hold out any longer.

Then Daia moved on to Heraclea, otherwise called Perinthus, and lost some days there in delays of the same kind. By now Licinius had reached Adrianople by fast marches, but with no great force. Then Daia, having taken Perinthus on terms and stayed there a short time, moved forward about sixteen and a half miles to the first posting station. There his advance was stopped, for Licinius had already occupied the second station, the same distance on again. Licinius had gathered what troops he could from the neighboring districts and was moving toward Daia more to slow his operations down than with any purpose of fighting or hope of victory; for Daia had an army of seventy thousand men, while he himself had scarcely thirty thousand. His soldiers were scattered through various regions, and there was no time, in that sudden emergency, to collect them all together.