The Last Persecutor Falls

The two armies came close, and it looked as though a battle would begin at any moment. Daia then made a vow to Jupiter: if he won the victory, he would put out the name of the Christians and wipe it away for good. [a]

That night an angel of the Lord seemed to stand over Licinius while he slept, telling him to get up at once and to pray, with his whole army, to the Supreme God, and promising that if he did he would win. In the dream Licinius thought that he got up, and that the one warning him stood close beside him and showed him how to pray and in what words. When he woke he sent for one of his secretaries and dictated the words exactly as he had heard them:

Many copies of these words were made and handed out to the senior commanders, who were to teach them to the soldiers under them. It put fresh heart into every man, since they were now sure that victory had been announced to them from heaven. Licinius decided to fight on the first of May. Exactly eight years earlier, on that day, Daia had been given the rank of Caesar, and Licinius chose the day in the hope that Daia might be beaten on the anniversary of his own reign, as Maxentius had been beaten on his. But Daia meant to fight sooner, on the last day of April, and to celebrate his victory on the anniversary itself.

Word came that Daia was on the move. Licinius’ soldiers armed themselves and advanced. Between the two armies lay a bare open plain called the Campus Serenus. They were now in sight of each other. Licinius’ soldiers set their shields on the ground, took off their helmets, and, following their officers’ example, stretched out their hands toward heaven. Then the emperor spoke the prayer, and they all said it after him. The other army, doomed to swift destruction, could hear the murmur of their enemies’ praying. When the prayer had been said through three times, Licinius’ men were full of courage; they buckled their helmets back on and took up their shields.

The two emperors came forward for a conference, but Daia could not be brought to peace. He held Licinius in contempt, and imagined that the soldiers would soon walk away from an emperor stingy with his gifts of money and take service with one who was generous to the point of extravagance. That, in fact, was the idea on which he had begun the war. He was counting on Licinius’ armies to come over of their own accord; then, with them added to his own, he meant to attack Constantine at once.

So the two armies came together. The trumpets gave the signal, the standards moved forward, and Licinius’ troops charged. But the enemy were struck with panic: they could neither draw their swords nor throw their javelins. Daia went up and down the line, trying by turns to beg and to bribe Licinius’ soldiers over to him. He got no hearing anywhere, and they drove him back. Then his own troops were cut down, none of them resisting. Such huge legions, such enormous forces, were mowed down by a smaller enemy. Not one man called to mind his own reputation, or the courage he had shown before, or the honors he had been paid for it. The Supreme God laid their necks under their enemies’ swords in such a way that they seemed to have come onto the field not as men fighting but as men already handed over to death. [g]

When great numbers had fallen, Daia saw that everything was going against his hopes. So he threw off the purple, put on a slave’s clothes, and hurried across the Thracian Bosphorus. Half his army died in the battle; the rest either surrendered to the victor or ran, for now that the emperor himself had deserted there seemed to be no shame in deserting. Before the first of May was out, Daia reached Nicomedia, though it is about a hundred and fifty miles from the battlefield: he covered that distance in one day and two nights. He hurried away with his children and his wife and a few officials of his court, and set off for Syria. But some troops from that region joined him, and he gathered up part of his scattered forces, and he halted in Cappadocia — and there he put the imperial robes back on.

A few days after the victory, Licinius took part of Daia’s soldiers into his own service, distributed them properly, and moved his army across into Bithynia. He entered Nicomedia and gave thanks to God, by whose help he had won. Then, on the thirteenth of June, in the year when he and Constantine were consuls for the third time, he ordered the following edict for the restoration of the church to be published, addressed to the governor of the province: [h]

“When we, Constantine and Licinius, emperors, met at Milan and talked over together everything that has to do with the good and the security of the state, we judged that among the things useful to people in general the reverence paid to the divine power deserved our first and chief attention. We judged it right that the Christians, and everyone else, should have the freedom to follow whichever form of worship each of them thought best, so that the God who is seated in heaven might be kind and favorable to us and to everyone under our government. And so we judged it a healthy measure, and one fully in line with sound reason, that no man at all should be refused leave to attach himself to the observances of the Christians, or to any other religion his own mind directed him to, so that the supreme divine power, to whose worship we freely give ourselves, might go on granting us its favor and its kindness.

“And so we want you to know that, setting aside anything laid down in our earlier orders to you concerning the Christians, everyone who chooses that religion is to be permitted, freely and without qualification, to remain in it, and is not to be disturbed or troubled in any way. We thought it right to be this particular about the matters placed in your charge, so that you would understand that the freedom we have granted the Christians in matters of religion is full and unconditional — and so that you would see at the same time that the open and free practice of their own religions is granted to everyone else as well as to the Christians. For it suits the good order of the state and the quiet of our times that every individual be allowed to worship the divine power in the way he himself chooses; and we do not mean to take anything away from the honor due to any religion or to those who follow it. “Further, concerning the Christians: we gave certain orders earlier about the places set aside for their religious meetings. Now our will is that everyone who has bought such places, either from our treasury or from anyone else, shall give them back to the Christians with no money asked and no price claimed, and that this be done at once and without argument. We will also that those who acquired any right to such places by gift shall give them back to the Christians immediately — always reserving to such persons, whether they bought them at a price or received them free, the right to apply to the judge of their district if they think they have a claim on our generosity for compensation.

“All those places are to be given back to the Christians at once, through your action. And since it appears that, besides the places set aside for worship, the Christians also owned other property, belonging not to individuals but to their body as a whole — that is, to their churches — we include all of it under the same rule. Our will is that you have it all restored to their society, or churches, without hesitation and without dispute, provided always that those who make restitution without being paid may seek compensation from our bounty. “In carrying all this out for the benefit of the Christians you are to use the utmost diligence, so that our orders may be obeyed quickly and our gracious purpose of securing the public quiet may go forward. In this way the divine favor we have already experienced in matters of the greatest importance will go on giving us success, and in our success will make the state happy. And so that the terms of this gracious ordinance of ours may be made known to everyone, our will is that you have it published everywhere by your authority.”

Having issued this ordinance, Licinius also made a public speech in which he urged the Christians to rebuild their places of worship. And so, from the pulling down of the church to its restoration, ten years and about four months had passed.

Licinius followed with his army, and the fugitive tyrant kept retreating. He seized the passes of Mount Taurus again, and there tried to block Licinius’ march by throwing up barricades and towers. But the victorious troops attacked on the right and broke through every obstacle, and Daia fled at last to Tarsus. There he was pressed hard by sea and by land alike, and he gave up hope of finding anywhere to shelter. In the anguish and terror of his mind he looked for death as the only cure for the disasters God had heaped on him. [m]

But first he stuffed himself with food and swallowed great draughts of wine, the way men do who believe they are eating and drinking for the last time. Then he took poison. The poison, held off by his full stomach, could not work at once; it brought on a dreadful sickness instead, something like the plague, and his life was drawn out only so that his suffering could be worse. Then the poison began to rage and to burn up everything inside him, until the pain was past bearing and drove him out of his mind. For four days the frenzy lasted, and he scooped up handfuls of earth and ate them greedily.

After torments of every kind he beat his forehead against the wall until his eyes started out of their sockets. Now that he was blind, he imagined he saw God sitting in judgment on him, with his servants standing about him in white robes. He roared out as men do on the rack, and shouted that it was not he but others who were guilty. In the end, as though he had been racked into confessing, he admitted his own guilt, and pitifully begged Christ to have mercy on him. Then, groaning like a man being burned alive, he breathed out his guilty soul in the most horrible kind of death.

So God brought down every one of the men who had persecuted his name, until neither root nor branch of them was left. For as soon as Licinius was securely in power, he ordered Valeria to be put to death. Daia had never dared do that, furious with her though he was — not even after his defeat and flight, when he knew his own end was near. [o]

Licinius ordered Candidianus killed as well. He was Galerius’ son by a concubine, and Valeria, who had no children of her own, had adopted him. When Valeria heard that Daia was dead she came in disguise to Licinius’ court, anxious to see what would become of Candidianus. The young man presented himself at Nicomedia. He was shown every outward mark of honor, and then, while he suspected nothing, he was killed. Valeria fled the moment she heard. The Emperor Severus had left a son, Severianus, now a grown man, who had been with Daia in his flight from the battlefield. Licinius had him condemned and executed, on the pretext that now Daia was dead he had been planning to take the purple himself. Long before this, Candidianus and Severianus had expected trouble from Licinius and had chosen to stay with Daia, while Valeria took Licinius’ side and was willing to give him what she had refused Daia — everything that came to her by right as Galerius’ widow.

Licinius also put to death Daia’s son Maximus, a boy of eight, and Daia’s daughter, a girl of seven who had been engaged to Candidianus. But before they died, their mother had been thrown into the Orontes, the river in which she herself had often ordered chaste women to be drowned. So by the unerring and just judgment of God, all the godless received exactly what their deeds deserved.

Valeria too, who for fifteen months had wandered from province to province in poor clothes, was discovered at last in Thessalonica. She was arrested along with her mother Prisca, and both suffered the death penalty. The two women were led out to execution — a fall from such a height that it moved the pity of the crowd which the strange sight had drawn together. They were beheaded, and their bodies thrown into the sea. So Valeria’s chastity, and her own high rank and her mother’s, proved fatal to them both. [r]

I report all this on the authority of people who were in a position to know, and I thought it right to write it down exactly as it happened, so that the memory of events so important should not be lost, and so that no future historian of the persecutors should corrupt the truth, either by covering up their crimes against God or by covering up God’s judgment against them. [s]

We owe thanks to his everlasting mercy. He has looked on the earth at last, and has thought fit to gather his flock again and restore it — part of it laid waste by ravenous wolves, part of it scattered abroad — and to root out those destructive wild beasts that had trampled its pastures and wrecked the places where it lay down.

Where are they now, the surnames Jovius and Herculius, once so glorious and famous among the nations, taken with such insolence first by Diocles and Maximian and afterwards handed on to their successors? The Lord has blotted them out and erased them from the earth.

So let us celebrate the triumphs of God with joy, and mention his victory again and again in our praises. Let us beg him in our prayers, night and day, to make secure forever the peace he has given his own people after a war of ten years. And you above all, Donatus, dearest to me and best deserving to be heard, beg the Lord that it may please him to go on showing his pity to his servants graciously and mercifully, to protect his people from the plots and assaults of the devil, and to guard the churches, now flourishing, in unbroken happiness.