CHAPTER VI. THE RISE OF CONSTANTINE

The persecution under Diocletian—The attack is begun—Afflictions of the persecutors—Rome surrenders—Six emperors at once—Roman embassies to Constantine—The Edict of Milan

DURING the eighty years occupied for the most part by the “dark, unrelenting Tiberius, the furious Caligula, the feeble Claudius, the profligate and cruel Nero, the beastly Vitellius, and the timid, inhuman Domitian,” “Rome groaned beneath an unremitting tyranny, which exterminated the ancient families of the republic and was fatal to almost every virtue, and every talent, that arose in that unhappy period.”—Gibbon ^{1[Page 167] “Decline and Fall,” chap. iii, par. 33.}TTR 167.1

This dreary scene was relieved by a respite of eighty-four years through the successful reigns of Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus Pius, and Marcus Aurelius; only to be opened up again by Commodus, A. D. 180, and to continue unrelieved for more than one hundred years. It is useless to pursue the subject in detail. Of this period it may be remarked as of one before, that to attempt to follow it in detail, would be only “to record the mandates of despotism, incessant accusations, faithless friendships, the ruin of innocence; one unvarying repetition of causes terminating in the same event, and presenting no novelty from their similarity and tiresome reiteration.”—Tacitus ^{2[Page 167] “Annals,” book iv, chap. xxxiii.}TTR 167.2

The inroads of the barbarians obliged the legions to be always stationed on the frontier of the empire, all the way from the mouth of the Rhine to the mouth of the Danube. Emperors were made and unmade by the soldiers according to their own caprice, many of whom never saw the capital of their empire; and the office was one so certainly to be terminated by murder that although from Commodus to Constantine there were sixty men named as emperor, only seven died a natural death; two—Decius and Valerian—perished by the enemy; and all the rest were murdered in the internal strifes of the failing empire.TTR 167.3