Soon war flared up between Licinius himself and Constantine. But Constantine first conquered Licinius, his sister's husband, in Pannonia, then overpowered him at Cibalae, and having gained possession of all Greece, at last compelled Licinius—who rose up and was beaten back in frequent battles by land and sea—to surrender; yet moved by the example of his father-in-law Herculius Maximian, lest he should again take up the purple he had laid down to the ruin of the commonwealth, he ordered him to be killed as a private man; for although all the agents of the wicked persecution had now been destroyed, a fitting punishment demanded this man too, inasmuch as he had been a persecutor as far as he was able.
The sons of Constantine—Crispus and Constantine—and the young Licinius, son of Licinius Augustus and grandson of Constantine through his sister, were made Caesars. In these days Arius, a presbyter of the city of Alexandria, deviating from the truth of the catholic faith, established a doctrine ruinous to very many. As soon as he became, at first in Alexandria, either known or marked out, and amid the confused crowd both a follower and an assailant of followers, he was driven from the church by Alexander, then bishop of that same city.
And when he stirred up into sedition the men whom he had led astray into error, at the city of Nicaea in Bithynia an assembly of three hundred and eighteen bishops was convened, by whom the Arian doctrine was most clearly detected to be ruinous and wretched, openly exposed and condemned. But amid these things lie hidden the causes why the emperor Constantine turned the avenging sword and the punishment destined for the wicked even against his own kin. For he killed Crispus his son and Licinius his sister's son. Besides, he subdued many nations in various battles. He founded a city of his own name—the first, or the only one, of the Roman kings to do so.
This city alone, free from idols, founded in this very short time and advanced by a Christian emperor, was raised so that it alone might deservedly be made equal to Rome—a Rome advanced through so many ages and miseries—in form and power. Then next Constantine, the first, in just order and with pious purpose, turned the tide: for by edict he decreed that the temples of the pagans should be closed without any slaughter of men. He destroyed the most powerful and most numerous nations of the Goths in the very bosom of barbarian soil, that is, in the region of the Sarmatians. He crushed a certain Calocaerus in Cyprus who aspired to revolution. In his thirtieth anniversary year he chose Dalmatius as Caesar. And when he was preparing war against the Persians, in a public villa near Nicomedia, handing over the well-ordered commonwealth to his sons, he met his death.
In the year 1092 from the founding of the City, Constantius, the thirty-fifth, having obtained the empire together with his brothers Constantine and Constans, held it for twenty-four years. Among the successors of Constantine was also Dalmatius Caesar, his brother's son, but he was straightway cut off by a military faction. Meanwhile the devil's ever-malignant assault against the true God—which from the beginning of the world until now, with the clouds of errors poured over it, troubles the slippery hearts of men away from the sincere path of faith and religion—after the Christian emperors, turning the height of royal power to better things, ceased to persecute the Church of Christ out of zeal for idolatry, found another contrivance by which to harass the Church of Christ through these same Christian emperors.
Therefore for Arius, author of the new error, and for the rest of his disciples, there opened a ready access and an easy way to the intimacy of the emperor Constantius. Constantius is persuaded to believe that there are, as it were, degrees in God, and he who had gone out by the door from the error of idolatry is led back into its bosom—while he seeks gods within God—as though through a false postern. Therefore, by a perverse zeal, power is armed, deluded, and under the name of piety the force of persecution is set in motion. There is contention over the choice of a new name, that the churches should be of the Arians rather than of the catholics. A horrible earthquake follows, which laid very many cities of the East level with the ground.
Constantine, while pursuing his brother Constans in war, exposing himself to dangers with rash insolence, was killed by his brother's generals. Constans fought nine battles with little success against the Persians and Sapor, who had laid waste Mesopotamia. At last, compelled by the sedition and intemperance of his soldiers to begin battle by night, he lost a victory all but won and was himself defeated besides. Afterward, when he had given himself over to intolerable vices and bought the soldiers' favor at the cost of his provincials, he was killed by the treachery of Magnentius in a town named Helena, near the border of Spain. For Magnentius had seized the empire at Augustodunum, which he straightway extended through Gaul, Africa, and Italy.
In Illyricum, however, the soldiers made Vetranio, a man advanced in age, emperor for themselves—a man simple by nature and agreeable to all, but who had never even learned the first elements of letters. And so, when the aged emperor was at times reluctantly practicing his first letters and the syllables of letters, he was ordered by Constantius—who was then preparing war against Magnentius, inflamed to avenge his brother—to lay down the empire; and casting off the purple along with his letters, content with private leisure, he gave up at once both palace and school. Then at Rome Nepotianus, son of Constantine's sister, relying on a band of gladiators, invaded the empire; and afterward, since he was wicked and on this account hateful to all, he was overpowered by the generals of Magnentius.
There follows that horrible war waged between Constantius and Magnentius at the city of Mursa, in which a great wasting of Roman strength did harm even for the future. Magnentius, however, defeated, fled, and not long afterward killed himself by his own hand at Lugdunum. Decentius too, his brother, whom he had set over Gaul as Caesar, ended his life with a noose at Senonae. Straightway Constantius chose Gallus, his uncle's son, as Caesar; whom again, acting cruelly and tyrannically, he killed a little after he had created him. He also took care that Silvanus, who in Gaul was gaping after revolution, should be promptly surrounded and crushed. Therefore, Silvanus being killed, he sent his cousin Julian, brother of Gallus, made Caesar, to Gaul;
and so Julian Caesar most vigorously restored to wholeness the Gauls that had been overthrown and oppressed by the enemy, routed a great multitude of the Alamanni with small forces, and confined the Germans behind the Rhine. Elated by these successes, he usurped the dignity of Augustus, and soon, overrunning Italy and Illyricum, deprived of part of his realm Constantius, who was occupied with the Parthian wars. Constantius, on learning of Julian's crime, abandoned the Parthian expedition, and while returning to civil war, died on the journey between Cilicia and Cappadocia.
Thus that man who, by rending the peace and unity of the catholic faith and arming Christians against Christians in what I may call a civil war, had torn apart the members of the Church, spent, drove on, and used up the whole restless time of his reign and the most troublesome span of his life with civil wars, stirred up even through kinsmen and blood-relations. In the year 1116 from the founding of the City, Julian, long Caesar, but afterward the thirty-sixth from Augustus, having gained power, held the summit of empire alone for one year and eight months. Persecuting the Christian religion by craft rather than by force, in order that the faith of Christ might be denied and the worship of idols taken up, he strove to provoke by honors rather than to compel by torments.
Yet he ordered by an open edict that no Christian should be a teacher of the liberal arts. But nevertheless, as we have learned from our forefathers, almost all everywhere, having embraced the conditions of the edict, chose to abandon their office rather than their faith. Julian, however, preparing war against the Parthians, when he was dragging the Roman forces gathered from every side with him to his appointed ruin, vowed the blood of Christians to his gods, intending openly to persecute the churches if he could win victory. For he even ordered an amphitheater to be built at Jerusalem, in which, on his return from the Parthians, he might cast bishops, monks, and all the saints of that place to beasts made even by artifice more savage, and watch them being torn apart.
And so, after he moved his camp from Ctesiphon, led by the trickery of a certain deserter into the desert, when his army was perishing, worn out by thirst and the sun's heat and besides by the labor of the sands, the emperor, anxious at so great a peril of his affairs, while he wandered too incautiously through the wastes of the desert, was struck by the lance of a certain enemy horseman who met him, and died. Thus the merciful God dissolved the impious counsels by the death of the impious man. In the year 1117 from the founding of the City, Jovian, the thirty-seventh emperor, created by the army in the utmost crisis of affairs, when, caught both by the unfavorable terrain and surrounded by enemies, he could find no means of escape, struck a treaty with Sapor, king of the Persians—one, though some think it scarcely worthy, yet quite necessary:
for, in order to free the safe and unharmed Roman army not only from the assault of the enemy but also from the peril of the terrain, he ceded to the Persians the town of Nisibis and part of upper Mesopotamia. Then, while returning toward Illyricum and journeying through Galatia, when he had withdrawn to lie down in a certain newly built chamber, oppressed and suffocated by the heat of the coals and the reek of walls recently coated with lime, he ended his life in the eighth month after he had begun to reign. In the year 1118 from the founding of the City, Valentinian, the thirty-eighth, was made emperor at Nicaea by the consent of the soldiers, and remained in it eleven years.
He, while bearing the oath of military service as a Christian of unimpaired faith, being a tribune of the shield-bearers under Julian Augustus, when ordered by the sacrilegious emperor either to sacrifice to idols or to leave the service, faithfully knowing both that the judgments of God are weightier and His promises better, departed of his own accord. Thus, after a short interval, Julian being killed and soon Jovian dead, he who had lost his tribunate for the name of Christ received the empire in place of his persecutor, Christ repaying him: who afterward made his brother Valens a partner in the empire, and killed the tyrant Procopius and many of his followers thereafter.
An earthquake occurring throughout the whole world so shook the troubled sea as well, that, the sea being poured back over the neighboring parts of the lowland regions, very many cities of the islands are reported to have been shaken, undermined, and to have perished. Valens, both baptized and persuaded by Eudoxius the bishop, a defender of the Arian doctrine, swerved into the most savage heresy; but he long concealed his malignant persecution and did not mix power with his will, so long as he was restrained by the authority of his living brother. For he reflected concerning him how great a force in avenging the faith an emperor could exert, who as a soldier had once shown such steadfastness for retaining it. In the third year of their reign Gratian, son of Valentinian, was made emperor.
In the same year, at Atrebatae, true wool, mixed with rain, flowed down from the clouds. Moreover Athanaric, king of the Goths, most cruelly persecuting the Christians among his own people, raised to the crown of martyrdom very many of the barbarians slain for the faith; yet most of these fled to Roman soil for the confession of Christ, not in fear, as though to enemies, but assured, because to brothers. Valentinian crushed the Saxons—a people settled on the shores and trackless marshes of the Ocean, terrible in valor and agility—who were planning with great effort a dangerous irruption into the Roman territories, in the very borders of the Franks.
There was also the new name of the Burgundians, new enemies, who, more than eighty thousand, as they say, of armed men, settled along the bank of the river Rhine. Gaul to this day is witness that these men, when the interior of Germany had once been subdued by Drusus and Tiberius, the adoptive sons of Caesar, and they had been distributed throughout the camps, grew together into a great nation, and thus even took their name from their work—because they commonly call the frequent dwellings set up along the frontier 'burgi'—and that theirs is a very strong and dangerous force; in those lands they take their stand on a possession they have seized;
although now, by the providence of God, all having been made Christians of the catholic faith and having received our clergy whom they obey, they live gently, mildly, and harmlessly—not as with subject Gauls, but truly as with Christian brothers. In the eleventh year of his reign, Valentinian, when the Sarmatians had spread themselves through the Pannonias and were laying them waste, while preparing war against them, was suffocated and died at the town of Brigetio by a sudden effusion of blood, which in Greek is called apoplexy. After him Gratian his son held the empire of the West, Valens his uncle being established in the parts of the East;
he also made Valentinian, his brother who was still quite young, a partner in the empire. In the year 1128 from the founding of the City, Valens, the thirty-ninth, after Valentinian's death held the empire for four years—before whom alone, since he acted impiously, he might have blushed. Forthwith, with the audacity as it were of unbridled license, he gave a law that the monks—that is, Christians who, abandoning the manifold business of worldly affairs, devote themselves to the one work of the faith—should be forced into military service. A great multitude of dwelling monks had filled those vast solitudes of Egypt and the spreading sands which, on account of the thirst and barrenness and the most dangerous abundance of serpents, human intercourse had not known.
Tribunes and soldiers were sent thither, to drag off the holy and true soldiers of God under another name—that of persecution. Many companies of saints were slain there. But as for what was done through the various provinces everywhere by these and similar orders against the catholic churches and the peoples of right faith, let it suffice that it has been sufficiently signified by the very choice of passing it over in silence. Meanwhile in the parts of Africa, Firmus, setting himself up as king with the Moorish nations roused, laid waste Africa and Mauretania; he gave to the barbarians as plunder Caesarea, the most noble city of Mauretania, captured by treachery and then filled with slaughters and burnings.
igiturcomesTheodosius, Theodosiiquipostimperiopraefuitpater, aValentinianomissuseffusasMaurorumgentesmultisproeliisfregit, ipsumFirmumafflictumetoppressumcoegitadmortem. postcumexperientissimaprouidentiatotamcumMauretaniaAfricammeliorempristinisreddidisset, instimulanteetobrepenteinuidiaiussusinterfici, apudCarthaginembaptizariinremissionempeccatorumpraeoptauitacpostquamsacramentumChristiquodquaesieratadsecutusest, post. gloriosamsaeculiuitametiamdeuitaeaeternitatesecuruspercussoriiugulumultropraebuit.
Therefore Count Theodosius, father of the Theodosius who afterward presided over the empire, sent by Valentinian, broke the spreading Moorish nations in many battles, and compelled Firmus himself, afflicted and crushed, to his death. Afterward, when with most experienced foresight he had restored the whole of Africa together with Mauretania to a better state than before, at the instigation and creeping in of envy he was ordered to be killed; and at Carthage he chose above all to be baptized for the remission of sins, and after he had attained the sacrament of Christ which he had sought, after a glorious life in the world, secure also concerning the eternity of life, he of his own accord offered his throat to the executioner.
Meanwhile the emperor Gratian, quite a young man, when he perceived an inestimable multitude of enemies poured into the Roman territories, relying on the power of Christ, with a far inferior number of soldiers gave himself against the foe, and straightway at Argentaria, a town of the Gauls, brought a most formidable war to an end with incredible success. For more than thirty thousand of the Alamanni are said to have been slain in that battle with the very least loss to the Romans. But in the thirteenth year of Valens' reign—that is, a little time after Valens had carried out throughout the whole East the rending of the churches and the slaughter of the saints—that root of our miseries sprouted at once the most abundant shoots.
For the nation of the Huns, long shut away in inaccessible mountains, roused by a sudden frenzy, blazed up against the Goths, and drove them, everywhere thrown into disorder, from their ancient dwellings. The Goths, fleeing across the Danube, received by Valens without any compact of treaty, did not even hand over their arms to the Romans—so that the barbarians might be more safely trusted. Then, on account of the intolerable greed of the general Maximus, driven by famine and injuries to rise in arms, having defeated Valens' army, they poured themselves through Thrace, mixing all things together at once with slaughters, burnings, and plunderings. Valens, having gone out from Antioch, when he was being dragged on to the last lot of an unhappy war, stung by a late repentance for his greatest sin, ordered the bishops and the rest of the saints to be recalled from exile.
And so in the fifteenth year of his reign he waged that lamentable war in Thrace with the Goths, who by then were most fully equipped through the exercise of their strength and the abundance of their resources. There, at the very first onset of the Goths, the squadrons of Roman cavalry, thrown into confusion, deserted the unprotected supports of the infantry. Soon the legions of infantry, surrounded on every side by the enemy's cavalry and first overwhelmed by clouds of arrows, then—when, frantic with fear, they were driven scattered through trackless places—were utterly cut down and perished by the swords and lances of their pursuers.
The emperor himself, wounded by an arrow and turned to flight, with difficulty carried off, lay hidden in the hut of some small farmhouse; caught by the pursuing enemies, with fire set under it he was consumed, and—so that the testimony of his punishment and of the divine indignation might be the more a terrible example to posterity—he even lacked a common burial. Let the obstinacy and misery of the heathen console themselves, but in this alone: that in Christian times and under Christian kings so great calamities, all heaped up together, weighed down the burdened neck of the commonwealth—provinces overthrown, an army destroyed, an emperor burned. Truly this is great to our grief, and the more wretched in that it is the more new.
But what does this profit toward the consolation of the pagans, who plainly perceive that in these things too a persecutor of the churches was punished? One God has handed down one faith, has spread one Church through the whole world: this He looks upon, this He loves, this He defends; with whatever name anyone may cover himself, if he is not joined to this, he is an alien; if he assails this, he is an enemy. Let the heathen console themselves, as much as they will, with the punishments of the Jews and heretics—only let them confess, from this proof above all of Valens destroyed, that there is one God and that He is no respecter of persons. The Goths had earlier through suppliant envoys begged that bishops be sent to them, from whom they might learn the rule of the Christian faith.
Valens the emperor, with ruinous depravity, sent teachers of the Arian doctrine. The Goths held to what they had received in the first rudiment of their faith. And so by the just judgment of God they themselves burned him alive, who shall burn even after death because of him through the fault of error. In the year 1132 from the founding of the City, Gratian, the fortieth from Augustus, after the death of Valens held the empire for six years, although long before he had reigned together with his uncle Valens and with his brother Valentinian.
He, when he saw the sharp and almost collapsed condition of the commonwealth, with the same foresight by which Nerva once had chosen the Spaniard Trajan, through whom the commonwealth was restored, himself also chose Theodosius, likewise a Spaniard, and out of the necessity of restoring the commonwealth clothed him in the purple at Sirmium, and set him over the empire of the East and Thrace at once—in this with more perfect judgment, because, although this man was equal in all the virtues of human life, in the sacrament of faith and the worship of religion he surpassed without any comparison; for the one was a persecutor, the other a propagator of the Church. Thus to the one not even a single son of his own was granted, in whom he might rejoice as successor;
but the glorious offspring of this latter rules over both East and West alike through successive generations down to the present. And so Theodosius believed that the afflicted commonwealth, struck by the wrath of God, was to be restored by the mercy of God; transferring all confidence in himself to the help of Christ, he without hesitation attacked those very great Scythian nations, dreaded by all the ancients—even by that Alexander the Great, as Pompey and Cornelius have testified, who avoided them—but now, after the Roman army had been destroyed, most fully equipped with Roman horses and arms, that is, the Alans, Huns, and Goths, and conquered them in great and many battles.
As victor he entered the city of Constantinople, and lest he should wear down by constant warfare that small remaining band of the Roman army, he struck a treaty with Athanaric, king of the Goths. But Athanaric, immediately upon coming to Constantinople, met his death. All the nations of the Goths, their king being dead, looking upon the valor and benignity of Theodosius, gave themselves over to the Roman empire. In those same days too the Persians, who—Julian having been killed and other emperors often defeated, and now also Valens put to flight—were belching with raw insolence the surfeit of their most recent victory, of their own accord sent envoys to Theodosius at Constantinople and as suppliants begged for peace; and a treaty was then struck, by which the whole East enjoys the most tranquil rest down to the present.
Meanwhile, when Theodosius in the East, having subdued the barbarian nations, had at last restored the Thraces free from the enemy, and had made his son Arcadius a partner in the empire, Maximus—a man indeed energetic and upright and worthy of the rank of Augustus, had he not emerged through tyranny against the faith of his oath—almost unwillingly created emperor by the army in Britain, crossed over into Gaul: where, the Augustus Gratian being terrified by a sudden incursion and meditating a crossing into Italy, he encompassed him by treachery and killed him, and drove his brother Valentinian Augustus out of Italy. Valentinian, fleeing into the East, was received by Theodosius with fatherly affection, and soon was even restored to the empire.
In the 1136th year from the founding of the City, Theodosius, the forty-first emperor, after Gratian had been killed by Maximus, obtained dominion over the Roman world and remained in it for eleven years, since he had already reigned for six years in the regions of the East while Gratian was still living. And so, moved to civil war by just and necessary causes — since, of the two brother Augusti, the blood of the one who had been slain demanded vengeance while the misery of the other, now an exile, begged for restoration — he placed his hope in God, and against the tyrant Maximus he rushed forth, mightier by faith alone (for in every comparison of warlike apparatus he was far inferior). At Aquileia Maximus had then settled himself as a spectator of his own victory; Andragathius, his count, was managing the chief conduct of the war.
He, with most ample forces of soldiers and with the very strength of great hosts, by surpassing strategy had incredibly fortified all the passes of the Alps and the rivers; yet by an unspeakable token of God, while he was preparing by a naval expedition to forestall and overwhelm the unwary enemy, of his own accord he abandoned the very barriers which he had blocked up. Thus Theodosius, with no one perceiving — not to say resisting — crossed the empty Alps, and arriving unexpectedly at Aquileia, that great enemy Maximus, fierce and exacting tribute and pay even from the most savage tribes of the Germans by the mere terror of his name, he shut in, captured, and slew, without guile and without contest. Valentinian, restored, took possession of the empire of Italy.
The count Andragathius, learning of Maximus's death, threw himself headlong from his ship into the waves and was drowned. Theodosius received a bloodless victory, with God providing it. Behold, under Christian kings and times, how civil wars, when they cannot be avoided, are carried through! Victory was reached, the city was broken into, the tyrant was seized — and this is little. Behold, on the other side, the hostile army was conquered, and the tyrant's count, more savage than the tyrant himself, was driven to death; so great a network of ambushes was dissolved and mocked, so great an apparatus was emptied out: and yet no one wove any guile, no one drew up a battle-line, in short no one, if it may be said, drew a sword from its scabbard.
A most fearsome war was finished without blood up to victory, and in victory by the death of but two men. And lest anyone suppose this was done by chance — so that the power of God, by which all things are both dispensed and judged, declared by the published testimony of itself, may compel the minds of the murmurers either to confusion or to faith — I tell a thing both unknown to all and known to all: after this war, in which Maximus was slain, many wars indeed, both foreign and civil, as we all recognize, have followed Theodosius and his son Honorius down to the present; and yet almost all of them, even to this very day, and that with the fruit of a simple and holy victory, have been laid to rest with either no blood or the very least.
And so the younger Valentinian, restored to the kingdom after Maximus and his son Victor (whom Maximus had left as emperor over the Gauls) were extinguished, himself crossed into Gaul; and there, while he was living in peace with the commonwealth tranquil, at Vienne, by the treachery of his count Arbogast — as they report — he was strangled, and, that he might be thought to have voluntarily brought death upon himself, he was hung in a noose. When Valentinian Augustus was dead, Arbogast soon dared to create Eugenius as tyrant, and chose a man on whom he might impose the title of emperor; he himself, a barbarian, intending to wield the empire — a man excessive in spirit, counsel, hand, daring, and power — gathered from every side innumerable and unconquered forces, relying now on Roman garrisons, now on barbarian auxiliaries, here by authority, there by kinship.
There is no need to enlarge in words upon a story known even to the eyes of very many, which those who beheld it know better — that it was by the power of God, not the confidence of man, that Theodosius always stood forth as victor; of which this Arbogast is the chief proof in both respects. For both then, when he obeyed Theodosius, he, the least of men, captured Maximus equipped with so great garrisons; and now, when against the same Theodosius he overflowed with the gathered strength of the Gauls and Franks, relying moreover on his especial cult of idols, he nevertheless succumbed with great ease.
Eugenius and Arbogast had drawn up their battle-lines on the plains, and had cunningly occupied the narrow flanks of the Alps and the unavoidable passes with ambushes set in advance, so that even if they were unequal in number and strength, yet by the mere disposition of the war they were conquerors. But Theodosius, posted on the highest peaks of the Alps, deprived of food and sleep — knowing that he was forsaken by his own, not knowing that he was shut in by another's men — prayed to the Lord Christ alone, to Him alone who could do all things, his body stretched on the ground, his mind fixed on heaven. Then, after he had passed a sleepless night in continual prayer and had left behind, as witnesses, the pools of tears, so to speak, which he had paid out as the price of heavenly aid, he confidently seized his arms alone, knowing that he was not alone.