United States or Ghana ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Others say that Diocletian did it spontaneously. On the 1st of May he repaired with his guards to a spot three miles out of Nicomedia, where he had thirteen years before proclaimed Galerius as Cæsar, and there addressing his officers and court, he said that the infirmities of age warned him to retire from power, and to deliver the administration of the state into stronger hands.
If it were possible to rely on the partial testimony of an injudicious writer, we might ascribe the abdication of Diocletian to the menaces of Galerius, and relate the particulars of a private conversation between the two princes, in which the former discovered as much pusillanimity as the latter displayed ingratitude and arrogance.
All other religions which swarmed in Rome were tolerated as naive curiosities by the people who had lost their own religion. But Christianity was marked as an enemy from the first. Not only a corrupted Caesar, like Nero, persecuted the Church, but the wise ones like Trajan and Diocletian, and the wisest, like Marcus Aurelius.
Even in the western provinces of the empire, in Gaul, Spain, and Britain, we meet with churches erected at the commencement of the fourth century. In Nicomedia also, under the very eyes of Diocletian, a church was built that surpassed in splendour the very palace of the Emperor. The army of Diocletian destroyed the holy building in the last grand persecution.
The Carthusian monastery is built upon the ruins of the Thermæ of Diocletian; and the church by the side of the monastery, is decorated with such of its granite columns as remained standing. The monks who inhabit this retreat are very eager to show them, and the interest they take in these ruins seems to be the only one they feel in this world.
After the success of the Persian war had raised the hopes and the reputation of Galerius, he passed a winter with Diocletian in the palace of Nicomedia; and the fate of Christianity became the object of their secret consultations.
The motives, whether of pride or of policy, which first induced Diocletian to withdraw himself from the ancient seat of government, had acquired additional weight by the example of his successors and the habits of forty years.
At present it may be sufficient to observe, that every victory of Constantine was productive of some relief or benefit to the church. The provinces of Italy and Africa experienced a short but violent persecution. The rigorous edicts of Diocletian were strictly and cheerfully executed by his associate Maximian, who had long hated the Christians, and who delighted in acts of blood and violence.
The same logic of events which transformed the constitutional principate of Augustus into the sultanate of Diocletian and Valentinian, has brought about a parallel development in the Church which inherited the traditions, the policy, and the territorial sphere of the dead Empire. The second World-State which had its seat on the Seven Hills has followed closely in the footsteps of the first.
His pious mother, on the other hand, appealed to the learned works of Clemens and Tertullian, who forbid the faithful Christian to draw the sword; and she related the legend of the holy Maximilianus, who, being compelled, under Diocletian, to join the army, had suffered death at the hands of the executioner rather than shed his fellow-creatures' blood in battle.
Word Of The Day