On the 1st of May, in the year 305, Diocletian, by an act of unexampled abnegation, resigned the purple and retired into private life. The renunciation was publicly performed, not in Rome, for Rome had ceased to be the centre of the political world, but on a broad plain in Bithynia, three miles from Nicomedia, which long had been the Emperor’s favourite residence. In the centre of the plain rose a little hill, upon which stood a column surmounted by a statue of Jupiter. There, years before, Diocletian had with his own hands invested Galerius with the symbols of power; there he was now to perform the last act of a ruler by nominating those whom he thought most fit to succeed him. A large platform had been constructed; the soldiers of the legions had been ordered to assemble in soldier’s meeting and listen to their chief’s farewell. Diocletian took leave of them in few words. He was old, he said, and infirm. He craved for rest after a life of toil. The Empire needed stronger and more youthful hands than his. His work was done. It was time for him to go.

The two Augusti were laying down their powers simultaneously, for Maximian was performing a similar act of renunciation at Milan. The two Cæsars, Constantius and Galerius, would thus automatically move up into the empty places and become Augusti in their stead. It had been necessary, therefore, to select two new Cæsars, and these Diocletian was about to present to the loyalty of the legions. We are told that the secret had been well kept, and that the soldiers waited with suppressed excitement until Diocletian suddenly announced that his choice had fallen upon Severus, one of his trusted generals, and upon Maximin Daza, a nephew of Galerius. Severus had already been sent to Milan to be invested by Maximian; Maximin was present on the tribunal and was then and there robed in the purple. The ceremony over, Diocletian—a private citizen once more, though he still retained the title of Augustus—drove back to Nicomedia and at once set out for Salona, on the Adriatic, where he had built a sumptuous palace for his retirement.

CONSTANTINE THE GREAT.
FROM GROSVENOR’S “CONSTANTINOPLE.”

The scene which we have depicted is described most fully and most graphically by a historian whose testimony, unfortunately, is entirely suspect in matters of detail. The author of The Deaths of the Persecutors—it is very doubtful whether Lactantius, to whom the work has long been attributed, really wrote it, but for the sake of convenience of reference we may credit him with it—is at once the most untrustworthy and the most vigorous and attractive writer of the period. His object throughout is to blacken the characters of the Emperors who persecuted the Christian Church, and he does not scruple to distort their actions, pervert their motives, and even invent, with well calculated malice, stories to their discredit. Lactantius knows, or pretends to know, all that takes place even in the most secret recesses of the palace; he recounts all that passes at the most confidential conferences; and with consummate artistry he throws in circumstantial details and touches of local colour which give an appearance of truth, but are really the most convincing proofs of falsehood. Lactantius represents the abdication of Diocletian as the act of an old man, shattered in health, and even in mind, by a distressing malady sent by Heaven as the just punishment of his crimes. He depicts him cowering in tears before the impatient insolence of Galerius, now peremptorily clamouring for the succession with threats of civil war. They discuss who shall be the new Cæsars. “Whom shall we appoint?” asks Diocletian. “Severus,” says Galerius. “What?” says the other, “that drunken sot of a dancer who turns night into day and day into night?” “He is worthy,” replies Galerius, “for he has proved a faithful general, and I have sent him to Maximian to be invested.” “Well, well,” says the old man, “who is the second choice?” “He is here,” says Galerius, indicating his nephew, a young semi-barbarian named Maximin Daza. “Why, who is this you offer me?” “He is my kinsman,” is the reply. Then said Diocletian, with a groan, “These are not fit men to whom to entrust the care of the State.” “I have proved them,” said Galerius. “Well, you must look to it,” rejoins Diocletian, “you who are about to assume the reins of the Empire. I have toiled enough. While I ruled, I took care that the State stood safe. If any harm now befalls, the fault is not mine.”[[16]]

Such is a characteristic specimen of Lactantius’s history, and so, when he comes to describe the ceremony of abdication, he makes Galerius draw Maximin Daza to the front of the group of imperial officials by whom Diocletian is surrounded, and represents the soldiers as staring in surprise at their new Cæsar, as at one whom they had never seen before. Yet a favourite nephew of Galerius can scarcely have been a stranger to the troops of Nicomedia. Galerius not only—according to Lactantius—drew forward Maximin Daza, but at the same time rudely thrust back into the throng the son of Constantius, the senior of the two new Augusti. This was young Constantine, the future Emperor, who for some years past had been living at the Court of Diocletian.

But it was no broken down Emperor in his dotage, passing, according to the spasms of his malady, from sanity to insanity, who resigned the throne on the plain of Nicomedia. Diocletian was but fifty-nine years of age. He had just recovered, it is true, from a very severe illness, which, even on the testimony of Lactantius, had caused “grief in the palace, sadness and tears among his guards, and anxious suspense throughout the whole State.”[[17]] But his brain was never clearer than when he took final leave of his troops. His abdication was the culminating point of his policy. He had planned it twenty years before. He had kept it before his eyes throughout a long and busy reign. It was the completion of, the finishing touch to his great political system. It would have been perfectly easy for Diocletian to forswear himself. Probably very few of his contemporaries believed that he would fulfil his promise to abdicate after twenty years of reign. Kings talk of the allurements of retirement, but they usually cling to power as tenaciously as to life. The first Augustus had delighted to mystify his Ministers of State by speaking of restoring the Republic. He died an Emperor. Diocletian, alone of the Roman Emperors, laid down the sceptre when he was at the height of his glory. It was a hazardous experiment, but he was faithful to his principles. He thought it best for the world that its master should not grow old and feeble on the throne.

Constantine, of whom we have just caught a glimpse at the abdication of Diocletian, was born either in 273 or 274. The uncertainty attaching to the year of his birth attaches even more to its place. No one now believes that he was born in Britain—a pleasing fiction which was invented by English monks, who delighted to represent his mother Helena as the daughter of a British King, though they were quite at a loss where to locate his kingdom. The only foundation for this was a passage in one of the Panegyrists, who said that Constantine had bestowed lustre upon Britain “illic oriundo.” But the words are now taken as referring to his accession and not to his birth. He was certainly proclaimed Emperor in Britain, and might thus be said to have “sprung thence.” Constantine’s birth-place seems to have been either Naissus, a city in Upper Moesia, or Drepanum, a city near Nicomedia. The balance of evidence, though none of it is very trustworthy, inclines to the former.

His father was Constantius Chlorus, afterwards Cæsar and Augustus, but at the time of Constantine’s birth merely a promising officer in the Roman army. Constantius belonged to one of the leading families of Moesia and his mother was a niece of the capable and soldierly Claudius, the conqueror of the Goths. Claudius had only been dead four years when Constantine was born, and we may suppose that it was his influence which had set Constantius in the way of rapid promotion. He had formed one of those secondary marriages which were recognised by Roman law, when the wife was not of the same social standing as the husband. Helena is said to have been the daughter of an innkeeper of Drepanum, and Constantine’s enemies lost no opportunity of dwelling upon the obscurity of his ancestry upon his mother’s side. But that he was born in wedlock is beyond question. Had the relationship between Constantius and Helena been an irregular one, there would have been no need for Maximian to insist on a divorce when he ratified Constantius’s elevation to the purple by giving him the hand of his daughter, Theodora.

Of Constantine’s early years we know nothing, though we may suppose that they were spent in the eastern half of the Empire. Constantius served with the eastern legions in the campaigns which preceded the accession of Diocletian in 284, and it is as a young officer in the entourage of that Emperor that Constantine makes his earliest appearance in history. Eusebius tells us[[18]] that he first saw the future champion of Christianity in the train of Diocletian during one of the latter’s visits to Palestine. He recalls his vivid remembrance of the young Prince standing at the Emperor’s right hand and attracting the gaze of all beholders by the beauty of his person and the imposing air which betokened his consciousness of having been born to rule. Eusebius adds that while Constantine’s physical strength extorted the respectful admiration of his younger associates, his remarkable qualities of prudence and wisdom aroused the jealousy and excited the apprehensions of his chiefs. However, the recollections of the Bishop of Cæsarea, with half a century of interval, are somewhat suspect, and we need see no more than a high-spirited[high-spirited], handsome, and keen-witted Prince in Eusebius’s “paragon of bodily strength, physical beauty, and mental distinction.” As for Diocletian’s jealous fears, they are best refuted by the fact that Constantine was promoted to be a tribune of the first rank and saw considerable military service. The foolish stories that his superiors set him to fight a gigantic Sarmatian in single combat, and dared him to contend against ferocious wild beasts, in the hope that his pride and courage might be his undoing, may be dismissed as childish. If Diocletian had feared Constantine, Constantine would never have survived his residence in the palace.