that his conscience forbade him to serve as a soldier. A centurion named Marcellus, who, when called upon to take part in the sacrifices of a heathen festival, publicly renounced the service of an idolatrous master, and declared that he would obey none but Christ the Eternal King, was beheaded at Tingi in Mauretania. There is a partial truth in the observation of Gibbon, —“Examples of such a nature savour much less of religious persecution than of martial or even civil law; but they served to alienate the mind of the emperors, to justify the severity of Galerius, who dismissed a great number of Christian officers from their employments; and to authorize the opinion that a sect of enthusiasts, which avowed principles so repugnant to the public safety, must either remain useless, or would soon become dangerous subjects of the empire."*

Such were probably the arguments by which Galerius, who spent the winter after the triumph at Nicomedia, prevailed on Diocletian to call a council of the chief civil and military officers, which resolved that the Christian religion should be suppressed throughout the empire. The first result of their decision was the demolition of the church at Nicomedia by the imperial guards (Feb. 23, A.D. 303); and on the following day, an edict was published, inaugurating a persecution such as no former emperor had conceived. All Christian churches throughout the empire were to be destroyed and their property confiscated, and all copies of the Scriptures were to be given up to be burnt in public by the magistrates; all who practised Christian worship in private were doomed to death; and Christians were deprived of their civil rights. Slaves were shut out from the hope of manumission; freemen from all honours and public employments. Debarred even from the common benefit of the law, they were placed at the mercy of informers; for, while the magistrates were enjoined to hear all causes against them, the Christians were forbidden to bring their complaints before the tribunals. The spirit in which the edict was likely to be received and enforced was immediately shown in

* The experience of our own army, as in India and in our Roman Catholic colonies, proves that even Christian states may involve themselves in similar difficulties of military discipline, the only solution of which lies in the unreserved extension of religious tolerance to individual consciences. Unless even the Roman emperors had learnt to act on this principle, the cases of Maximilian and Marcellus must have been of daily occurrence, and Christians must have been excluded from the army, or massacred by thousands for refusing to serve and this is the reply to Gibbon's suggestion, if it is meant to excuse the conduct of Maximian and Galerius. The fact that the difficulty" of martial or even civil law" had been in some way generally solved, tamps their enforcement of it as "religious persecution."

an incident which the historian thus relates:-"This edict was scarcely exhibited to the public view, in the most conspicuous place of Nicomedia, before it was torn down by the hands of a Christian, who expressed at the same time, by the bitterest invectives, his contempt as well as abhorrence for such impious and tyrannical governors. He was burnt, or rather roasted, by a slow fire; and his executioners, zealous to revenge the personal insult which had been offered to the emperors, exhausted every refinement of cruelty, without being able to subdue his patience, or to alter the steady and insulting smile which, in his dying agonies, he still preserved in his countenance.' The fires which twice broke out in the palace of Diocletian within fifteen days of the publication of the edict were at once ascribed to the revenge of the Christians. The Christian officers of the palace were examined with exquisite tortures, and put to the most cruel deaths; and Galerius departed in haste from Nicomedia, giving out that he held his life insecure. Without attaching importance to the charge brought against Galerius himself of having caused the conflagration, we may feel sure that any Christian, who had for the first time used such a means of vengeance upon the persecutors, would have been a fanatic who would have claimed the glory of the deed. Even after these causes of mutual exasperation, the prudence of Diocletian suffered some months to pass before the edict was generally published in the provinces; and it was at first enforced against the churches and Scriptures rather than the persons of the Christians. Many even among the bishops and presbyters earned the by-name of traditors by delivering up the sacred books; and the first who suffered death for his refusal was an African bishop, named Felix. When it was found that his example was generally imitated, and when, in some places, the Christians defended their churches with armed force, new edicts were issued to the governors of all the provinces. The command to imprison all the ministers of religion was presently extended to the whole body of Christians; and their Pagan neighbours were threatened with severe penalties if they should protect them. These were the last measures of Diocletian's reign, and we may be allowed to hope that disgust at the course into which he had been urged was one motive for his abdication.

The system of government devised by Diocletian had now been tried by the experience of twelve years, and the result seemed even brilliantly successful abroad, while no disunion had yet

appeared among the four great potentates. "Every one was sovereign within his own jurisdiction; but their united authority extended over the whole monarchy, and each of them was prepared to assist his colleagues with his counsels or presence. The Cæsars, in their exalted rank, revered the majesty of the emperors, and the three younger princes invariably acknowledged, by their gratitude and obedience, the common parent of their fortunes. The suspicious jealousy of power found not any place among them; and the singular happiness of their union has been compared to a chorus of music, whose harmony was regulated and maintained by the skilful hand of the first artist." But the historian, who transcribes from Julian this glowing picture of imperial concord, has pointed out the vast increase of taxation required to maintain the dignity of four courts, of which two at least were on the pattern of oriental splendour, with the vast hierarchy of officials who were now multiplied in every province,* till, as the Christian writer Lactantius says, "the proportion of those who received exceeded the proportion of those who contributed." Since Gibbon wrote, a remarkable discovery has proved at once the effects of growing luxury and public expenditure, and the false principles of political economy, which might excite our surprise the more if we ourselves had escaped from them longer. In 1826, Colonel Leake found at Stratonicea (Eskihissar), in Caria, a copy of an edict of Diocletian and his colleagues, referred to by Lactantius, and issued in A.D. 301, fixing the maximum prices of the necessaries of life throughout the empire, in consequence, as the preamble declares, of the hardhearted, inhuman, unbridled cupidity of the dealers, who withheld from customers the benefits of abundance. "Among the articles of which the maximum value is assessed are oil, salt, honey, butchers' meat, poultry, game, fish, vegetables, fruit; the wages of labourers and artisans, schoolmasters and orators; clothes, skins, boots and shoes, harness, timber, corn, wine, and beer. The depreciation in the value of money, or the rise in the price of commodities, had been so great during the last century, that butchers' meat, which in the second century of the empire was in Rome about two denari the pound, was now fixed at a maximum of eight: Colonel Leake supposes the average price could not be less than four: at the same time the maximum of the wages of the agricultural labourers was twenty-five. The whole edict is, The reader who wishes to see a vivid illustration of this statement should glance his eye the Notitia Utriusque Imperii.

perhaps, the most gigantic effort of a blind though well-intentioned despotism to control that which is and ought to be beyond the regulation of the government."* The separation of the provinces of the Augusti and the Cæsars had given the deathblow to the political unity of the empire; nor ought it to have been expected that their personal concord would last beyond the first quaternion of princes. Diocletian was too sagacious not to feel such doubts; and having provided for the peaceful succession to the empire, he resolved himself to superintend the change.

The decision to take a step for which the whole history of the empire furnished no precedent,f-though Sulla had given one under the Republic-was prompted, or at least hastened, by a serious illness, which broke down the emperor's vigour at the comparatively early age of fifty-nine. He had left Rome after celebrating the festival of his twentieth year, and entered on his ninth consulship at Ravenna on the 1st of January, A.D. 304. His journey through Illyricum during a cold wet winter was so injurious, that he reached Nicomedia dangerously ill, and was not able to appear in public till the 1st of March, A.D. 305. Galerius was absent, and Diocletian must have often reflected on the danger of leaving the supreme power an object of contention between two such men as him and Maximian. He decided that the two Augusti should quietly give place to the two Cæsars; and he is said to have provided for the contingency by exacting an oath from Maximian, at the time of their joint triumph, to share the abdication which he was even then meditating. Accordingly, on the 1st of May, A.D. 305, the double act of resignation was performed at Milan and Nicomedia. While Maximian retired unwillingly to Ravenna, Diocletian took a solemn and graceful leave of the soldiers and people assembled in a plain three miles from Nicomedia, and withdrew to the retreat he had prepared near his native city of Salona, on the Adriatic coast. The magnificent palace, the completion of which was a chief amusement of his nine remaining years, has given its name to the modern village of

Dean Milman's note to Gibbon, chap. xiii. For a copy of and commentary on the edict, see Das Edict Diocletians de Pretiis Rerum Venalium, herausgegeben von Theodor Mommsen, Leipzig, 1851. The value of the document is unfortunately lessened by our ignorance of the worth of the denarius, which was not the silver coin of that name, but a copper coin, worth much less.

+ Eutrop. ix. 28: Solus omnium post conditum Romanum imperium, qui ex tanto fastigio ad privatæ vitæ statum civilitatemque remearet.

Spalato. Its ruins were studied a century ago by Adams,t who by a comparison with the precepts of Vitruvius, made an ingenious restoration of the immense edifice, which formed an almost perfect square of from 600 to 700 feet, and covered a little more than eight acres. The building was composed of two principal parts, of which the one to the south contained the emperor's private apartments and two temples of Jupiter and Æsculapius.‡ Two streets intersected one another at right angles in the centre of the building, the chief one leading from the Golden Gate to a spacious court before the vestibule of the principal apartments, where the other crossed it. The entrance next in importance was called the Silver Gate; and the other gates were flanked by pairs of octagonal towers, sixteen in all. Diocletian's palace marks an era in the transformation of the Greco-Roman into the Byzantine architecture. Columns and arches were combined in such a manner, that the arches were at first made to rest upon the entablature, and afterwards were even forced immediately to spring from the abacus; and at length the entablature itself took the form of an arch. But, although this architecture offends against the rules of good taste, yet these remains may serve to show how directly the Saracen and Christian architects borrowed from Roman models many of the characteristics which have been looked upon as the creation of their own imagination.§

The locality which Diocletian chose for this magnificent retreat is thus described by Mr. Adams:-"The soil is dry and fertile, the air is pure and wholesome, and, though extremely hot during the summer months, this country seldom feels those sultry and noxious winds, to which the coast of Istria and some parts of Italy are exposed. The views from the palace are no less beautiful than the soil and climate are inviting. Towards the west lies the fertile shore that stretches along the Adriatic, in which a number of small islands are scattered in such a manner as to give this part of the sea the appearance of a great lake. On the north side lies the

*This name, often corrupted into Spalatro, is simply S. Palatium, i.e., Salona Palatium, the palace of Salona.

+ Gibbon commemorates him as "an ingenious artist of our own time and country, whom a very liberal curiosity carried into the heart of Dalmatia." Our time has had a similar advantage in the researches of Sir Gardner Wilkinson.

The temple of Jupiter is now the cathedral; that of Esculapius the church of St. John the Baptist; and the Golden Gate, which is nearly perfect, forms the entrance into the market-place of Spalato.

§ See Adams, Antiquities of Diocletian's Palace, 1764; Wilkinson, Dalmatia and Montenegro, vol. i. pp. 114-143; Fergusson, Handbook of Architecture, vol. i, p. 356.