16 THIRD PERIOD. A.D. 311-590.
ceiicc bordering on wastefulness were prominent. Many of Ui| laws and regulations breatlied the spirit of Christian justice and huniauitv, promoted the elevation of the female sex, improved the condition of slaves and of unfortunates, and gavo free play to the efficiency of the churcii throughout the whole empire. Altogether he was one of the best, the most fortunate, and the most influential of the Roman emperors, Cliristian and pagan.
Yet he had great faults. lie was far from being so pure and so venerable as Eusebius, blinded by his favor to the church, depicts him, in his bombastic and almost dishonestly eulogistic biography, Avith the evident Izitention of setting him up as a model for all future Christian princes. It must, with all regret, be conceded, that his progress in the knowledge of Christianity was not a progress in the practice of its virtues. His love of display and his prodigalit}^, his suspiciousness and his despotism, increased with his power.
The very brightest period of liis reign is stained with gross crimes, which even the spirit of the age and the policy of an absolute monarch caimot excuse. After having reached, upon the bloody path of war, the goal of his ambition, the sole possession of the empire, yea, in the very year in which he summoned the great council of ISTicaea, he ordered the execution of his conquered rival and brother-in-law, Licinius, in breach of a solemn promise of mercy (324).' Not satisfied with this, he caused soon afterwards, from political suspicion, the death of the young Licinius, his nephew, a boy of hardly eleven years. But the worst of all is the murder of his eldest son, Crispus, in 326, who had incurred suspicion of political consj)iracy, and of adulterous and incestuous purposes towards his step-mother Fausta, but is generally regarded as innocent. This domestic and political tragedy emerged from a vortex of mutual suspi cion and rivalry, and calls to mind the conduct of Philip 11. towards Don Carlos, of Peter the Great towards his son Alexis,
'Eusebius justifies this procedure towards an enemy of the Christians by the laws of war. But what becomes of the broach of a solemn pledge ? The murdei of Crispus and Fausta he passes over in prudent silence, in violation of the highcs' duty of the historian to relate tlie truth and the whole truth.
§ 2, CONSTANTINE THE GREAT. 17
and of Soliman the Great towards his son Muslapha. Later authors assert, though gratuitously, that the emperor, like David, bitterly repented of this sin. He has been frequently charged besides, though it would seem altogether unjustly, with the death of his second wife Fausta (326?), who, after twenty years of happy wedlock, is said to have been convicted of slandering her stepson Crispiis, and of adultery with a slave or one of the imperial guards, and then to have been suffocated in the vapor of an over-heated bath. But the accounts of the cause and manner of her death are so late and discordant as to make Constantine's part in it at least very doubtful.'
At all events Christianity did not produce in Constantine a thorough moral transformation. He was concerned more to advance the outward social position of the Christian religion, than to further its inward mission. He was praised and censured in turn by the Christians and Pagans, the Orthodox and tlie Arians, as they successively experienced his favor or dislike. He bears some resemblance to Peter the Great both in his public acts and his private character, by combining great virtues and merits with monstrous crimes, and he probably died with the same consolation as Peter, whose last words were : " I trust that in respect of the good I have striven to do my people (the church), God will pardon my sins." It is quite characteristic of his piety that he turned the sacred nails of the
' Zosimus, certainly in heathen prejudice and slanderous extravagance, ascribes to Constantine under the instigation of his mother Helena, who was furious at the loss of her favorite grandson, the death of two women, the innocent Fausta and an adulteress, the supposed mother of his three successors ; Philostorgius, on the contrary, declares Fausta guilty (H. E. ii. 4 ; only fragmentary). Then again, older ■!vitnesses indirectly contradict this whole view ; two orations, namely, of the next fullowing reign, which imply, that Fausta survived the death of her son, the younger <,'onstantine, who outlived his father by three years. Comp. Julian. Orat. i., and Monod. in Const. Jun. c. 4, ad Calcem Eutrop., cited by Gibbon, ch. xviii., notes 25 and 26. Evagrius denies both the murder of Crispus and of Fausta, though only on account of the silence of Eusebius, whose extreme partiality for his imperial friend seriously impairs the value of his narrative. Gibbon and still more decidedly Niebuhr (Vortrage iiber Rom. Geschichte, iii. 302) are inclined to acquit Constantine of all guilt in the death of Fausta. The latest biographer, Burckhardt (1. c. p. 3*75), cliarges him with it rather hastily, without even mentioning the critical difSculties in the way. So also Stanley (1. c. p. 300).