Volume I Part 31 (2/2)

904 ”Italy, Sicily, Gaul, and whatever parts extend towards the West,-Spain, Mauritania, and Africa.”-Euseb. _Mart. Palest._ ch.

xiii. But in Gaul, as I have said, the persecution had not extended beyond the destruction of churches; in these provinces the persecution, Eusebius says, lasted not quite two years.

905 The history of this persecution is given by Eusebius, _Hist._ lib.

viii., in his work on the _Martyrs of Palestine_, and in Lactantius, _De Mort. Persec._ The persecution in Palestine was not quite continuous: in A.D. 308 it had almost ceased; it then revived fiercely, but at the close of A.D. 309, and in the beginning of A.D.

310, there was again a short lull, apparently due to political causes. See Mosheim, _Eccles. Hist._ (edited by Soames), vol. i. pp.

286-287.

906 Eusebius.

907 See two pa.s.sages, which Gibbon justly calls remarkable. (_H. E._ viii. 2; _Martyrs of Palest._ ch. xii.)

908 There is one instance of a wholesale ma.s.sacre which appears to rest on good authority. Eusebius a.s.serts that, during the Diocletian persecution, a village in Phrygia, the name of which he does not mention, being inhabited entirely by Christians who refused to sacrifice, was attacked and burnt with all that were in it by the Pagan soldiery. Lactantius (_Inst. Div._ v. 11) confines the conflagration to a church in which the entire population was burnt; and an early Latin translation of Eusebius states that the people were first summoned to withdraw, but refused to do so. Gibbon (ch.

xvi.) thinks that this tragedy took place when the decree of Diocletian ordered the destruction of the churches.

909 Mariana (_De Rebus Hispaniae_, xxiv. 17). Llorente thought this number perished in the single year 1482; but the expressions of Mariana, though he speaks of ”this beginning,” do not necessarily imply this restriction. Besides these martyrs, 17,000 persons in Spain recanted, and endured punishments less than death, while great numbers fled. There does not appear to have been, in this case, either the provocation or the political danger which stimulated the Diocletian persecution.

910 This is according to the calculation of Sarpi. Grotius estimates the victims at 100,000.-Gibbon, ch. xvi.

911 See some curious information on this in Ticknor's _Hist. of Spanish Literature_ (3rd American edition), vol. iii. pp. 236-237.

912 This was the case in the persecutions at Lyons and Smyrna, under Marcus Aurelius. In the Diocletian persecution at Alexandria the populace were allowed to torture the Christians as they pleased.

(_Eusebius_, viii. 10.)

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