As the abdication of Diocletian and Maximian in the May of the year 305 marks a new departure in the last great persecution, it will be well to take a general view of this supreme effort of Paganism against Christianity.
It is true that the great persecution lasted roughly ten years. But after the first two years, of which we have spoken in some detail, although it continued to rage, it was greatly limited in the area of its operations. Between the spring of A. D. 303, when the first edict was promulgated at Nicomedia, and the late spring of A. D. 305, when Diocletian and Maximian abdicated, the persecution was general throughout the whole Empire. Even in the great province of Gaul, where Constantius Chlorus ruled, and in which the Christians enjoyed, on the whole, stillness, the persecuting edicts were nominally carried out; while throughout the dominions of Diocletian, Maximian, and Galerius a bitter and harassing war was waged against the followers of the Crucified. These dominions included roughly all the provinces of the East; the sphere of persecution comprehended Italy, Greece, Egypt, Spain, and North Africa in the Western division of the Empire.
After the abdication of the two senior Emperors in A. D. 305, in the West the power of Constantius Chlorus was greatly augmented. Spain was probably added to his sphere of control, and Severus, the new Caesar, who ruled in Italy and North Africa, contrary to the expectation of his friend and patron Galerius, ordered his policy towards the Christian portion of the population rather after the wishes of Constantius, his immediate superior in the Western Empire, than in accordance with those of Galerius. In his dominions, although the edicts remained unrepealed and the churches and cemeteries were not restored to the Christians, no open persecution harassed the communities. Thus in the matter of toleration and persecution the Empire was divided. Eusebius clearly indicates this cleavage in the following language. He tells us of "an innumerable multitude of martyrs, noble wrestlers" in the cause of piety who suffered in the Eastern Provinces, while in the other countries, including all Italy, Sicily, and Gaul, Spain, and Mauritania and Africa, the hostility of the persecution hardly lasted two years; they were blessed by the interposition and peace of God. Thus in the one part of the Empire peace was being enjoyed, whilst those brethren who inhabited the other endured innumerable trials.
Of this second phase of persecution in the East, which lasted some eight years longer, we shall speak again; of the general persecution, usually known as Diocletian's, which went on for about two years, we have already given some details.
Lactantius, in an interesting and instructive passage which deserves to be quoted at length, sets forth the spirit in which the hostile edicts were carried into effect by the different provincial governors and magistrates during these two years of general persecution. "It is impossible to represent in detail everything that took place in all the various districts of the Roman world. Each provincial governor, according to his discretion, used the special powers (against the Christians) with which he was armed. The timid ones, fearful lest they should be reproached with not carrying out their orders, went farthest in the work; others followed them and their severe interpretations of the directions for various reasons; they were cruel by nature, or they were actuated by a special hatred for the just ones' (the Christians), or they wished to curry favor with the Sovereign, and by this means to secure their own promotion. In some cases they inflicted the penalty of death in a wholesale fashion." Here the writer quotes the example of a Phrygian city where a terrible massacre of Christians of all ages and sexes was ordered.
"But the most dreaded of the governors were those who made false professions of kindness. The most dangerous and terrible executioner was he who boasted that he never shed blood in the province over which he ruled. These men could not endure the thought of the martyrs' victory. It is impossible to describe the tortures which these magistrates devised in order to compass their purpose. They felt it was a combat to the death between them and the Christians. I have seen myself in Bithynia, the joy of one of their governors, when a Christian, who had held out for two years with true courage, in the end gave in. He was as proud of the achievement as though he had subjugated a barbarian people. To gain this end, every nerve was strained; they felt their honor was at stake. So they inflicted on the bodies of the victims the most cruel tortures, taking all care that their sufferings stopped short of death. Do they imagine that our bliss is only won by death? Will not these torments win for us the glory due to a noble resistance, a glory, too, which will be more conspicuous in proportion to the greatness of the sufferings endured? But the persecutors are blind. The greatest care is taken of the tortured ones in order that the sufferings may be renewed. The shattered limbs are carefully tended with a view of subjecting the sufferers to fresh agonies. Was ever anything conceived more gentle, more humane? This is the strange humanity which idol-worship breathes into its votaries!"
It is impossible to compute the number of those who perished in the two years of general persecution which, save in Gaul and the provinces under the rule of Constantius, raged over the whole Empire, and in the following seven or eight years of persecution in the Eastern Provinces. The computation of Gibbon is unreliable. He suggests that the total number of those who perished during the whole period of ten years did not exceed two thousand; and he bases his calculations largely upon the ninety-two martyrs of Palestine mentioned particularly by Eusebius; but that historian does not profess to give more than a list of those cases which were personally known to himself, or were specially interesting. "The roll of the Palestine martyrs is, therefore, on every reasonable supposition only a select list, and bears probably the same relation to the whole number that suffered, as the names of officers in a gazette to the undistinguished victims of the rank and file. The persecution was undoubtedly a mighty effort to crush Christianity. More than once the tyrants boasted that they had succeeded in the attempt. That in such an endeavor continued for ten years they accomplished nothing more than the death of some two thousand persons is as contrary to reason as to the testimony of all early writers."
Besides, in his computation, evidently made with a desire to minimize as much as possible the numbers of sufferers in this long continued persecution, the historian of the Decline and Fail disdains to take any account whatever of the crowds in different countries who were tortured, as the contemporary writer Lactantius so graphically in the above quoted passage tells us, but were not put to death. He omits mentioning the numberless victims condemned to a lingering death in prison or in the mines, he makes no allusion whatever to the unspeakable misery and wretchedness endured by uncounted numbers of the members of the Christian communities during those long years of the terror.
There is no question, when all possible deduction is made for the number—no inconsiderable one—of the "Traditores" who gave up the sacred books hoping thus to save their lives, and of those who fell away under threats of torture, shame, and confiscation of their goods, that on the whole the great mass of the Christians endured all rather than deny the name of Jesus, and that their noble constancy and brave patience to the end literally wearied out their persecutors, who gradually became sensible of the hopelessness of the task they had set themselves of exterminating such a sect, so numerous and so determined.