widow, by her beauty had the ill fortune to
attract the regards of his successor in persecution, the Emperor
Maximin. Spurning his suit with the scorn becoming a pure and
high-souled woman, at once the daughter and widow of an Emperor, she
encountered his deadly hate. Her estates were confiscated, her trusted
servants tortured, and her dearest friends put to death.

"The Empress herself," says Gibbon, "together with her mother, Prisca,
was condemned to exile; and as they were ignominiously hurried from
place to place, before they were confined to a sequestered village in
the deserts of Syria, they exposed their shame and distress to the
provinces of the East, which during thirty years, had respected their
august dignity." On the death of Maximin, Valeria escaped from exile and
repaired in disguise to the court of his successor, Licinius, hoping for
more humane treatment. But these hopes, to use again the language of
Gibbon, "were soon succeeded by horror and astonishment, and the bloody
execution which stained the palace of Nicomedia sufficiently convinced
her that the throne of Maximin was filled by a tyrant more inhuman than
himself. Valeria consulted her safety by hasty flight, and, still
accompanied by her mother Prisca, they wandered above fifteen months
through the provinces in the disguise of plebeian habits. They were at
length discovered at Thessalonica; and as the sentence of their death
was already pronounced, they were immediately beheaded and their bodies
thrown into the sea. The people gazed on the melancholy spectacle; but
their grief and indignation were suppressed by the terrors of a military
guard. Such was the unworthy fate of the wife and daughter of
Diocletian. We lament their misfortunes, we cannot discover their
crimes."[58]

At length, on the triumph of the British-born Emperor, Constantine, over
his rivals for the throne of the world, like the trump of Jubilee, the
edict of the toleration of Christianity, pealed through the land. It
penetrated the gloomy dungeon, the darksome mine, the Catacombs' dim
labyrinth, and from their sombre depths, vast processions of "noble
wrestlers for religion," thronged to the long-forsaken churches, with
grateful songs of praise to God.

Christianity, after long repression, became at length triumphant. It
emerged from the concealment of the Catacombs to the sunshine of
imperial favour. Constantine, himself, proclaimed to eager thousands the
New Evangel--the mo