306, was born probably in the year 2Y2, either in Britain or at Naissus (now called Nissa), a town of Dardania, in lUyricum.' " The heathen historians extol the earlier part of his reign, and depreciate the later. Thus Eutropius, x. 6 : " In primo imperii tempore optimis principibus, ultimo mediis comparandus." With this judgment Gibbon agrees (ch. xviii.), presenting in Constantine an inverted Augustus : "In the life of Augustus we behold the tyrant of the republic, converted, almost by imperceptible degrees, into the father of his country and of human kind. In that of Constantine, we may contemplate a hero, who had so long inspired his subjects with love, and his enemies with terror, de- generating into a cruel and dissolute monarch, corrupted by his fortune, or raised by conquest above the necessity of dissimulation." But this theory of progressive de- generacy, adopted also by F. C. Schlosser in his Weltgeschichte, by Stanley, 1. c. p. 297, and many others, is as untenable as the opposite view of a progressive improve- ment, held by Eusebius, Mosheim, and other ecclesiastical historians. For, on the one hand, the earlier life of Constantine has such features of cruelty as the surrender of the conquered barbarian kings to the wild beasts in the ampitheatre at Treves in 310 or 311, for which he was lauded by a heathen orator; the ungenerous conduct toward Herculius, his faliier-in-law ; the murder of the infant son of Maxentius ; and the triumphal exhibition of the head of Maxentius on his entrance into Rome in 312, On the other hand his most humane laws, such as the abolition of the gladiatorinl shows and of licentious and cruel rites, date from his later reign. ^According to Baronius (Ann. 306, n. 16) and others he was born in Britain, because an ancient panegyric of 307 says that Constantine ennobled Britain by his birth (tu Britannias nobiles oiiendo fecisti) ; but this may be understood of his royal g (::^S^j^v// Vtc c-v^-h^^-i^ . § 2. CONSTANTINE THE GREAT. - 19 His mother was Helena, daughter of an innkeeper/ the first wife of Constantius, afterwards divorced, when Constantius, for pohtical reasons, married a daughter of Maximian." She is described by Christian writers as a discreet and devout woman, and has been honored with a place in the catalogue of saints. Her name is identified with the discovery of the cross and the pious superstitions of the holy places. She lived to a very advanced age and died in the year 326 or 327, in or near the city of Rome. Rising by her beauty and good fortune from obscurity to the splendor of, the court, then meeting the fate of Josephine, but restored to imperial dignity by her son, and ending as a saint of the Catholic church : Helena would form an interesting subject for a historical novel illustrating the leading events of the Nicene age and the triumph of Christian- ity in the Roman empire. Constantino first