OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE.

Ill

afterwards, he was put to death, either by thehand of the executioner, or by the more gentleoperation of poison.' The Cfesar Licinius, ayouth of amiable manners, was involved in theruin of Crispus ; u and the stern jealousy ofConstantine was unmoved by the prayers andtears of his favourite sister, pleading for the lifeof a son, whose rank was His only crime, andwhose loss she did not long survive. The storyof these unhappy princes, the nature and evi-dence of their guilt, the forms of their trial, andthe circumstances of their death, were buriedin mysterious obscurity; and the courtly bishop,who has celebrated, in an elaborate work, thevirtues and piety of his hero, observes a pru-dent silence on the subject of these tragic events.*Such haughty contempt for the opinion of man-kind, whilst it imprints an indelible stain onthe memory of Constantine , must remind us ofthe very different behaviour of one of the greatestmonarchs of the present age. The Czar Peter,

* Ammianua (1. xiv, c. II) uses the general expression of peremptum.Codinus (p. 34) beheads the young prince; but Sidonius Apollinaris (Epistol. v. 8), for the sake perhaps of an antithesis to Fansta’s warmbath, chooses to administer a draught of cold poison.

" Sororis filium, commodas indolis juvenem. Eutropins, x, 6. MayI not be, permitted to conjecture, that Crispus had married Helena, thedaughter of the Emperor Licinius ; and that, on the happy delivery of^the princess, in the year 322, a general pardon was granted by Constan-tine ? See Ducange , Fam. Byzant. p. 47, and the law (1. ix, tit. xxxvii)of the Theodosian Code , which has so much embarrassed the interpre-ters. Godefroy, tom. iii, p. 2G7.

* See the Life of Constantine , particularly 1. ii, c. 19-20. Twohundred and fifty years afterwards, Evagrins (1. iii, c. 41) deduced,from the silence of Eusebius , a vain argument against the reality of

the fact.

CHAP.

XVIII.