“No!” the crowd thundered.
“They have attacked you in your homes, perhaps killed those you love. What shall be their punishment?”
“Throw them to the beasts!” a voice from the crowd shouted and immediately a hundred, then a thousand, then ten thousand voices took up the cry.
“So be it,” Constantine announced. “The people who suffered most at their hands have spoken. Let the prisoners be thrown to the beasts.”
Behind him, Constantine heard Dacius’ familiar low whistle. “Our fears were needless, scholar,” the old soldier said to Eumenius. “There stands an Augustus who will rule Rome with an iron hand.” “And a just one.” Eumenius’ words sounded like a prayer. “May Jupiter and all the gods grant us that boon.”
During the next month, Constantine spent most of the time riding around the countryside, as he had done in Britain after his father’s death. In the lovely town called Lutetia in the district of the Parish, in Lugdunum and in Massilia, he received the plaudits of thousands acclaiming him Augustus of the West. Had time allowed, he would have ridden through the mountain passes into Spain, but he was expecting a letter from Galerius to arrive at Treves almost any day. So after making a swing eastward to the headwaters of the Rhine, he turned again to Treves, where he found the expected letter waiting.
Imagine Galerius
It was brief and he could imagine Galerius’ whitelipped fury as he had dictated it to a clerk.
Constantine’s claim to the title of Augustus was ignored. But since Galerius could hardly ignore the largest and best army in the Empire, he had confirmed the young ruler in the title of Caesar, with sovereignty under himself as Senior Augustus over Gaul, Britain and Spain. What was not mentioned, but which the cornier who brought the letter reported, was that even as it was being sent westward to Treves, Galerius, Maximian and Severus were converging upon the palace of Diocletian at Salonae to beg the old Emperor to take up once again the robes of office and put the young upstart in the West in his place.
As reported to Constantine later by his spies, the plea did not move Diocletian. Instead Galerius appointed Caesar Severus the Augustus of the West and sent word of his action to Constantine,
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