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SUCH was the supplication of Alexander. Meanwhile the emperor,
being desirous of personally examining Arius, sent for him to the
palace, and asked him whether he would assent to the determinations of
the Synod at Nicaea. He without hesitation replied in the
affirmative, and subscribed the declaration of the faith in the
emperor's presence, acting with duplicity. The emperor, surprised
at his ready compliance, obliged him to confirm his signature by an
oath. This also he did with equal dissimulation. The way he evaded,
as I have heard, was this: he wrote his own opinion on paper, and
carried it under his arm, so that he then swore truly that he really
held the sentiments he had written. That this is so, however, I
have written from hearsay, but that he added an oath to his
subscription, I have myself ascertained, from an examination of the
emperor's own letters. The emperor being thus convinced, ordered
that he should be received into communion by Alexander, bishop of
Constantinople. It was then Saturday, and Arius was expecting to
assemble with the church on the day following: but divine retribution
overtook his daring criminalities. For going out of the imperial
palace, attended by a crowd of Eusebian partisans like guards, he
paraded proudly through the midst of the city, attracting the notice of
all the people. As he approached the place called Constantine's
Forum, where the column of porphyry is erected, a terror arising from
the remorse of conscience seized Arius, and with the terror a violent
relaxation of the bowels: he therefore enquired whether there was a
convenient place near, and being directed to the back of
Constantine's Forum, he hastened thither. Soon after a faintness
came over him, and together with the evacuations his bowels protruded,
followed by a copious hemorrhage, and the descent of the smaller
intestines: moreover portions of his spleen and liver were brought off
in the effusion of blood, so that he almost immediately died. The
scene of this catastrophe still is shown at Constantinople, as I have
said behind the shambles in the colonnade: and by persons going by
pointing the finger at the place, there is a perpetual remembrance
preserved of this extraordinary kind of death. So disastrous an
occurrence filled with dread and alarm the party of Eusebius, bishop
of Nicomedia; and the report of it quickly spread itself over the city
and throughout the whole world. As the king grew more earnest in
Christianity and confessed that the confession at Nicaea was attested
by God, he rejoiced at the occurrences. He was also glad because of
his three sons whom he had already proclaimed Caesars; one of each of
them having been created at every successive decennial anniversary of
his reign. To the eldest, whom he called Constantine, after his own
name, he assigned the government of the western parts of the empire,
on the completion of his first decade. His second son Constantius,
who bore his grandfather's name, he constituted Caesar in the eastern
division, when the second decade had been completed. And Constans,
the youngest, he invested with a similar dignity, in the thirtieth
year of his own reign.
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