CHAPTER XXXVI

MAGIC ARTS OF MAXENTIUS AGAINST CONSTANTINE: AND FAMINE AT ROME

BUT the crowning point of the tyrant’s wickedness was his having recourse to sorcery: sometimes for magic purposes opening women with child, at other times searching into the bowels of new-born infants. He slew lions also, and practised certain horrid arts for evoking demons, and averting the approaching war, hoping by these means to make himself secure of victory. In short, it is impossible to describe the manifold acts of oppression by which this tyrant of Rome enslaved his subjects: so that by this time they were reduced to the most extreme penury and want of necessary food, a scarcity such as our contemporaries do not remember ever before to have existed at Rome.