“No more killing!” he ordered. ‘The prophecy has been fulfilled! No more killing lest we offend the god.”
“Carry the order to the troops ahead,” Constantine ordered the decurion who had been riding beside him. “No more killing on pain of punishment by the Emperor.”
“Forgive me for touching your divine person without leave, Dominus,” he said, as the decurion spurred his horse forward, shouting the order to the line of troops as he passed. “I feared your mount would go down.”
“You no doubt saved my life twice, Tribune Constantine,” Diocletian said gratefully. “Once when you held me up and again when you kept me from incurring the displeasure of Apollo by going against his will. I would never have realized the prophecy had been fulfilled, if you had not recognized it. The people of Alexandria may yet raise a monument to your name, as Cleopatra did the obelisks in the square ahead in memory of Julius Caesar.”
Constantine was not surprised, when the wealth captured in Alexandria was distributed, to find his own share larger than that of any Roman officer, save the Emperor himself. Nor did the great booty gained in Egypt come too soon for the Empire in general, since, even before the city fell, official dispatches brought word that the Persian king, Narses, taking advantage of Diocletian’s preoccupation with Egypt, had attacked across the border of Augusta Euphratensia and was moving eastward toward Antioch.
Orders went immediately from Diocletian to Galerius, directing the Caesar of the East to prepare an army against the Emperor’s return to Antioch, since it seemed that another campaign must now be fought upon the Persian frontier. Fortunately the Egyptian campaign was quickly consummated after the fall of Alexandria and emissaries soon began to arrive from cities farther up the Nile, assuring Diocletian of their allegiance.
During the long siege, a considerable section of the province of upper Egypt had joined with the black savages of Ethiopia and the Blemmyes a barbaric tribe but little removed from the monkeys who swarmed in the trees of their land to cause considerable trouble. When Busiris, one of the most ancient of Egyptian centers, and Coptos, through which for more than a thousand years had poured much of the Egyptian trade with India by way of the Red Sea, failed to send substantial payments as a token of allegiance, Diocletian decided to level them to the ground and Constantine was assigned the task of carrying out the order.
Imperial Courier
As he was preparing to ride out on the mission, an Imperial Courier brought him a letter from Drepanum. Written by his mother, it contained the news that, almost coincident with the fall of Alexandria, he had become the father of an infant son. And since there was already another Constantine the son of his father and Theodora Minervina and Helena had decided to call the baby Crispus, a family name on the mother’s side.
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