garb, blood upon his face, blood upon
his bared forearm, blood upon his naked sword. Licinius too had gone
with the tide.

"Hail, Caesar, hail!" he cried, as he bowed his head before the giant.
"I come from Alexander. He will trouble you no more."

III THE FALL OF MAXIMIN

For three years the soldier Emperor had been upon the throne. His palace
had been his tent, and his people had been the legionaries. With them he
was supreme; away from them he was nothing. He had gone with them from
one frontier to the other. He had fought against Dacians, Sarmatians,
and once again against the Germans. But Rome knew nothing of him, and
all her turbulence rose against a master who cared so little for her or
her opinion that he never deigned to set foot within her walls. There
were cabals and conspiracies against the absent Caesar. Then his heavy
hand fell upon them, and they were cuffed, even as the young soldiers
had been who passed under his discipline. He knew nothing, and cared as
much for consuls, senates, and civil laws. His own will and the power
of the sword were the only forces which he could understand. Of commerce
and the arts he was as ignorant as when he left his Thracian home. The
whole vast Empire was to him a huge machine for producing the money by
which the legions were to be rewarded. Should he fail to get that money,
his fellow soldiers would bear him a grudge. To watch their interests
they had raised him upon their shields that night. If city funds had to
be plundered or temples desecrated, still the money must be got. Such
was the point of view of Giant Maximin.

But there came resistance, and all the fierce energy of the man, all the
hardness which had given him the leadership of hard men, sprang forth to
quell it. From his youth he had lived amidst slaughter. Life and death
were cheap things to him. He struck savagely at all who stood up to him,
and when they hit back, he struck more savagely still. His giant shadow
lay black across the Empire from Britain to Syria. A strange subtle
vindictiveness became also apparent in him. Omnipotence ripened every
fault and swelled it into crime. In the old days he had been rebuked for
his roughness. Now a sullen dangerous anger arose against those who had
rebuked him. He sat by the hour with his craggy chin between his
hands, and his elbows resting on his knees, while he recalled all the
misadventures, all the vexations of his early youth, when Roman wits had