DIOCLETIAN
Roman Emperor (eastern empire) from 284-305 AD, Mosaicarum et Romanarum Legum Collatio (295 AD)
http://people.vanderbilt.edu/~james.p.burns/chroma/saints/Persecution.html, Christians and the Roman State: 193-324, “THE GREAT PERSECUTION”:
Christian apprehensions at this harsh treatment of what would have been seen by many as simply yet another variant of a Christians sect were no doubt exacerbated by the fact that it was only a year or two before (in all likelihood)[55] that the Emperors Diocletian and Galerius had become infuriated at repeated failures during the taking of the sacred auspices: this was put down to the malign effect of Christians present, making the sign of the cross on their foreheads. In enraged reaction, not only those attending the rites but all serving in the palace were required to sacrifice (on pain of flogging) and letters were then despatched to the army commanders requiring their soldiers to sacrifice (on pain of dismissal). The eastern imperial courts and the soldiers who served under their auspices were being purged of the offending Christians.[56] Forty years of relative peace since the toleration of Gallienus (reigned 253-260 AD) were coming to an end.[57] But this imperial mood of moral and religious outrage, combined with a passion for disciplined conformity, was no sudden novelty. A few years previously, for example, in 295, an edict was issued from Damascus[58] on the moral offence of incestuous marriages within degrees of kindred long forbidden by ancient Roman law, marriages roundly declared to be a sacrilegious abomination and a barbarian savagery by which men 'plunged into illicit unions with promiscuous lust no better than cattle and wild beasts without a thought for morality and piety'. The preamble didactically insists that it is the strict duty of the pious and religious emperors to venerate and preserve the chaste and sacred precepts of Roman law: 'For there can be no doubt that the immortal gods themselves will favour and be at peace with the Roman name, as they have always been in the past, if we have seen to it that all subject to our rule entirely lead a pious, religious, peaceable and chaste life in every respect'. And the edict concludes, declaring 'Our laws protect only what is holy and venerable, and accordingly the Roman majesty has attained to so great a plenitude by the favour of all the divine powers, for it has wisely entwined about all its laws with the bonds of piety and the observance of morality'.[59] The logic of this thinking, with its appeal to antiquity and religious uniformity--and prosperity, could be ominously turned against adherents of any deviant 'barbarian superstition'. But whereas it had been feasible for Roman authorities any time over the preceding forty years to draw the logical conclusions from these premises, it requires an explanation why it was eventually now, on February 23, 303 that the Empire was plunged, by stages-- but by no means uniformly nor continuously--into a bloody decade of turmoil involving horrifying human pain and suffering as the 'Great Persecution' against the Christians got under way. After all, the senior Augustus, Diocletian, had been in power now some eighteen years.
…
Some of the words of Maximinus' (reigned 308-313) response to these petitions are worth quoting as a remarkable theological statement of pagan piety:
For all these evils [= war, plague, tempest, earthquake], and evils even more terrible, have happened many a time before this, as everyone knows. And all these things happened at once because of the baneful error and vain folly of those unhallowed men [= Christians] when that error took possession of their souls, and, one might almost say, oppressed the whole world everywhere with its deeds of shame.... … (ap. Euseb. H.E. 9.7.9ff. [Eusebius: Ecclesiastical History, “Copy of the translated epistle of Maximinus, in answer to the ordinances (of the cities) against us, taken from the brazen tablet at Tyre”], trans J.E.L. Oulton)
“Notes”:
57. Note
that in this interim, the Acta preserve accounts of Christian
conscientious objectors, the most reliable of which are those of the recruit
Maximilian, martyred on March
12, 295: the
punishment is for refusal to serve (Milita, ne pereas, Acta Maximiliani
2).
58. By Galerius? See
Barnes, New Empire, 62 n. 76.
59. Mos. et Rom. Legum Collatio
VI. IV (esp. 1, 2, 6). (Mosaicarum et Romanarum
Legum Collatio [Mosaic and Roman Laws Collected]: “VI: De Incestis
Nuptiis [About Unchaste/Lewd Marriages]”)