Dr. David Gwynn

The Christians are simply part of society.

They don't cause any real problems, and they're kind of useful.

And so what seems to be the local pattern pretty much everywhere in the Empire is that the edicts go up,

But the local governors don't want to do it.

The army doesn't want to get particularly involved.

The local population don't care.

And if you don't have that local upsurge, the persecution cannot be effective.

So it goes in several stages, the Great Persecution, to answer that question in a sense first.

So technically, the Great Persecution ends in 313.

So it will have continued for a decade.

But actually, it's been very much Fitz starts.

Galerius himself decides in 311, just before he dies, that he will pass an edict saying, no, the persecution ends.

I've always rather liked it as an edict, because Galerius is not sorry.

This isn't a, we shouldn't have done this.

This is, we did this for the best reasons, because this is what would have been best for the empire, would have been best for the gods.

But people have carried on being Christian, so we're stopping.

It's very much...

We tried.

Precisely.

It's actually the only surviving statement by any of the original Tetrarchs on the persecution.