other · 315
It is not a work of history in the way Eusebius is attempting one; it is a settling of accounts, and the argument is that the deaths of the persecutors are themselves evidence. But the man making it had been in Nicomedia when the church opposite the palace was pulled down, and had seen the edicts posted, and that gives the book a value its polemic does not. It is the only contemporary account of Galerius' final illness and his edict of toleration, and the only one of the agreement reached at Milan, whose text it preserves. This project already cites it: lactantius-dmp is in the bibliography, the text is in the Ante-Nicene Fathers volume the repo actually ships, and until now the work had no event for its own writing.
To show, case by case, what had become of every emperor who had persecuted the church.
The only contemporary narrative of the Great Persecution's end, of Galerius' edict, and of the agreement at Milan.