Constantine the Great, returned from Palestine, bearing with her--so
men believed--not only the miraculously discovered cross of Christ,
but the seamless coat which he had worn; and, turning her palace
into a church, deposited the holy coat therein: where--so some
believe--it remains until this day. Men felt that a change was
coming, but whence it would come, or how terrible it would be, they
could not tell. It was to be, as the prophet says, "like the
bulging out of a great wall, which bursteth suddenly in an instant."
In the very amphitheatre where Gratian sat that afternoon, with all
the folk of Treves about him, watching, it may be, lions and
antelopes from Africa slaughtered--it may be criminals tortured to
death--another and an uglier sight had been twice seen some seventy
years before. Constantine, so-called the Great, had there exhibited
his "Frankish sports," the "magnificent spectacle," the "famous
punishments," as his flattering court-historians called them:
thousands of Frank prisoners, many of them of noble, and even of
royal blood, torn to pieces by wild beasts, while they stood
fearless, smiling with folded arms; and when the wild beasts were
gorged, and slew no more, weapons were put into the hands of the
survivors, and they were bidden to fight to the death for the
amusement of their Roman lords. But fight they would not against
their own flesh and blood: and as for life, all chance of that was
long gone by. So every man fell joyfully upon his brother's sword,
and, dying like a German man, spoilt the sport of the good folk of
Treves. And it seemed for a while as if there were no God in heaven
who cared to avenge such deeds of blood. For the kinsmen, it may be
the very sons, of those Franks were now in Gratian's pay; and the
Frank Merobaudes was his "Count of the Domestics," and one of his
most successful and trusted generals; and all seemed to go well, and
brute force and craft to triumph on the earth.