NARRATOR: Across the Roman Empire, we saw early Christians form small, scattered congregations, preserving and nurturing their faith.

But some would pay a terrible price, martyred at the hands of Rome.

At the beginning of the third century, Christianity, with an ever-stronger foundation, was starting to grow rapidly.

This brought the faith to the full attention of the Roman Empire, who belatedly saw it as a real threat to its authority.

And at last Rome raised its sharp sword to try to eradicate the faith.

In this episode we'll see where, how, and why thousands of Christians were martyred, and we'll relive a young woman's first-hand account of what it was like to face death at Roman hands because she would not abandon her faith.

I'm Jonathan Phillips, a history professor at Royal Holloway University of London.

Follow me now as we continue our journey, a journey that will take us into the world of the early Christians as they faced the full power of Rome.

PHILLIPS: We've traveled thousands of miles through seven countries to the places where Christianity began slowly to take root.

For two centuries, the new religion was under the shadow of the Roman Empire, enduring sporadic persecutions from its very beginning.

But now, in the third century, Rome, fearing the continuous growth of this new belief, would bring her full power to try to stop it.

Christianity would emerge a fragile and vulnerable faith, into a world dominated by the Roman Empire.

Because both Jesus and Paul perished at imperial hands, it's easy for us today to think of the Romans as locked in permanent conflict with early Christians, but the truth is much more complicated.

The rise of Christianity owed much to Rome and the stability that the Empire brought.

Roman roads and Roman shipping lanes enabled the Christian message to spread, while paganism did not demand the exclusion or destruction of other beliefs.

Some later Christians even believed that it was God's purpose that Christ and the Roman Empire would rise together for the benefit of mankind.

Only gradually did the new religion gain the attention of the Roman Empire.

And by the time the State started to react, it was too late to halt the rise of Christianity.

Jesus himself had not taught active opposition to Roman rule.

As Mark 12:17 says, "Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's and to God what is God's."

The execution of Christ was demanded by the Jewish high priest, and the Roman governor, Pontius Pilate, agreed out of a desire to keep the peace in Judea.

After the death of Christ there was sporadic violence against his followers, such as the stoning of Stephen, but this was inspired by the Jewish leadership, not the Romans.

The first real imperial persecution took place in Rome under Nero.

After this period, the Romans showed little interest in Christianity for the remainder of the first century.

Yet there was a growing awareness that the Christians were distinct from the Jews.

And while the latter were tolerated, the Christians were suspect.

Christians circulate stories of the abuse they suffered from pagans.

And we know one of the reasons early Christians were persecuted is pagans had no idea what Christianity actually was.

One of the great changes between AD 100, the very early Christian movement, and AD 300 is, across those two centuries, people gradually learnt who Christians really were.

It is very telling that in the second century, the people who persecuted the Christians, it's not the Empire, it's not an imperial decree.

It's the local community attacking local Christians because they are afraid.

PHILLIPS: The attitude of the Roman Empire is expressed in an exchange of letters between the Emperor Trajan and the senator Pliny the Younger in the year 112.

Pliny was the imperial governor in Bithynia, now in modern Turkey.

He reported to Emperor Trajan he'd been required to investigate people accused of being Christian, and he wanted guidance from his superior as to what action he should take.

You have followed the right course of procedure, my dear Pliny, for it is impossible to lay down a general rule to a fixed formula... Trajan's letter to Pliny established a precedent for imperial authority that continued almost unchanged for over a century.

Christianity was illegal.

Those proven to be Christians would be executed.

But the Church was not regarded by the Roman State as a serious threat, and the emperors saw no need for a systematic persecution.

What violence did erupt was localized.

For those involved, it was obviously terrifying and traumatic -- and, in the longer-term, did much to underpin the cult of martyrs, an idea so important to the attraction and ideology of the early church.

To understand the cult of the martyrs and its importance to the growth of Christianity, I traveled to North Africa where the faith began to put down roots.

One of the most powerful and moving stories of this whole age is the conversion and martyrdom of a young woman named Perpetua.

The place that she lived and died was the mighty city of Carthage.

The North African city of Carthage, today in Tunisia, was once the second biggest settlement in the Roman Empire.

Known as the breadbasket of Rome, it had become prosperous on trade in olive oil and wheat.

It was a wealthy, vibrant city full of fine houses, mosaics, and running water.

It was also the home to almost 400,000 people, including a small but growing community of Christians.

Christianity was not yet a sweeping movement.

It advanced little by little, family member by family member, neighbor by neighbor.

At the start of the third century, Perpetua, a young girl from a well-to-do family, found herself drawn to the immediacy of early Christianity.

She found the presence of the Holy Spirit in these communities.

This, of course, was a pretty radical move on her part.

Her father was horrified, as you can imagine -- as any of us who have 20 year olds doing something bizarre -- we say, please lie down till it passes.

You will feel better in a year or two.

And so you can imagine his feelings of horror as his prize daughter with an infant son at her breast, who was the hope for the future of his family, trying this strange path of ecstatic expression that was going to take her to death.

PHILLIPS: There was no particular reason why these small Christian communities should have attracted the attention of the authorities.

Tragically for Perpetua though, it was the emperor's son's birthday -- an occasion that demanded bloody sacrifices and ceremonial games.

The people in charge of the festivities heard of the Christian slave in Perpetua's household and they came to pick her up for sacrifice.

Slaves had been part of the city's population since the sacking of Jerusalem by the Romans in the first century.

SALISBURY: When Jerusalem was destroyed in the wars with Rome, and the temple was burned down, the Romans took lots of slaves.

And they took the slaves to all parts of the Mediterranean world.

And, of course, as you can imagine, a rich place like Carthage got a large percentage of their slaves.

And along with the Jews were those who followed Christ.

PHILLIPS: As they took the slave, Perpetua, too, affirmed her own faith.

She also chose to be baptized, and, in doing so, broke the law of the Roman Empire.

Most high profile trials in Carthage took place in front of hundreds of people here in the major public space, the Forum.

Perpetua and her friends faced a zealous Roman governor, determined to break their faith and to force them to make proper sacrifices to the Roman gods.

In the course of the trial, he asked her, "Are you a Christian?"

"Yes, I am," she replied.

With that answer, her fate was sealed, and she and her companions were sentenced to the beasts.

Perpetua kept a diary.

Through her writings, we learn of her father's desperate attempts to persuade his daughter to abandon her new beliefs, to bring up her infant child and to save her own life.

But Perpetua could not be swayed.

Death in the arena awaited her.

PHILLIPS: Perpetua's diary describes her time in prison.

She and her companions were held in a small, stiflingly hot room here in Carthage.

That they survived was in large part because of the support and charity of their new family, the Christian church.

Another part of Perpetua's prison experience was dreams.

SALISBURY: Two of them had to do with what she might expect after death.

So, she imagined herself, or she dreamed herself, treading on the head of a serpent as she climbed a ladder to a wonderful garden, presided over by a good shepherd, which was presumably heaven, where she would be greeted by angels and other martyrs.

So, she found a great comfort in that promise of the future.

And the last dream as well showed her fighting in the arena, victorious over the devil and over forces of evil, and being welcomed victorious into heaven.

And it's in her dreams that we can access the way her mind worked -- how she rearranged the things she knew, the things she had read, the things she had believed, in a way that made sense to go in the arena to get killed by wild animals.

PHILLIPS: This amphitheater in Carthage was, in its day, the second biggest in the Roman Empire, behind of course the mighty Coliseum.

These remains are all that survive of a once magnificent structure that could hold up to 30,000 spectators -- and it was here in this arena that Perpetua and her companions met their faith.

The amphitheater in Carthage is badly ruined.

To get a better idea of Perpetua's fate, I traveled just over 100 miles south to the amazing amphitheater of El Djem.

This spectacular structure at El Djem in Tunisia is one of the world's greatest surviving examples of a Roman amphitheater.

The Roman amphitheater was central to their way of life, a place where civilization met and controlled nature, humans killed beasts, and the state punished its enemies.

Games were also held to honor the cult of the emperor -- sacred, ritualistic events of huge popularity.

So, here in this wonderful arena, a sign of solidity and strength of the Roman Empire -- enemies of the state were put to death in a choreographed fashion designed to show the power and belief system of Rome.

I'm sitting here trying to imagine what it must have been like to attend one of these dramatic spectacles.

I'm in the best seats in the house, only a few feet from the arena.

I will see, hear, and smell people die right in front of me.

But there's a problem.

Just as today we worry about excessive video violence desensitizing people, so too could the Roman crowd get bored.

How many different ways can you kill someone?

It was up to the organizers to devise ever more exotic ways to entertain.

They chose a variety of beasts for this grizzly task -- lions, bears, bulls.

Sometimes they tied the prisoners to strange carts to ensure the creatures could actually kill their victims.

Down below the arena the condemned were gathered.

The Christians could hear and smell the wild beasts they were about to face.

They knew their time had come, yet Perpetua's strength of personality gave them courage.

This place of pagan idolatry would be a doorway to heaven.

[Perpetua's Diary] She at first thinks she will take the baby to be martyred with her, but then of course her father steps in and says, no, not happening.

Rome was very proprietary over its children.

For example, one of the slaves that had been picked up was pregnant when she was jailed.

Felicity was pregnant.

And she was afraid she would not be killed.

So, Felicity, in the words of the author, miraculously delivered the baby in prison so the baby was delivered before they were to go into the arena.

So, Felicity could join her friends dying in the arena with Perpetua.

PHILLIPS: This is an amazing place.

It's incredibly atmospheric here below the arena floor in the amphitheater.

I imagine it must have been like bedlam centuries ago.

I can conjure up in my mind the smell of animals, the noise, the roaring of lions, the lowing of bulls, all trapped down here waiting to be unleashed into the arena.

I can see gladiators -- wounded, covered in blood, after some of their epic encounters.

and I can think of Christian prisoners huddled together waiting to die.

Yet the Christians chose to meet their fate in a distinctive style -- notwithstanding the very real terror they felt, they fortified themselves by prayers and hymns.

SALISBURY: The space of the arena was a pagan space, but the Christians, by singing hymns as they marched in, by praying, by being defiant to the crowds, believed they were claiming it for God.

And in fact, this central portion where the criminals are killed, that's supposed to be not very interesting because criminals are supposed to die badly to provide the contrast for the gladiators in the afternoon who can die well -- and so here, these Christians are turning over the social order.

They're dying well.

PHILLIPS: Of course, many were terrified.

But their belief in heavenly reward gave them strength.

Some in the crowd were enraged at this calm acceptance of death.

Others, crucially, were inspired.

For the first part of her punishment, Perpetua was to be attacked by a wild heifer.

The beast tossed her high into the air, a spectacle that delighted the crowd.

Then, the young woman and her wounded companions were brought to the center of this arena, placed on a specially constructed stage, and ritually executed.

SALISBURY: She's supposed to be killed by the animals.

So, usually, um, people might be mauled and not totally dead, and then they will come and finish them off with the blade.

And then here Perpetua had to face one more bit of pain.

So, the gladiator missed, and he caught her on the collar bone.

And so she took his hand and slit her own throat.

So, even at that last moment, she doesn't recoil from the killing blade.

This humble chapel commemorates the place where Perpetua died.

To me, she's one of the most compelling and fascinating stories in the history of early Christianity, not least because she overturned the social order.

A woman showing such leadership and direction in this early stage of Christian history, I think, is pretty remarkable.

Perpetua's story survived because she had kept a diary.

And just before she was taken into the arena, she managed to pass it to a supporter who witnessed this horrendous scene, and thus the story endured.

It was acclaimed by the Christians as true -- her dreams were seen as prophecies, and Christians across the Mediterranean believed.

There were people who died, there were martyrs, who left no record, and what's happened is they've been forgotten.

What in some ways matters is the text that's recorded that people remember.

Her story survives in the text.

It's always about the texts.

She wrote down her experience and her dreams, and the followers wrote how she died, and they read the text in the house churches over and over and over.

The tragedy of Perpetua shows the clash between Christianity and Rome, but this was not part of a systematic persecution, only an isolated local outbreak of violence.

Likewise, Christian views were not fixed on how to regard Rome and its emperor.

While the Book of Revelation had expressed hostility to Rome, many Christians prayed for the security of the empire and its emperor.

They would not, of course, honor him as divine.

The Christian writer Tertullian was based in Carthage around the time of Perpetua's martyrdom.

Indeed, it is not inconceivable that he witnessed her death.

He still protested the loyalty of Christians to the Empire.

PHILLIPS: Now, my journey takes me back to Rome, where the empire was reeling from pressures that were reaching a boiling point.

As terrifying as the localized persecutions in North Africa were, they didn't actually threaten Christianity's existence, because they didn't have an empire-wide scope.

It was during the third century that the imperial attitude to Christianity changed.

One reason was the growing number of Christians, now perhaps 10% of the population.

They were found in all levels of society, from slaves, market traders, professional classes, even the imperial household.

But the real problem was the condition of the Roman Empire.

The Romans were beset by a series of disasters called the Third Century Crisis -- invasions by Germanic tribes and by the Persian Empire, plagues, civil wars, and economic collapse.

WOMAN: Most of the third century was really a low point for the Roman Empire.

There was a lot of political and military chaos.

After the fall of the Severan Dynasty in 235, which was the last really strong family imperial dynasty, it was unclear who was going to become emperor.

And there was a period when the emperors were chosen by the military.

And for about 50 years there were emperors who came to power very briefly and then fell violently, either assassinated by their own troops or committing suicide.

And all of this military and political unrest also bled over into daily life.

One of the main problems was that the empire had become very large and unwieldy.

And the military, while strong, was also spread very thinly.

And the Romans were facing constant wars on several of their borders.

On the Rhine and Danube borders, they were fighting tribes that they called barbarian tribes, like the Goths.

And they were also in almost constant war with the Persian Empire.

The focus on one God, and also the fact that the Christians practiced a salvation religion, which said that by a personal relationship with one god you can be saved in an afterlife, and this was something that the Romans didn't believe at all.

They believed in keeping the appropriate relationship with gods and goddesses by giving them sacrifices and by praying to them.

And this was very important because in order for the state and the empire to remain healthy the people had to be in a right relationship with their gods and goddesses.

But they did not believe that they were going to be saved by them.

Many of the people who worshipped the traditional Roman gods thought of the Christians as atheists because they refused to worship all of the gods.

They were denying them and they thought of them as demons.

It's a little bit of a hard term, daemones, in that period -- it doesn't mean exactly the same thing we think of demons.

But they believed that the gods were real but they were not deities -- they were these evil spirits.

So, the Christians in that way, could actually be dangerous to Roman society because they put themselves in a bad relationship with the roman gods.

PHILLIPS: So, by not keeping the Roman gods happy, the Christians were actually threatening Roman society and order.

They were seen as a danger to society.

And the fact that they wouldn't worship the emperor was really an important aspect to the problems that they had with Roman society as a whole.

They were showing dishonor to the emperor, they were dishonoring the Roman gods, and being disloyal to the Roman state.

In the year 250, another burst of persecution began.

Everyone was required to get a certificate to prove that they had sacrificed to the Roman gods.

It was against this background that, for the first time, Christians became the target for an imperially ordered empire-wide persecution.

The first emperor to carry out such a systematic persecution was Decius, but crushing the Church does not appear to have been his main aim.

Under attack from all sides, the desperate emperor ordered all of his inhabitants to sacrifice to the gods.

This was a desperate effort to regain divine favor.

Amazingly, evidence of this persecution remains, preserved in the John Rylands Library, in Manchester, England.

These mass-produced papyri survived unknown in the arid conditions of Egypt until they were discovered in modern times.

During the third century AD -- and the emperor Decius right in the middle of that century, the Roman Empire goes into chaos.

There are invasions, there are civil wars, there are imperial assassinations.

They tried to find out what had gone wrong.

Why were they falling apart?

Their solution -- the gods.

The gods must be angry.

So, Decius, a pagan, declared that everyone in the empire must sacrifice, they must show their devotion to the pagan gods, and they would receive a certificate.

PHILLIPS: So, an edict is issued that you have to sacrifice to the pagan gods -- are people then going to sort of knock on your door and say, "Prove it," or you've got to show these to the religious police, effectively?

GWYNN: What seems to have happened is, particularly in big cities -- Carthage in North Africa, Alexandria, in Egypt, they held big sacrifices and they brought these certificates.

And you came to the sacrifice, you took part in the sacrifice, and then you wrote your name on the certificate.

All the words actually specified is, this is what you have done.

What would have actually happened in real life is this would have been a formal animal sacrifice, carried out by the priests in the great cities.

And in a traditional Roman animal sacrifice, often a bull, led up before the priest.

There is a prayer that must be recited.

Then a man with a very large hammer brings it down on the bull's head.

You stun the bull, and then, with a knife, its throat is cut; the blood is often caught in a vessel of some description.

The body of the bull, it can be burnt as an offering to the gods, but usually the priests and those taking part in the sacrifice consume parts of the body.

A contemporary Christian writer in Alexandria described the impact of this edict.

GWYNN: The pagan gods are not nice.

The idea of a loving god is the Christian loving god.

The pagan gods are not loving.

But if you treat them correctly, they will treat you correctly.

Now, all of these texts here, to our knowledge, the certificates belonged to pagans.

People who had no problem signing this.

But what of a Christian?

You could go through with it -- do the sacrifice, sign the certificate, but then claim, "I'm still Christian, I did this because I had to."

Or you can refuse outright and take the potential consequences.

Those who refused outright, they'd be seized, they'd be given the chance to recant, to go ahead, to do the sacrifice.

If they continued to refuse, they will die.

The Christian willingness to face death rather than recant a religious belief has no pagan equivalent.

And we have many accounts of pagans seeing Christians die.

And some were horrified, some did shun away from this religion.

But others wanted to know why?

What gave someone the strength to face martyrdom when all they had to do to walk away was say, "I am not Christian" -- and they wouldn't do it.

PHILLIPS: But how should Christianity regard those who chose to sacrifice to the Roman gods, yet later sought forgiveness?

Central to this question was the attitude of the Bishop of Carthage.

On this bluff overlooking the Mediterranean lie the remains of the church of one of North Africa's greatest bishops, St. Cyprian of Carthage.

St. Cyprian was bishop during the brutal persecutions in the middle of the third century.

As a church leader, he was targeted for arrest.

Unwilling to sacrifice to the pagan gods or to face martyrdom, Cyprian fled and went into hiding.

Some Christians criticized him for fleeing, even calling him a coward.

But by pleading divine instruction he was able to remain Bishop.

Upon his return, he was immediately faced with the question of what to do with Christians who had lapsed during the persecution.

And despite his own ambiguous behavior, Cyprian opposed easy readmission.

By late fourth century in North Africa, they're killing each other.

So, it's a war, actually.

An actual war between those who support continued martyrdom and those who don't.

PHILLIPS: By hiding from the Romans, Cyprian managed to survive the empire-wide persecution ordered by Emperor Decius in January of the year 250.

Decius had come up through the ranks of the army, and as emperor he often personally led his troops in battle.

Decius' persecution had only limited effect outside great cities such as Rome, Alexandria, and Carthage.

Decius himself was killed by the Goths in the year 251, the first Roman emperor ever to die in battle with a foreign foe, and his persecution was then forgotten.

A new attack on Christianity broke out six years later under Emperor Valerian.

As emperor, Valerian initially treated the Christian population well, but under the influence of his advisors, he eventually blamed the Christians for many of Rome's troubles.

Valerian's motives seem to have been the same as Decius' -- seeking to remove those who had aroused the gods' anger.

In the year 258, the Emperor Valerian issued an edict ordering that all bishops, priests and deacons be summarily put to death.

The Valerian persecution claimed the life of St. Cyprian.

He finally faced his own martyrdom with the courage he'd demanded of so many others.

SALISBURY: On a personal front, Cyprian was one of those who first rejected martyrdom.

He left town when given the opportunity to step forward.

And then it must have weighed on him, because then when martyrdom came around again, he was one of those that stepped forward and died for his belief.

PHILLIPS: To the relief of the Christians, Emperor Valerian soon met a similar fate.

The emperor was trapped and captured by the Persians in the year 260, and then executed.

After his death, his skin was removed, dyed vermilion, and placed in a temple as a reminder to Rome of the power of the Persians.

The persecutions are a disaster.

The emperors die, the church survives.

For the next forty years -- a generation -- the church is not persecuted.

It grows, it gets stronger.

PHILLIPS: But caution was still the order of the day.

Large public meetings were virtually non-existent due to fears of renewed persecution, but I can imagine Christians gathering converts by preaching to individuals and small groups, here in the streets of Rome.

But with their numbers growing, Christian groups started to develop procedures for evaluating potential converts.

Some would be asked to make changes in their lives before they were accepted into the church.

While Christianity was growing during the third century, another religious movement was spreading across the Roman world.

This was Mithraism, the cult of the god Mithras.

Mithraism was a pagan mystery cult, which offered salvation to those initiates who embraced its secrets.

Central to its mythology was Mithras killing a sacred bull -- an image of which appears wherever Mithras was worshiped.

MAN: The religious world of Rome is an incredible mixed stew of all kinds of activities and beliefs and cults that come from all over the Mediterranean.

And one of these is a rather strange new group called the Cult of Mithras, Mithras the Persian God.

And in some respects, for a period of about maybe the second and third centuries, it probably is the chief competitor to early Christianity at least in terms of certain kinds of popularity.

And what's interesting about it is, very much like the Christians, they meet in small little groups, they have religious dinner parties that are both worship on the one hand, but social gatherings on the other.

And for a lot of people, they would have assumed that Mithras and Christ looked a lot alike, at least in the popular mind.

Now, of course, the Christians wouldn't have ever said anything like that, but in the popular mind there are some similarities that people took note of.

PHILLIPS: The religion's rituals were secret, and to protect their mysteries, they were always held in hidden, underground temples.

Called Mithraeums, these underground temples always center on a tauroctony, which is a statue or relief of Mithras killing the sacred bull.

The followers of Mithras cult are largely the working class.

Not the rich folks, and in that sense somewhat more like Christianity also, in that there -- it's not elite who are going for these new cults.

It's often -- it's often the middler folks, the rising sort of working class folks who may be wanting to imitate some of the, you know, the more established kinds of religious traditions.

And this gives people a place where they can -- they can have a voice, or they can have a presence, by emulating what the richer folks might be doing.

PHILIPS: Mithraism spread rapidly through Roman society, and in particular within the military.

Several emperors were believers in what was called the Mithraic Mysteries.

However Mithraism appears to have excluded women, and so could never truly rival Christianity in popularity.

By the end of the third century, Christianity was the fastest growing religious movement that the ancient world had ever seen.

It was the increasing numbers of Christians and the challenge that they posed to the traditional religion of the Roman Empire that led to the most brutal of all Roman attacks upon the church -- the great persecution begun by the emperor Diocletian.

WEDDLE: Diocletian was a common man who rose in the ranks of the army to become emperor.

His father was perhaps a freedman, a former slave, so he was very common.

But he rose by his own intelligence and ability to become one of the protectores, part of the emperor's bodyguard.

And he was serving as a bodyguard for the Emperor Numerian when that emperor was assassinated.

It's fairly clear that he was assassinated and that Diocletian might have played a part in that.

He was clearly highly intelligent, he was a talented organizer, he was able to basically save the empire from falling apart.

PHILLIPS: To do this, Diocletian created the Tetrarchy -- The Rule of Four.

The senior emperor of the East was Diocletian, based in Nicomedia.

His junior was Galerius.

The senior ruler of the West was Maximian, and his deputy was Constantius Chlorus, father of the future Emperor Constantine.

The Tetrarchy, which means rule of four, was a system that Diocletian set up when he got firm control of the empire.

He realized that it was very large and unwieldy, and that it would be easier for it to be cut into sections and ruled by four rulers, rather than one ruler.

Although he always retained the right of being the top ruler, the most important ruler, so to speak.

So Diocletian always saw himself as the main ruler, as the head of the Tetrarchy.

And he took on the title Jupiter, which was the name of the most powerful of the Roman gods, and he really equated himself with Jupiter throughout his reign.

PHILLIPS: Rome had conquered the known world to the west, but had not been able to overcome the Persian Empire to the east, which was centered in the area of present-day Iran.

The Persians had a long history of military power and conquests.

In the year 296, the Persian ruler Narses took advantage of a rebellion that was distracting Emperor Diocletian, and attacked the Roman provinces of Armenia.

Diocletian appointed his junior emperor Galerius to lead the Roman armies against Narses.

This was an inspired appointment, and Galerius crushed his Persian enemies.

As one of the four emperors of Diocletian's Tetrarchy, Galerius made his home here, in Thessaloniki, a secure seaport that offered rapid communications with the rest of the empire.

This is the Arch of Galerius in Thessaloniki, built to commemorate his epic victory over the Persians in the year 297.

The images depict the emperor's power as he tramples his enemies underfoot.

Galerius was a proud and loyal supporter of the old Pagan gods.

They had brought him this victory.

He loathed the Christians, and soon he would urge Diocletian to begin The Great Persecution.

Diocletian was an old-fashioned pagan.

His chief deity was Jupiter Optimus Maximus, the highest god of ancient Rome.

Diocletian believed that only with the favor of the gods could he restore prosperity and order to the empire.

Like Decius and Valerian before him, Diocletian saw the new atheistic religion of the Christians as a threat to that divine favor.

Since the Roman gods played such a large role in the history of the early Christians, I decided to travel to the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, a place that contains an impressive collection of Roman antiquities.

I met up with my colleague Dr. David Gwynn to see the gods exactly as the Romans did.

GWYNN: This is a classic image of both the power and also the diversity of the gods and goddesses of ancient Greece and Rome.

We have Zeus, Jupiter, the King of the Gods, the greatest god.

We have Hera, or Juneau, his wife.

We have Athena, Minerva, the Goddess of Wisdom, who sprung from Zeus's head fully grown.

All of these different deities, they make up this incredible spectrum of the pagan world.

PHILLIPS: But these gods, so important to Rome, and important to Diocletian, were being challenged by a new god, the god of the Christians.

Something had to be done.

And it started in Diocletian's capitol of Nicomedia, in Northwestern Asia Minor, today in the country of Turkey.

On the 23rd of February, 303, Diocletian initiated the Roman Empire's single greatest attempt to crush Christianity.

Earlier persecutions had been brutal, but sporadic and localized.

This, however, was a bid to smash the faith using the full mechanism of the Roman state -- an action that has a modern, almost totalitarian, feel to it.

From his palace here in Nicomedia, Diocletian could see a church, tangible evidence that Christianity was growing.

Within hours he'd had it torn down.

Then, he issued an edict banning bibles and sacred vessels.

One brave soul tore the edict down, but he was captured and roasted alive -- the first martyr of the great persecution.

A second edict ordered the arrest of all Christian clergy, but so many were rounded up that the prisons overflowed.

A third edict offered amnesty to all who sacrificed, but torture to those who did not.

A fourth edict extended the order to sacrifice to everyone in the empire.

What is missing here, though, is a direct order to kill Christians.

Diocletian wanted to literally break the Christian church and return its followers to the worship of the traditional gods.

It was in the East that the persecution fell most heavily.

Eusebius describes in detail the effects of the persecution which he himself witnessed, both in his native Palestine and in Egypt.

PHILLIPS: Yet Diocletian's persecution failed.

One major reason was that many pagans no longer regarded Christians as a threat.

The Christians were part of the community, and often a useful and caring part.

A story from North Africa reveals the problems the emperors had in enforcing the persecution.

In North Africa, a Roman official goes to a church and he tells the priest, "Surrender your bibles."

And the priest says no, he's not going to give in.

So, the official comes back and says, "Could you just give me a piece of paper, anything, just something that shows I've done my job?"

And the priest says, "No, I won't even do that."

It's not always that officials want to persecute.

Many of them don't.

PHILLIPS: Even the Roman emperors, the Tetrarchs themselves, appear to have been split over whether the Christians deserved to suffer.

The Tetrarchy are not united.

The great persecution ordered by Diocletian -- do they all carry it out the same?

No, they don't.

We have Galerius, the man the Christians blame for the great persecution.

In Egypt and Syria, he's the man driving it forward.

But out in the western parts of the empire, Britain and Gaul, the Tetrarchs there do very little.

We have Constantius Chlorus, this is the father of Constantine.

Now, he is not persecuting.

And, all right, that's partly because there are far fewer Christians in those parts of the Empire.

But he doesn't seem to want to.

The Tetrarchy are not united.

PHILLIPS: The greatest impact of the persecution was psychological rather than physical.

For Christians like Eusebius, who had grown up in the years of peace since the year 260, the shock of persecution was traumatic.

Many Christians lapsed under the threat of torture and death, denying their faith or surrendering holy books.

By the year 300, Christianity had rooted itself so deeply in the Roman world, it could not be destroyed easily.

For all their wealth and power, Diocletian and Galerius could not carry out their purge of Christians because the popular hostility which had inspired earlier attacks had largely disappeared.

Christianity was now a recognized part of society.

In the year 305, Diocletian abdicated his throne.

Galerius, who encouraged the persecution, assumed power in the East and continued to attack the Christians.

Near the Arch of Galerius is another grand structure that honors the emperor -- the Rotunda of Galerius.

It was probably intended to be his mausoleum, although it was never actually used as such.

The rotunda is an austere structure, built entirely of brick, with 20 foot thick walls on a circle within a circle plan.

Throughout the early centuries, Christians covered the interior with intricate mosaic art of which only a few fragments survive.

I'm standing outside the Rotunda of Galerius, built in Thessaloniki around the year 306.

To me it's a neat irony that this place built for the man who stirred up so much trouble against the early Christians, was, within a couple of decades of his death, turned into a church.

During his last years as a Roman emperor, Galerius actively continued his persecution of the Christians.

Finally, when his own death approached, he ended the persecution by issuing a decree of tolerance in the year 311.

GWYNN: The death of Galerius is particularly horrible.

This is the rabid persecutor, the man the Christians blamed for the great persecution.

And according to the Christian tradition, he's wrapped up in bed, his bowels turned to worms and they ooze out of his body, and in agony he prays to God for forgiveness, and God says no.

And he dies, and he dies in pain.

Toward the end of his reign he was stricken with what was apparently a very painful and horrific cancer that actually was rotting away his flesh.

And it was very painful and very disgusting.

And on his deathbed he himself became convinced that the cancer was the wrath of the Christian God, and was because of the persecutions that he had carried out.

So, on his deathbed, he issued a new law overthrowing all of the persecutions and saying that Christians were now free to worship as they pleased, and, by the way, would they please pray for him.

And it was too late.

It didn't do any good.

He did die then in 311, but only after reversing the persecutions.

With hindsight, the Great Persecution was too little and too late to prevent the rise of the Church.

Yet we should not dismiss the effects that it had upon those who endured it, nor should we doubt the joy with which Christians welcomed the end of the Persecution.

That joy was soon to be amplified a thousand-fold.

In the year 306, even as the great persecution raged, a new figure began his rise to power.

His name was Constantine.

He was the emperor who would overthrow the Tetrarchy and unite the empire under his rule.

And through his miraculous conversion, he would become the first Christian emperor of Rome.

In our next episode, two great Roman armies will face off, and Christian belief will take center stage.

It will be a contest of divine favor, with the power of the Christian God pitted against the Pagan pantheon.

But at the time, there is no way the participants could know how incredibly far-reaching their struggle would be.

The future of Christianity and the future of Rome hung in the balance.

I'm Jonathan Philips -- join me next time for the final stage on "The Road from Christ to Constantine."