Res Gestae

For after many other things, he also corrected some of the laws, removing ambiguities, so that they showed clearly what they demanded or forbade to be done. But this one thing was inhumane, and ought to be buried in eternal silence, namely, that he forbade teachers of rhetoric and literature to practise their profession, if they were followers of the Christian religion.

At about that same time, that notorious state- secretary Gaudentius, who (as I said before)[*](See xxi. 7, 2.) had been sent to Africa by Constantius to oppose Julian there, and also Julianus, a former vice-governor, an intemperate partisan of the same faction, were brought back in chains and punished with death.

Then, too, Artemius, sometime military commander in Egypt,[*](xvii. 11, 5.) since the Alexandrians heaped upon him a mass of atrocious charges, suffered capital

Hardly had a brief time elapsed, when the Alexandrians, on learning of the death of Artemius, whom they dreaded, for fear that he would return with his power restored (for so he had threatened) and do harm to many for the wrong that he had suffered, turned their wrath against the bishop Georgius, who had often, so to speak, made them feel his poisonous fangs.

The story goes that he was born in a fullery at Epiphania, a town of Cilicia,[*](According to Athanasius he was a Cappadocian.) and flourished to the ruin of many people. Then, contrary to his own advantage and that of the commonwealth, he was ordained bishop of Alexandria, a city which on its own impulse, and without ground, is frequently roused to rebellion and rioting,[*](See, for example, Curtius, iv. 1, 30; Aegyptii, vana gens, et novandis quam gerendis aptior rebus; Trebellius, Thirty Tyrants, 22, 1.) as the oracles themselves show.[*](Nothing is known of these oracles.)