The ready ministers of this persecution were Culeianus, the prefect of the Thebaid, and Hierocles, the prefect of Alexandria.  The latter was peculiarly well chosen for the task; he added the zeal of the theologian to the ready obedience of the soldier.  He had written against the Christians a work named Philalethes (the lover of truth), which we now know only in the answer by Eusebius of Caesarea.  In this he denounced the apostles as impostors, and the Christian miracles as trifling; and, comparing them with the pretended miracles of Apollonius of Tyana, he pronounced the latter more numerous, more important, and better authenticated than the former by the evangelists; and he ridiculed the Christians for calling Jesus a god, while the pagans did not raise Apollonius higher than a man beloved by the gods.

This persecution under Diocletian was one of the most severe that the Christians ever underwent from the Romans.  It did not, however, wholly stop the religious services, nor break up the regular government of the Church.  In the catechetical school, Pierius, whom we have before spoken of as a man of learning, was succeeded by Theognostus and then by Serapion, whose name reminds us that the Egyptian party was gaining weight in the Alexandrian church.  It can hardly have been for his superior learning, it may have been because his opinions were becoming more popular than those of the Greeks, that a professor with an Egyptian name was placed at the head of the catechetical school.  Serapion was succeeded by Peter, who afterwards gained the bishopric of Alexandria and a martyr’s crown.  But these men were little known beyond their lecture-room.  In the twentieth year of the reign, on the death of Peter, the Bishop of Alexandria, who lost his life as a martyr, the presbyters of the church met to choose a successor.  Among their number was Arius, whose name afterwards became so famous in ecclesiastical history, and who had already, even before he was ordained a priest, offended many by the bold manner in which he stated his religious opinions.  But upon him, if we may believe a partial historian, the majority of votes fell in the choice of a patriarch of Alexandria, and had he not himself modestly given way to the more ambitious Alexander, he might perhaps have been saved from the treatment which he afterwards suffered from his rival.

When, in the year 305, Diocletian and his colleague, Valerius Maximian, resigned the purple, Egypt with the rest of the East was given to Galerius, who had also as Caesar been named Maximian on his Egyptian coins, while Constantius Chlorus ruled the West.  Galerius in 307 granted some slight indulgence to the Christians without wholly stopping the persecution.  But all favour was again withdrawn from them by his successor Maximin, who had indeed misgoverned Egypt for some years, under the title of Caesar, before the rank of Augustus was granted to him.  He encouraged private informers, he set townsman against townsman;