In Africa and Egypt, what had long been an uneasy peace suddenly erupted into war when a group of five Moorish nations left their normal haunts in the desert and invaded the peaceful and rich provinces along the Nile. At the same time, a rude and savage people called the Blemmyes, who dwelt in the wild region between the mouth of the Nile and the Red Sea, also chose this moment to rebel against Roman rule.
Nor was the rebellion limited to Egypt. Farther westward along the North African coast, a Moor named Julian assumed the purple and proclaimed himself Augustus at Carthage. And at Alexandria, an Egyptian named Achilles claimed the same exalted position. Thus Maximian was forced to move from Italy across the narrow space of water separating the island of Sicily from Carthage on the African shore while Diocletian prepared to lead a second army into Egypt.
News from Constantius’ headquarters at Treves had included an almost yearly announcement of the birth of another child to him and Theodora. A second boy, following the first, who had been called Constantine, was named Hannibalianus and a third was called Constantius. Helena naturally became anxious to have grandchildren of her own, in order to preserve the line of her son and, shortly before he departed with the Emperor for the expedition into Egypt, Constantine legally took Minervina, with whom he was very much in love, as his concubina any other form of marriage between them being forbidden by the fact that he was of noble birth while she was not.
Ibunus Primi Ordinarius
He spent a pleasant week of leave in the quiet village of Drepa num with his mother and his new bride, then rode back to Nicome dia to lead a cohort of the Emperor’s personal guard on the expedition to Egypt, this time proudly wearing the insignia of Tribunus Primi Ordinarius.
It was a few weeks later that the galley bearing the Emperor Diocletian and the immediate members of his court, including Constantine, nudged to a mooring place at the great mole forming part of the harbor of Caesarea on the coast of Syria Palaestina. Dacius had managed to get himself assigned to the expeditionary force and, having fought in this area years earlier, was fairly familiar with its history. The port city, he told Constantine, had been built almost three hundred years earlier by a Jewish king called Herod, known as “the Great” to distinguish him from subsequent rulers bearing the same name.
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