Recording the words of Julian:
Constantine, as you yourself know,
was the most gullible of men, stupid and senseless, and so made innovations in
the cult, annulled the Roman customs, and turned away to Christianity; it was
because he was afraid of his unholy acts and because the gods led him
astray as one accursed and unworthy in
their cult, drenched as he was with his own relatives’ blood. For he killed his
brothers, who had done nothing wrong, along with his wife Fausta and his son
Priscus, that good and worthy man. Abhorring these impious deeds, the gods led
him astray and made him wander far indeed from their sacred and all-holy cult,
and wiped out his accursed and abominable seed and his whole family from the
human race. ((Philostorgius, Church History [trans. Philip R. Amidon;
Writings From the Greco-Roman World 23; Atlanta, Ga.: Society of Biblical
Literature, 2007], Book 2, 4b [p. 19])
Elsewhere, we read of the charge of image-worshipping against
Christians:
Our enemy of God accuses the
Christians of worshipping with sacrifices the images of Constantine set up upon
the porphyry column, of paying homage to it with lamp-lighting and incense or
praying to it as to a god, and of offering it supplications to avert calamites.
(Book 2, 17 [p. 35])
Having now a firm expectation of
victory, he at once made an image of the cross that had appeared. What he did
was to show a model of the sign of triumph to a goldsmith and thus raise up in
the camp a trophy of purest gold and of stones most precious, since victory was
quite certain. Fifth of the strongest men in the army were charged with taking
it in turn to carry it in the line of battle, and it was the greatest display
of faith amid such an overwhelming prevalence of the polytheism and worship of
demons of most people: some of the units bore the very names of the demons,
such as those called the Ioviani and Herculiani, which in Greek
would be Diasioi and Herakleioi (among the Italians Zeus is
“love” and Heracles is “Hercules”), while all of them carried idols on their
standards, which the Romans call signa, different ones with different
idols. And amid all of this, Constantine placed his hopes for victory on the
sign of the cross and the symbol of suffering. (Supplement New Fragments of
Philostorgius On the Life of Constantine, IV, 3 [pp. 246-47])
