It is of course quite possible that isolated cases of officers being put to death for their faith occurred during Maximinian's reign, and on some such cases the legend may have grown up during the century and a half between Maximinian and Eucherius.
By some such process of reasoning as this must the idea of changing the succession to the throne, by setting aside Alexius, have first occurred to the mind of Peter the Great.
As a proof of the seriousness with which he regarded the literary vocation, it may be mentioned that he used to write out his poems in printed characters, believing that that process best enabled him to understand his own peculiarities and faults, and probably unconscious that Coleridge had recommended some such method of criticism when he said he thought "print settles it."
With Descartes the use of exponents as now employed for denoting the powers of a quantity becomes systematic; and without some such step by which the homogeneity of successive powers is at once recognized, the binomial theorem could scarcely have been detected.
There is no reason to doubt that some such visit was made about the year 315, when the death of Maximin Daza left Constantine supreme.
