Next up on the docket in my series of “rulers who died horribly and the authors who recorded their deaths with delight” is the Ancient Roman Emperor Galerius (d. 311). Galerius lived in a particularly turbulent era of the Roman Empire, when both civil and foreign wars had become an endemic part of life. But did his contemporary Lactantius pay any attention to Galerius’ military competency? Why no, of course not, because Lactantius was a Christian and Galerius had opposed the religion for much of his professional career.
In his work _On the Deaths of the Persecutors_, Lactanius goes into great detail about the Christians that Galerius had thrown into jail and killed. Even though Galerius eventually co-issued the Edict of Toleration (alongside the Christian Emperor Constantine) which granted religious freedom to all Romans, Lactantius was unforgiving. The author described the final death of Galerius from a horrific malady that caused his body to putrify, bleed, and spew worms. His gruesome description is among the most lengthy deathbed scenes recorded in ancient history, and I shall just quote bits here. Bits — you know, sort of reminiscent of the bits of body parts that were just sloughing off the still-living yet ailing emperor.
“And now when Galerius was in the eighteenth year of his reign, God struck him with an incurable disease. A malignant ulcer formed itself in the secret parts [i.e. his genitals] and spread by degree. . . . The sore . . . Broke again; a vein burst, and the blood flowed . . . And gangrene seized the neighboring parts . . . His bowels came out . . . The distemper attacked his intestines, and worms were generated in his body. The stench was so foul as to pervade not only the palace, but even the whole city . . . And his body, with intolerable anguish, was dissolved into one mass of corruption”.
So that’s some nasty ending, but for Lactantius, it was Divine comeuppance — with his description, he turned Galerius’ body into an object of disgust for all his readers to come.
Source(s): _International Scientific Conference, “Constantine the Great and Christianity,”_ Dec 4, 2013, Pristine, Kosova, Yanko M. Hristov, South-western University “Neophyte Rilsky” – Blagoebgrad Bulgaria, “A special death — the end of Emperor Gaius Galerius Galerius Maximianus”. _Hektoen International: A Journal of Medical Humanities_, “The most loathsome disease of the Emperor Galerius”, Summer 2018, George Dunea, ed in chief; Kuosoulis, Aa, at Al, _Journal of the American College of Surgeons 215 (2012), pp. 890-893.
