The death of Galerius is fascinating. Diocletian's Caesar in the East has been underestimted and has only recently been deemed worthy of his own biography - William Leadbetter's Galerius and the Will of Diocletian earlier this year.
Galerius' death in early May AD311 is worth a look at and not just because he died of that imperial rarity - natural causes. Lactantius has the details in On the Death of the Persecutors 33:
And now, when Galerius was in the eighteenth year of his reign, God struck him with an incurable plague. A malignant ulcer formed itself low down in his secret parts, and spread by degrees. The physicians attempted to eradicate it, and healed up the place affected. But the sore, after having been skinned over, broke out again; a vein burst, and the blood flowed in such quantity as to endanger his life. The blood, however, was stopped, although with difficulty. The physicians had to undertake their operations anew, and at length they cicatrized the wound. In consequence of some slight motion of his body, Galerius received a hurt, and the blood streamed more abundantly than before. He grew emaciated, pallid, and feeble, and the bleeding then stanched. The ulcer began to be insensible to the remedies applied, and a gangrene seized all the neighbouring parts. It diffused itself the wider the more the corrupted flesh was cut away, and everything employed as the means of cure served but to aggravate the disease.
Lactantius then goes on at some length with even more blood and guts.
The emperor's symptoms have been analysed at some length recently by Antonis Kousoulis,
Konstantinos Economopoulos, Martin Hatzinger, Ahad Eshraghian and Sotirios Tsiodras, “The Fatal Disease of Emperor Galerius,” Journal of the American College of Surgeons 215
(2012) pp890-893. it is a fascinating article and concludes that Galerius died from complications from Fournier gangrene.
The problem is that the description that Lactantius uses is literary rather than medical. It is remarkably similar to the death of Herod the Great as described by Josephus,
The Jewish War, 1.656. His death has also been examined by the medical profession in some detail with the same conclusion: JV Hirschmann, P
Richardson, RS Kraemer, PA Mackowiak, “Death of an Arabian Jew,” Archives of Internal Medicine 164 (2004), pp833-839.
That the death of a persecutor of Christians - which is how Galerius has been painted - and Herod the Great should share the same fate makes literary sense which is why Lactantius provides so much detail. Other accounts just suggest that Galerius died from an infected wound (Aurelius Victor, de Caesaribus, 40.9). It would be unwise to go further than that.
