or CIRCCELLIONES, a furious and sanguinary set of fanatics in the fourth century, composed of peasants and rustics, who espoused the cause of the Donatists against the emperor Constantine, and went about with women as abandoned as themselves, filling the province of Africa with slaughter, rapine, and burnings, and inflicting on the persons of the adverse party the most atrocious cruelties. They were called circumcelliones because they hovered, vagrant like, about the cottages (cellae) of the peasants, having no fixed residence of their own; and styled themselves agonisti or combatants, pretending that they were combating the devil. These wretches were utterly regardless of their lives, and when there was occasion they would face death with the greatest alacrity. They first appeared amid those terrible commotions that ensued when Constantine, A.D. 316, ordered the temples of the Donatists in Africa to be taken from them, banished the seditious bishops, and put others to death. Some have accused the Donatists of encouraging them in their enormities; but it does not appear on any good evidence that the bishops, or at least the more sensible of them, approved or instigated their proceedings. Constantine endeavoured in vain to repress their outrages; and the storm continued to increase till it seemed to threaten a civil war. The laws against the Donatists were repealed, A.D. 321. But the Circumcelliones were not subdued—for in the succeeding reign, when Constans attempted to heal this deplorable schism, and Donatus opposed a reconciliation, they still contended furiously in support of the party whose cause they had espoused. In the time also of Gratian, when that emperor deprived the Donatists of their temples, the Circumcelliones acted as the soldiery of the Donatists, and undoubtedly prevented the vigorous execution of the laws enacted against them, as proved by the subsequent prosperity of the Donatist community in Africa.—(Mosheim's Ecclesiastical History—Reid's edition.)