Noel Lenski

The Reign of Constantine

Birth and Early Career The details of Constantine’s birth are enigmatic. We know that he was born in or near the Moesian city of Naissus (Ni.s: see Map 1) and that he was the eldest son of Flavius Valerius Constantius, soon to become Caesar. The year of his birth, however, is hardly certain. Most historians agree that he was born on February 27, 272, though one good contemporary source indicates 276, and some scholars have argued for a date as late as 288. Behind much of the confusion stands Constantine himself, who regularly had himself portrayed in art and panegyrics as much younger than he actually was. The question of Constantine’s legitimacy has also long plagued historians. The Christian chronographer Jerome, writing in the 380s, claimed that Constantine’s mother, Helena, was a mere concubine of Constantius I; the anonymous author of the Origo Constantini , a source quite favorable to Constantine, calls Helena “extremely lowly”; and bishop Ambrose, Jerome’s contemporary, reports that she had been a mere stable maid when she met Constantius. Whatever the exact status of their relationship, then, Constantine’s mother was hardly of noble stock, a fact that eventually provoked his father to leave her c. 289 in order to marry the princess Theodora, stepdaughter of the emperor Maximian. When Constantine was born, his father, a native of Illyricum (the Balkans), was serving as an imperial bodyguard ( protector ) to the emperor Aurelian (r. 270-5). This position would prove quite favorable after two other Illyrian officers of Aurelian, Diocletian and in turn Maximian, took over corulership of the empire in 284 and 285, respectively (Coins 5 and 7).

Evoking the Pagan Past: Instinctu divinitatis and Constantine's Capture of Rome

The inscription on Constantine’s arch claims that he defeated Maxentius “by the instigation of the divine”(“instinctu divinitatis”). Scholars long have recognized the significance of this phrase in the context of Constantine’s vision or visions before the Battle of the Milvian Bridge. This study examines the phrase from a philological perspective and demonstrates that it likely was formulated by pagan senators rather than the emperor himself. It argues that these senators probably were the very aristocrats who had supported Maxentius and that they used the iconography of the arch and its inscription to point Constantine toward a pagan interpretation of his success in battle. By tracing the phrase to a passage in Livy, it further demonstrates that the interpretation of the battle on the arch is heavily colored by the Republican war ritual of evocatio, whereby a city’s protective deity is called forth in anticipation of an assault. Without contending that an evocatio was actually performed, it shows how the arch’s inscription and the Latin panegyrics that treat the battle deploy the language and concepts of evocatio in order to explain how Constantine succeeded in overcoming a foe who had relied on the protection of the Urbs Roma.

The Impact of Constantine on Christianity

The impact of Constantine on Christianity can be summarized fairly quickly: during the thirty years of his reign, more change took place in the status, structure, and beliefs of the Christian Church than during any previous period of its history. In 306, when Constantine was first elevated by his father’s troops, the imperial government was in the middle of a concerted effort to remove all traces of Christian presence from the empire. When he died in 337, Christian leaders had assumed the rank, dress, and, increasingly, the duties of the old civic elite. Before the century ended, the tables were turned completely, with traditional sacrifices outlawed and the old state cults forbidden. But Constantine’s role in bringing about this reversal is more problematic. At one time, the only question that needed to be asked about that role was how “sincere” Constantine’s conversion had been. Was he in truth a pious son of the church, or was he rather a political mastermind who seized on the power he could gain by subordinating this well-organized and doctrinaire group to his will? Admirers pointed to the enormous powers and benefactions he bestowed upon the church, the Christian character of his laws, and his suppression of pagan cults. Those who argued the opposite pointed disdainfully at the continued presence of pagan images on his coins for some time after 312, his unwillingness to use any but the most general terms for deity in his public utterances, and, most damningly of all, evidence that he not only permitted the old cults to survive but even actively patronized them, at least on occasion.

Sources for the History of Constantine

What we can know about the history of an emperor is entirely dependent on our source base. For our knowledge of Constantine, the situation is actually quite favorable considering the usual standards in ancient history. To be sure, there is no longer extant a full-scale ancient historical work for the rule of Constantine. The historian finds compensation, however, in a large number of other sources whose breadth and complexity have made the treatment of the historical problem of Constantine’s reign into something of a proving ground for ancient historical method. This method consists primarily in using the sources available to document a state of affairs in the most comprehensive way possible and then setting those sources in relation to one another, as for example through hierarchization. To offer one example, the ancient historian could not settle the question whether Constantine the Great suddenly became Christian in the fall of 312 after the battle of the Milvian Bridge by looking only at the ecclesiastical historians of the fifth century, who preserve the well-known legend, often repeated into modern times, that Constantine saw a cross in the heavens before his victory over Maxentius and converted to Christianity out of gratitude for his success. On the contrary, he must investigate the origin of the legend and explain why already the contemporary Eusebius included this report in his Life of Constantine ( Vita Constantini ).

Bureaucracy and Government

On September 18, 324, at Chrysopolis, just across the water from Byzantium, Constantine’s army won a decisive battle. This victory over the emperor Licinius (who had ruled most of the eastern half of the empire since 313) established Constantine’s control over a reunified Roman world. It effectively doubled his domains. But like all military successes - no matter how glorious or divinely inspired - the reconquest of the eastern Mediterranean posed a series of difficulties: practical, political, administrative, economic, and ideological. This chapter looks at one particular problem which might confront any government attempting to assimilate a large and recently subdued territory. The challenge Constantine and his advisers faced was, of course, not how to “Romanise” or “civilise” the eastern provinces - the very idea would have seemed farcical - but rather how to control and exploit its resources. One tactic was to strengthen the apparatus of central government control. The evidence is patchy and unsatisfactory, but it does seem that both after the victory at the battle of the Milvian Bridge in 312 (which confirmed Constantine’s rule in the west) and especially following the defeat of Licinius, a series of reforms significantly altered the duties of the empire’s most important civil and military officials. These innovations saw the consolidation and systematisation of distinct areas of responsibility under the supervision of high-ranking office-holders closely associated with the emperor himself.

The Dynasty of Constantine Down to 363

From the elevation of Constantius I as Caesar in 293 to the death of the emperor Julian in 363, the family of Constantine would play a direct and major role in the later Roman empire for seventy years. The actions of Constantius I’s first son, Constantine, would forever change the nature of the Roman empire and of Western civilization. In an effort to elucidate this impact, this chapter will begin by examining the ways in which Constantine adopted and adapted the Tetrarchic system established by Diocletian into a family dynasty. It will then investigate how this plan was followed - and sometimes not - in the period after Constantine’s death up to the death of his nephew Julian, the last male dynast to rule as emperor. As we shall see, however, the next dynasty, the house of Valentinian, established connections to the Constantinians through marriages to a granddaughter and, probably, a grandniece of Constantine, with the result that the bloodline of the family continued to run through the veins of Roman emperors well into the fifth century. The chapter ends with a quick look at the afterlife of the image of Constantine in the later Roman empire and in world history.

Harnessing Violence: Armed Force as Manpower in the Late Roman Countryside

Brent Shaw’s monumental study invites reflection rather than critique. Proceeding from its demonstrations that Donatist violence was limited in scale, that Augustine’s extensive treatments of the movement have conditioned modern readers to see it as more violent and better organized than it was, and that the “circumcellions” were occasional agricultural laborers enlisted to bully sectarian opponents, this study explores Shaw’s findings on three fronts. First, it shows the relationship between Donatist sectarian violence and football hooliganism, both of which represent the expression of surplus male aggression in search of a cause. Second, it explores the relationship between violence and manual labor in an effort to rethink the dimensions of the problem. Finally, it situates the Donatist movement in a broader Mediterranean context by showing how it reflected a growing trend toward the breakdown of state authority in Late Antiquity.

Der Kaiser als Sieger. Metamophosen triumphaler Herrschaft unter Constantin I by Johannes Wienand (review)

and polytheism with polyarchy in his Oration to Constantine (LC 3.5), and consistently characterized pagans as “polytheists” (e.g., LC 7) in such a way as to elide the very points of contact that Jones discusses. In chapter 7, “Debate,” Jones turns his attention away from the standard apologetic sources to concentrate on letters, which he points out were meant to be read by wider audiences than the recipient and which come closer to the issues that actually concerned contemporaries. Some 2,000 letters by the fi fth-century Egyptian monk Isidore of Pelusium also have the virtue of embracing a much broader range of recipients, from emperors and philosophers to merchants and farmers. Jones reaches a familiar conclusion—that such exchanges strengthened Christian thinking—albeit in a highly quotable way. “Though the debate between pagans and Christians ended with the victory of the Christians,” he writes (p. 89), “it was a victory by absorption rather than by conquest.” Nowhere does Jones’s argument for change in the positions of both Christians and pagans show more clearly than in an appendix on Macrobius, whose Saturnalia underpinned arguments for a “pagan circle” mobilized against Christianity at the end of the fourth century until Alan Cameron demonstrated in 1966 that the work was written a generation later than supposed. The appendix deals with Robert Kaster’s more recent argument that Macrobius was himself a Christian. With step-by-step analysis, Jones concludes that Macrobius was more likely to have been a Neoplatonist, and thus a prime example of the blurred boundaries that he has explored with such clarity and insight. Der Kaiser als Sieger. Metamophosen triumphaler Herrschaft unter Constantin I. Johannes Wienand Klio Beihefte 19. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2012. Pp. 646. ISBN 978–3-05–005903–7