Constantine

Dynasty, Religion and Power in the Later Roman Empire

Timothy D. Barnes

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781118782750, 9781405117272
• eBook ISBN: 9781444396256
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

Drawing on recent scholarly advances and new evidence, Timothy Barnes offers a fresh and exciting study of Constantine and his life.

• First study of Constantine to make use of Kevin Wilkinson's re-dating of the poet Palladas to the reign of Constantine, disproving the predominant scholarly belief that Constantine remained tolerant in matters of religion to the end of his reign
• Clearly sets out the problems associated with depictions of Constantine and answers them with great clarity
• Includes Barnes' own research into the marriage of Constantine's parents, Constantine's status as a crown prince and his father's legitimate heir, and his dynastic plans
• Honorable Mention for 2011 Classics & Ancient History PROSE award granted by the Association of American Publishers

1

INTRODUCTION

In the preface to his novel about Helena, the mother of Constantine, Evelyn Waugh proclaimed that ‘the Age of Constantine is strangely obscure’ and that ‘most of the dates and hard facts, confidently given in the encyclopedias, soften and dissolve on examination.’ Similarly, Michael Grant began the preface to his book on Constantine by observing that ‘the problem of finding out about Constantine is an acute one’, then quoted these words of Evelyn Waugh before characterizing his own work as ‘another endeavor to walk over the same treacherous quicksands’ (Grant 1998: xi). In their assessment of the ancient evidence for Constantine, which Grant pronounced ‘wholly inadequate’ (Grant 1998: 13), both Waugh and Grant showed far superior judgement to professional historians of the Later Roman Empire who have recently written about the emperor and his place in history.

One such historian goes so far as to make the palpably false claim that ‘Constantine is one of the best documented of the Roman emperors, and a political narrative of his life and reign is straightforward enough’ (Van Dam 2007: 15), while another asserts that, if Constantine remains a problematical figure, it is not ‘because the events of his reign are obscured by a lack of relevant material’ (Lenski 2006b: 2). But the last period of Constantine’s reign from the surrender of the defeated Licinius on 19 September 324 to his own death on 22 May 337 is a truly dark period, in which the course of events is often obscure, except for the emperor’s movements, which can be reconstructed in detail (Barnes 1982: 76–80), and certain aspects of ecclesiastical politics, for which many original documents are preserved (Barnes 1981: 208–244; 1993a: 1–33). For the last third of Constantine’s reign, therefore, it is simply impossible to construct any sort of detailed military or political narrative. Nevertheless, it is possible to write a coherent and connected political and military narrative of the first third of Constantine’s reign (Chapters 4 and 5). Moreover, even if we know far less about Constantine than we do about other periods of Roman history such as the last decades of the Roman Republic, we can understand the basic outlines of his life and career before he became emperor, his political and military achievements as emperor, and his religious policies and attitudes – provided that we allow ourselves to be guided by the ancient evidence and do not seek to impose our own antecedent assumptions on its interpretation.

OFFICIAL LIES AND THE ‘CONSTANTINIAN QUESTION’

Constantine himself is in no small way responsible for creating many of the uncertainties about his religious convictions and religious policies which have been the subject of scholarly controversy since the sixteenth century. He was a highly skilful politician who, like all others of his breed, appreciated the necessity of using deceit in achieving his aims, and he had no compunction about eliminating those who obstructed his dynastic plans (Chapter 5). Moreover, he consistently employed propaganda in order to perpetuate deliberate falsehoods about both himself and important political and dynastic matters. Constantine’s subjects perforce accepted official falsehoods and reiterated them in public – and many no doubt genuinely believed them, as so often happens even in our modern world. Gross falsehoods put out by what may aptly be described as Constantine’s propaganda machine for contemporary consumption have also deceived many recent historians of Constantine and the Later Roman Empire – even those who prided themselves most on their critical acumen.

The prime (and most important) example of modern willingness to acquiesce in Constantine’s misrepresentation of basic facts without proper critical scrutiny is what ought to be the uncontroversial matter of his date of birth. Without exception, ancient authors who offer a figure state that Constantine was in his sixties when he died: according to Eusebius, for example, Constantine began to reign at the age when Alexander the Great died, lived twice as long as Alexander lived and twice as long as he himself reigned (VC 1.8, 4.53).¹ The explicit ancient evidence, therefore, unanimously and unambiguously places Constantine’s birth in the early 270s (Barnes 1982: 39–40), and the indirect evidence indicates that he was in fact born on 27 February 273 (Chapter 2). Otto Seeck, however, rejected this date and contended that 288 was almost certainly (‘ziemlich sicher’) the year of Constantine’s birth (1895: 407; 1922: 435–436), adducing five specific items of ­evidence, namely (i) the mosaic in the palace of Aquileia invoked in the Gallic panegyric of 307 (Pan. Lat. 7[6].6.2i5); (ii) Eusebius’ report that he saw Constantine accompanying Diocletian in 301 or 302 when he was an adolescent (VC 1.19, cf. Chapter 3); (iii) Constantine’s own statement that he was a mere boy in 303 (Eusebius, VC 2.51); and retrospective statements that the emperor was young when he came to power in 306, especially those of (iv) Nazarius in 321 (Pan. Lat. 4[10].16.4: adhuc aevi immaturus sed iam maturus imperio) and (v) Firmicus Maternus in 337 (Mathesis 1.10.16). But the mosaic at Aquileia (i) probably depicted Constantine as a young man in 293, which is perfectly compatible with his being twenty at the time (Chapter 3), while Nazarius (iv), Firmicus Maternus (v) and Eusebius (ii) are merely repeating Constantine’s own deliberate misrepresentation for political reasons of how old he was in 303 and 306. In other words, it cannot be denied that contemporary writers presented Constantine in the last two decades of his life as being younger than he really was. Why? It is naive and simple-minded in the extreme to argue that ‘his precise age was apparently unknown,’ then to deduce from what Eusebius says that Constantine was ‘about thirteen or fourteen’ in 296 or 297 ( Jones in Jones & Skeat 1954: 196–197, slavishly repeated by Winkelmann 1962b: 203). That is not only to date the occasion when Eusebius saw Constantine at the side of Diocletian five years too early (Chapter 3), but to allow undue ­credence to an official untruth. Constantine himself deliberately lied about his age for political reasons.

Writing to ‘the provincials of the East’ shortly after his defeat of Licinius in 324, Constantine subtly combined two lies about his situation when Diocletian consulted the oracles of Apollo immediately before launching the ‘Great Persecution.’ He claimed that ‘I heard <about it> as a mere youth² at the time’ (VC 2.51.1: ἠκροώμην τότε κομιδη̑ παι̑ς ἔτι ὑπάρχων). That is doubly false: in the winter of 302–303 Constantine was a mature adult at the court of Diocletian waiting for promotion into the imperial college (Chapter 3). Constantine undoubtedly knew how old he was. His claim that he was a mere boy or youth in 303 is not a simple and straightforward statement of fact from an impartial witness. He was in Nicomedia when the ‘Great Persecution’ started in that city, as he told a different audience at Easter 325 (Chapter 6 at nn. 13–15) and he stayed silent in order not to compromise his position as a crown prince or damage his prospects of being co-opted into the imperial college. More than twenty years later and over a decade after his very public conversion to Christianity, Constantine reminded his new subjects in the East that in 303 his father had protected the Christians of his territories at a time when his three imperial colleagues were not only savage persecutors intent exclusively on their own advantage, but also mentally deranged (VC 2.29). Political animal as he was, the Constantine of 324 avoided the embarrassing question of why he had failed to protest when his Christian friends were being hauled off to execution for their religious beliefs (Vogt 1943a: 194). He simply claimed that, so far from being a grown man of thirty with a prominent position at court in 303, he was in fact in 303 ‘still just a boy.’ For what could a mere boy have done to stop the persecution?

Historians who wrote about Constantine in the nineteenth century or most of the twentieth found it hard to believe that Constantine lied about his age and hence either allowed themselves to be taken in like Seeck or, like Jones, invented an excuse to palliate the misrepresentation. I write as one whose political awareness began in October 1956 with the invasion of Egypt by British, French and Israeli troops acting in concert at the same time as Russian tanks attacked Hungarian civilians on the streets of Budapest. Hence I have long been familiar with official stories designed to deceive. Indeed in 2003 I watched both the American Secretary of State and the British Prime Minister on television as they misled the Security Council of the United Nations and the House of Commons in Westminster about the necessity of invading a small country which they falsely claimed to possess ‘weapons of mass destruction’ ready to be deployed.

When I began to write about Constantine in the early 1970s, I immediately became aware that propaganda had played a role in shaping the surviving evidence for his reign (Barnes 1973: 41–43, cf. 1981: 37, 45, 47, 68, 268–269), but I underestimated quite how great that role really was until I read and reflected on Charles Pietri’s analysis of what the four documents which Eusebius quotes in the second book of his Life of Constantine (VC 2.24–42, 46, 48–60, 64–72) reveal about imperial propaganda and the emperor’s theology, self-presentation and self-promotion in and after 324 (1983: 73–90). It will be apposite, therefore, to draw together some other clear examples (besides his age) of the emperor’s use of deliberate falsehood and his misrepresentation of facts and recent events which will be discussed in the following chapters.

1 The Origo Constantini Imperatoris and Lactantius have differing versions of an invented story that Galerius attempted to get Constantine killed either in battle or on the parade ground (Chapter 3).

2 In his tract On the Deaths of the Persecutors (De Mortibus Persecutorum), which he wrote c. 315 after he had returned to Bithynia, Lactantius repeats an embroidered version of the death of Maximian (Chapter 4). In 310 Maximian committed suicide under compulsion when his attempt to seize power from Constantine failed; a year or more after his death, a story was invented that he was pardoned by Constantine, but repaid his clemency by attempting to assassinate him as he lay asleep in the palace at Arles; this story was in circulation at the court of Constantine in 311 and 312 when Lactantius heard it (Appendix A) and later repeated it in 314/315 (Mort. Pers. 30), even though by this time Constantine was rehabilitating the memory of Maximian. After his death Constantine first vilified Maximian and abolished his memory by ordering statues and images of him to be pulled down and destroyed (Lactantius, Mort. Pers. 42.1: senis Maximiani statuae Constantini iussu revellebantur et imagines ubicumque pictus esset detrahabantur). After the Battle of the Milvian Bridge on 28 October 312, however, Constantine decided to rehabilitate his memory, and the Roman Senate consecrated his memory so that in 318 coins from Constantinian mints honored him as a divus together with Constantine’s father and Claudius, his purported third-century imperial ancestor as (I transpose the obverse legend from the dative to the nominative case and expand the abbreviations) divus Maximianus senior fortissimus (or optimus) imperator (RIC 7.180, Trier: nos. 200–207; 252, Arles: nos. 173–178; 310–312, Rome: nos. 104–128; 395, Aquileia: nos. 21–26; 429–430, Siscia: nos. 41–46; 503, Thessalonica: nos. 24–26).

3 Maxentius granted the Christians of Italy and Africa the right to practice their religion freely very soon after he came to power in October 306, though he did not allow Christians to recover confiscated property until some years later (Chapter 4). But he exiled Marcellus and Eusebius, successive bishops of Rome, and the latter’s rival Heraclius, because Christian factions were fighting one another in the streets of Rome (Chr. min. 1.76; Damasus, Epigrammata 48, 18 = ILCV 962, 963, cf. Barnes 1981: 38, 304 n.106). The see of Rome then remained vacant for almost three years until Miltiades was consecrated bishop on 2 July 311 when war loomed with the pro-Christian Constantine (Chr. min. 1.76). These necessary police actions helped to provide a basis for claiming that after a good start Maxentius turned against the Christians, and after the Battle of the Milvian Bridge Constantinian propaganda rapidly transformed Maxentius into a textbook tyrant who massacred his subjects, raped the wives of senators and examined the entrails of pregnant women, infants and lions for magical purposes (Eusebius, HE 8.14.1–5, cf. Grünewald 1990: 64–71; Barnes 1996a).

4 Constantinian propa...

Table of contents

• COVER
• BLACKWELL ANCIENT LIVES
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• DEDICATION
• ILLUSTRATIONS
• PREFACE
• ABBREVIATIONS
• 1 INTRODUCTION
• 2 THE SOLDIER AND THE STABLE-GIRL
• 3 CONSTANTINE, THE RUINS OF BABYLON AND THE COURT OF PHARAOH
• 4 THE ROAD TO ROME
• 5 BROTHERS-IN-LAW
• 6 THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE EAST
• 7 DYNASTIC POLITICS AFTER THE COUNCIL OF NICAEA
• 8 EPILOGUE
• APPENDIX A: THE CAREER OF LACTANTIUS
• APPENDIX B: GALERIUS’ SARMATIAN VICTORIES
• APPENDIX C: THE PANEGYRICI LATINI AND CONSTANTINE
• APPENDIX D: EUSEBIUS, ON EASTER (DE SOLLEMNITATE PASCHALI)
• APPENDIX E: NICAGORAS IN EGYPT
• APPENDIX F: PRAXAGORAS OF ATHENS
• APPENDIX G: AN ANONYMOUS PANEGYRIC OF CONSTANTINE
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• SUPPLEMENTAL IMAGES
• INDEX