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CONSTANTINE LIVED WELL in Nicomedia, but in reality, he was something of a hostage, kept close at hand to ensure his father’s loyalty to Diocletian. He was formally educated in literature and philosophy, and in 297 he caught his first glimpse of the realities of war, when at the age of twenty-five, he accompanied Diocletian’s arrogant deputy Galerius into battle against the Persians. Constantine naturally concluded he was being groomed to join his father one day in the tetrarchy.
By the time he was thirty-two, Constantine had fathered a son with a woman named Minervina. They named him Crispus, and it seems that Constantine was a loving and protective father.
While in Nicomedia, Constantine received a first-class education in the messy realities of politics, simply by observing Diocletian and his court, who were attempting to reorganise the whole of Roman society along the lines of an orderly army camp. Diocletian had a military man’s love of a straight line, a tidy barracks and a clear chain of command. He suppressed the threat of rebellion from powerful governors by reapportioning the imperial territories into smaller chunks, and by dividing military and civil authority in each province, with a dux (‘duke’) to assume military leadership, and a vicarius (‘vicar’) to oversee civil administration.
Diocletian’s hapless predecessors had tried to pay for their expenses by minting more money, which had led to runaway inflation. Diocletian responded characteristically by attempting to nail down prices with a hammer, introducing price controls on every saleable commodity – bread, wine, beef, grain, cloaks, sausages and shoes.* He put tight constraints on job mobility by tying peasants to the land and making most professions hereditary. His tax policies encouraged the creation of large, self-sufficient estates. Diocletian was aiming for a restoration of classical Roman traditions but accidentally invented feudalism instead.
Despite his conservative instincts, Diocletian saw a need to reinvent the whole concept of imperial authority. Putting all pretence of republican virtue aside, Diocletian styled himself as emperor by divine right: he was the favourite of the gods, the human incarnation of Jupiter. He abandoned his soldier’s tunic and took to wearing robes of purple silk and slippers studded with rubies. In court ceremonies the old soldier appeared before his awed subjects in make-up with a diadem on his head. All visitors who approached him were required to enter on their knees and kiss his robe.
Constantine witnessed the transfiguration of Diocletian from peasant-soldier to god-emperor. He saw how an emperor’s authority could be magnified several times over by having a plausible claim to a divine mandate. Who would, after all, want to defy the gods?
The Last Persecution
IT WAS A QUESTION that came sharply into focus one day in 299, when Diocletian called for his haruspex, the pagan priest he used to divine the future from messages encoded in the entrails of sacrificed animals.* The emperor and his men stood by as the animals were slaughtered in the correct manner, and their entrails extracted and studied. But the haruspex appeared confused, and muttered that he was unable to read the divine portents. Diocletian asked him what was wrong.
‘Sire,’ the haruspex complained, ‘I must tell you that as we began the divination, I saw the Christians of your household make the sign of the cross. This, I believe, has angered the gods into silence.’
Diocletian was deeply angered. Turning to his court, he declared that everyone in the room must at once make a sacrifice to appease the gods. Anyone who declined was to be flogged. To Diocletian, what had taken place was more than insolence; it was Christian sabotage, a threat to the empire’s security more dangerous than any barbarian army. From Diocletian’s point of view, nothing was more important to the empire’s wellbeing than the favour of the gods, whose goodwill had granted them dominion over all other peoples.
Anxious to soothe the gods’ anger, the emperor decreed the next day that every soldier of the legions must also make a sacrificial offering. Christians who refused were imprisoned. Many Christians were ready to profess their loyalty, but infuriatingly, were forbidden by their religion to offer sacrifices to the emperor or to the pantheon of gods that Diocletian believed had made Rome so powerful.
Galerius, who detested Christians, urged Diocletian to go further, and the machinery of the empire geared up to purge the enemy within. Christians were stripped of their legal rights and property. Churches and holy books were destroyed. Christians who refused to renounce their religion were burnt alive. Diocletian’s other reforms were put on hold as he allowed himself to be distracted into these pointless cruelties.
The last great persecution of the Christians was an atrocity in human terms and utterly counterproductive politically. The spectacle of innocent people thrown out of their homes and beaten in the streets appalled even non-Christians. Diocletian’s prestige sank, while public admiration for the steadfast Christians climbed. Galerius, undaunted, persisted with the persecutions with undisguised glee, as Diocletian became depressed and withdrew from his imperial duties.
IN LATE 304, Diocletian became seriously ill and disappeared from public view. He emerged from his palace in March the following year, looking haggard and exhausted. In May he called an assembly of his generals and other senior figures to a hill outside Nicomedia, the same hill where he had been acclaimed emperor twenty years earlier.
Constantine stood impassively behind the old emperor as Diocletian declared he would do what no other emperor had done before – abdicate the throne voluntarily. Furthermore, he declared, his old friend Maximian, the western Augustus, would be retiring too. They would peacefully hand over their senior roles to their experienced deputies, Constantius Chlorus and Galerius.
This meant two new men would have to be brought into the tetrarchy to fill the vacant deputies’ positions. Everyone in the crowd that day expected Constantine to be named as one of the Caesars. The court historian Lactantius describes the scene:
The gaze of all was upon Constantine. No one had any doubt; the soldiers who were present . . . were delighted with him, they wanted him, they were making their prayers for him.
Then suddenly Diocletian proclaimed Severus and Maximinus Daia as Caesars. Everyone was thunderstruck. Constantine was standing up on the platform, and people hesitated, wondering whether his name had been changed. But then in full view of everybody Galerius stretched back his hand and drew Maximinus Daia out from behind him, pushing Constantine away.
Both new Caesars were friends and allies of Galerius.
Constantine had been snubbed, as had Maximian’s capable son Maxentius, who had likewise expected to be elevated. Diocletian wanted to establish the principle of succession based on merit, rather than inheritance, which suited Galerius just fine. But in this case, the two sons could make a claim based on merit and birthright.
Galerius, now the senior emperor, knew he’d made an enemy of Constantine, and had him watched closely. He had to assume that, sooner or later, disaffected elements in the army and bureaucracy would congregate around the snubbed prince and encourage his ambitions. Constantine for his part must have realised it was only a matter of time until he would meet some kind of tragic accident while he remained in Nicomedia.
Constantine passed each day in a state of watchful readiness, until one night when he was able to ply Galerius with wine and extract his mumbled consent to leave. As soon as Galerius fell asleep, Constantine bolted, taking off from the palace on the fastest horse in the stable, riding hard through the night from post-house to post-house, laming every horse behind him so he couldn’t be followed. By the time Galerius woke up the next day, Constantine was long gone and pursuit was impossible.
CONSTANTINE JOINED HIS FATHER in Gaul. Together they crossed the Channel into Britain, travelling up to the Roman military base in York, where Constantine was introduced to his father’s court. In 306 he was given troops to lead into battle against the Pictish tribes, north of Hadrian’s Wall, which allowed his father’s staff to observe his military skills. As win
ter set in, Constantius Chlorus fell gravely ill. When he died on 25 July 306, the senior staff arranged for the legions in York to acclaim Constantine as the rightful new Augustus of the west.
Constantine then wrote to Galerius, presenting his elevation as a fait accompli. He provocatively included a portrait of himself dressed in the purple robes of an Augustus. Who was he to say no to the legions loyal to his father’s memory? Galerius was livid, but had to accept the turn of events to avoid war. Even so, he insisted on a compromise: Constantine would be promoted to the junior role of Caesar rather than replace his father as the senior Augustus. Galerius sent him the imperial robes to underline the point that it was he who conferred the title of ‘Emperor’. Constantine was happy to accept, knowing that Galerius’s acknowledgement removed any doubts about his legitimacy.
Constantine’s audacious move left Maxentius, the other imperial son, seething with envy. Then, out of the blue, disgruntled members of the Praetorian Guard in Rome approached Maxentius and invited him to become emperor of Italy, if he would only promise to repeal an irksome new tax. Maxentius was only too happy to accept, but he sent his father, the retired Augustus Maximian, to smooth things over with Constantine. Constantine was offered a deal: the hand of Maximian’s daughter Fausta, in return for his support. Constantine agreed, clearing the way for Maxentius to be acclaimed as emperor of the Italian peninsula, infuriating Galerius and his deputy, Severus.
Constantine’s marriage to Fausta did not require him to divorce Minervina, either because they were never legally married or because she was already dead. Fausta and Constantine would have six children together, but he remained closest to Crispus, his firstborn son from Minervina, and kept the boy close by his side in Gaul.
DIOCLETIAN EXPECTED the tetrarchy to endure as a permanent institution, refreshing itself every twenty years or so with new leaders. But Diocletian was the indispensable man in the tetrarchy, and the system collapsed almost as soon as he walked away. Galerius, the new senior Augustus, lacked the authority to keep his rivals in check, and the empire descended into a series of debilitating civil wars, fought between armies led by emperors and would-be emperors.
Diocletian, who had retired to a palace in Dalmatia to grow vegetables, observed the collapse of his carefully constructed new order with dismay. Galerius wrote to him, beseeching him to come out of retirement and broker a new settlement between the rivals. With a weary sigh, Diocletian did as he was asked, but the deal collapsed almost straightaway. One of his old colleagues wrote to him, begging him to return to the throne and restore peace to the empire. Diocletian wrote back, ‘If you could come here and see the splendid cabbages I have grown with my own hands, then you would not ask such a thing of me.’
Meanwhile, his hand-picked successor was failing. Galerius was dying from a grotesque form of bowel cancer. The decline and death of the great persecutor was chronicled with gruesome relish by the Christian scholar Lactantius, who thought he could see divine justice at work in Galerius’s nether regions: ‘The stench was so foul as to pervade not only the palace, but even the whole city . . . for by that time the passages from his bladder and bowels, having been devoured by the worms, became indiscriminate, and his body, with intolerable anguish, was dissolved into one mass of corruption’.
Galerius perished in agony, and an empire-wide power struggle broke out between Constantine and his rivals inside and out of the tetrarchy. The rivals fought each other for eighteen years like hungry sea creatures in a tank: the strong consuming the weak, until there were only two, and then one. It was in the course of this long struggle that Constantine underwent a dramatic spiritual experience that he believed saved him from defeat and death at the gates of Rome.
Chi-Rho
IN THE SPRING OF 312, Constantine marched his forces across the Alps into northern Italy. His quarry was now Maxentius, his brother-in-law. Their uneasy alliance had broken down. Maxentius’s control of the Italian peninsula was slipping and Constantine had brought an army to take it from him.
Constantine, who was now forty, took Turin and Milan without a fight, then marched down Via Flaminia and camped outside Rome’s Aurelian Walls. Maxentius had stockpiled food in the city and destroyed its bridges. It was assumed that Maxentius and his army would sit tight behind the formidable city walls and wait out the siege, leaving Constantine’s forces exposed to the ravages of the coming winter.
Maxentius, however, was spooked by Constantine’s apparent self-confidence. Looking for guidance, Maxentius consulted the Sibylline Oracles, which predicted that on 28 October an ‘enemy of the Romans’ would fall in battle. Maxentius naturally assumed that enemy was Constantine, and so he prepared to meet his brother-in-law’s forces in open battle outside the city walls.
The night before the battle, Constantine was said to have experienced a jangling, hallucinatory dream or a vision. Unlike the Sibylline prophecies, the message of Constantine’s vision was utterly direct and unambiguous. Constantine looked up at the sun and saw a blazing symbol of light over it. The cross-like symbol resembled an ‘X’ with a ‘P’ through the centre, like so:
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And with it, Constantine saw these words written across the sky:
BY THIS SIGN YOU SHALL CONQUER
The fiery monogram was formed from two Greek letters, ‘chi’ and ‘rho’, the first two letters of the Greek word ‘χριστός’ or ‘Christ’. The chi-rho was a well-known symbol of self-identification among Christians. Constantine awoke from his vision and asked his soldiers to paint the chi-rho on their shields, as they waited for Maxentius to emerge from the Aurelian Walls with his army.
MAXENTIUS CHOSE TO MAKE his stand at the Milvian Bridge, which had to be hastily reconstructed to get his troops across the Tiber River. He marched his army over the shaky pontoon timbers and prepared to confront Constantine’s infantry.
Constantine’s cavalry charged forward, pushing Maxentius’s army back towards the bank of the Tiber. Maxentius called for his forces to retreat and regroup behind the city walls. Suddenly there was a confused crush of men and horses on the pontoon bridge; it collapsed and the Tiber was filled with drowning soldiers, weighed down by their heavy armour.
Maxentius’s Praetorian Guard was now stranded on the other side of the river. They made a desperate last stand, but were slowly hacked to pieces by Constantine’s men. Maxentius fell into the Tiber, where he drowned. His corpse was dragged out of the river and decapitated. The gates of the city were opened, and Constantine’s men paraded through the streets, carrying Maxentius’s head, spiked on a lance, to quell all further resistance.
Constantine had won the prize of Rome and, with it, complete control of the western empire. He entered the city the next day to cheering crowds. He was acclaimed in the senate, but surprised everyone when he firmly declined to give thanks and praise to the golden statue of Nike, the goddess of winged victory.
WHILE IN ROME, I track down Danielle, a classics graduate and part-time archaeologist who spends a day with us in the ruins of the Imperial Forum. Danielle has lived in Rome for many years and has an answer for every question Joe and I can throw at her. Even better, she has access to the lower levels of the Colosseum, where gladiators, slaves and wild animals were once kept. The three of us have the dank subterranean space all to ourselves.
Joe points to a row of cylindrical grooves carved into the concrete floor.
‘What were those holes for?’ he asks.
‘They were the slots that once held a series of pole winches,’ Danielle explains, ‘that were turned by slaves to operate an elevator platform.’
Colosseum basement.
Richard Fidler
‘The Romans had elevators?’ Joe asks incredulously.
‘It was very dramatic. The animals and gladiators would be hoisted up from this basement onto the floor of the arena.’
‘And then they’d die.’
‘Actually,’ Danielle says, ‘some gladiators had it pretty good. Better th
an you’d think from the movies.’
She tells us that the best gladiators were prized athletes and celebrities who lived very comfortably and ate well between bouts. The popular ones seldom got killed, since their opponents were mostly captured enemy soldiers, who were meant to lose.
Cell in Colosseum
Richard Fidler
Danielle leads us through the basement to a damp little cell that once held these soldier-slaves and the cruelty of everyday life in the Roman world is suddenly apparent to me. ‘So you’d be a farmer, living somewhere on the periphery of the empire, and you’d join a rebellion, which would be easily crushed by the legions. You’d be carted to Rome in a cage, and then they’d dump you in this tiny cell here. After god knows how long, they’d give you a short sword and a wooden shield, push you onto the elevator and winch you up to the stadium floor, where you’d see sixty thousand Romans screaming for your death. Someone lops off your arm and runs a sword through you, and you bleed to death in the sawdust. Is that how it would go?’
‘Something like that, yes.’
‘Who was it that ended blood sport in the Colosseum?’ I ask.
‘It was Constantine,’ she says.
CONSTANTINE WAS READY to give thanks and praise to the Christian God for his victory at the Milvian Bridge, but his personal adoption of the faith was very much a work in progress. It wasn’t a complete and sudden Damascene conversion. Constantine was a political creature, and he took care to honour the pagan gods most of his subjects still revered.
His victory monuments sent mixed signals to the people of Rome. The Arch of Constantine, built to commemorate his victory, is Rome’s largest triumphal arch – there’s that fondness for bigness again – but for an emperor who had credited the Christian God for his victory, the Arch is remarkably free of specific Christian references. There are, however, plenty of images of pagan gods, particularly of the sun god Apollo.
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