Defending Constantine: The Twilight of an Empire and the Dawn of Christendom

by Peter J. Leithart

  Persecution also had the unfortunate but obvious consequence of weeding out some of the most determined leaders from the church. Persecutors targeted bishops and priests, and bishops who capitulated survived to rule the church once the persecution ended. Those who did not cooperate often died. It is hardly surprising that, with a few exceptions like Athanasius, the church leaders of the early fourth century were not men of the strongest character.

  Finally, critics who ignore Constantine's setting are doing bad political theology. If anything should characterize Christian political thought, it is attention to the gritty realities of history. Creation, incarnation, cross, resurrection-all the cardinal doctrines of Christian faith reveal a God who acts in history. To do political theology without attention to historical context and circumstance is to replace a Christian political theology with a Platonic one. Without detailed attention to the details of history, political theology becomes perfectionistic. Relative judgments-Constantine was better than Diocletian or Galerius-give way to absolute, global, often ill-informed polemics against a Constantine who has become more an idea than a man.

  Persecution reveals one dimension of the complex situation in the Roman Empire in the early fourth century. To do justice to Constantine, we must attempt to make some sense of that period, and to do that we need to reach back to the previous century.

  The immortal gods will be ... well-disposed and favourable to the name ofRome, if we scrutinize thoroughly everyone under our rule and see they properly cultivate in every way a pious, observant, peaceful, and chaste life.

  EMPEROR DIOCLETIAN

  Mother Rome was not well when Diocletian assumed the imperial throne in 285.1 Over the previous decades, Rome had been shaken by multiple crises: "a constant and rapid turnover of emperors between A.D. 235 and 284 ... near-continuous warfare, internal and external, combined with the total collapse of the silver currency and the state's recourse to exactions in kind .112

  Trouble lay at the heart of the imperial system. From its beginning, the empire rested on a delicate political dance, the emperor's ability to balance the interests and cultural assumptions of the Senate with the brute force of the military, which he commanded. Octavius3 was a consummate player of the imperial game, ostentatiously humble in relation to the Senate, careful to keep up republican appearances by avoiding threat and intimidation. Imperial power was founded on modesty, on a combination of kingship and citizenship that expressed itself in the ritual of recusatio, the emperor's ritual reluctance to assume the imperial post.' In theory, the emperor under the Augustan system was no more than a princeps, the "first man" of the Senate, a first among equals.

  Augustus's system, known as the Principate, had several centuries of relative success, but even before the end of the first century, there were ominous signs of internal fragility. The Year of the Four Emperors, A.D. 69, was a period of chaos that, Tacitus observed, revealed the imperial secret that "emperors could be made elsewhere than Rome."5 With the Roman Senate's role reduced and the military's increased, imperial power was a reward for the most ambitious and skilled-and sometimes the most ruthless-military commander.

  Succession brought the clash of interests to a boiling point. The problem of succession was endemic to the imperial system. Early on, emperors created a pseudo-dynasty by adoption, as Julius Caesar did with Octavius, but by the middle of the fourth century that system was no longer viable. During the "Year of the Four Emperors" and again in the crisis that followed the murder of Commodus (193-97), the succession system, such as it was, broke down. After the murder of Alexander Severus in 235, things became even more tumultuous. Many of the emperors between Alexander and Diocletian ruled for only a few months, and only Gallienus (253-68) ruled more than a decade.6 Political turmoil at the center encouraged ad venturism in the provinces. Between 257 and 273 five emperors battled over Gaul.7

  By the third century, the vulnerability at the center of the empire was exacerbated by external threats. The Principate was functional so long as borders were secure. Under Augustus they were; by the third century they were not.' Persia threatened as never before, mainly because the dilatory Arsacid dynasty was replaced by the vigorous and ambitious Sassanids.9 Valerian's reign was comparatively long (253-260), but his name was tarnished by the shame of defeat at the hands of the Persian king Shapur I, commemorated on a monument that can still be found in Naqsh-i-Rustam, Iran. Relief carvings show Shapur seated resplendently on horseback holding the wrist of Valerian and receiving the obeisance of the Roman emperor, Philip the Arab. Valerian died in captivity, and afterward the Persian king stripped his skin off his corpse, dyed it, and kept as a trophy. Nearly forty years later, the Romans were still smarting from the humiliation. After he defeated Shapur's successor Narseh, Galerius, trembling with anger, chided the Persians not only for holding Valerian prisoner but for preserving his skin after his death.10 Persia was not the only threat. Goths, Franks, and other Germanic and Slavic tribes repeatedly crossed the Rhine and Danube and threatened the empire. Everywhere, and for the first time in its history, the empire was on the defensive. Rome's enemies no longer considered it invincible, and Romans were inclined to agree.11

  Rome was on the defensive because enemies attacked simultaneously from various directions. Sarmatians, Alemanni, Burgundians, Franks, and Saxons, a group known to the Romans as Skythai, all pressed in together, and this created conditions for rivalry among the leaders of Rome. When a local Roman commander repelled a Gothic invasion along the frontier, he naturally believed he had won some right to rule.12 He was, after all, the savior of the empire. Because of the pressures from outside, the boundaries of the empire weakened and in places broke altogether. In 281, a civil war broke out in Egypt, in which "the inhabitants of one part of the province, the Thebais, assault[ed] the region around Toptos with the aid of nomadic Blemmyes, who dominated what is now the northern Sudan." That is to say, "one portion of a [Roman] province" allied itself with a group from outside the empire to attack another part of the same province.13

  A SINGLE POLIS

  The Roman Empire was a military and political superpower, but Romans believed that their success depended on the gods. Roman emperors had always been deeply religious. Augustus publicized the horoscope that predicted his rise to power, and he surrounded his reign with religiopolitical symbols of rebirth and renewal.14 Even a philosophical emperor like Marcus Aurelius claimed to have broken a siege with prayer in 172 and attributed his victory over the people Dio Cassius calls the Quadi to the influence ofAnuphis, "an Egyptian magician, who was a companion of Marcus" and who called down a powerful rain by invoking "various deities and in particular Mercury, the god of the air."" During the third century, the Severans were devoted to the sun god.

  Unlike Eastern rulers like Alexander, Augustus did not accept divine honors during his lifetime, and his position as emperor was not underwritten by an explicit theory of divine right. During the reign of Augustus, the eastern provinces did homage to the emperor, but in the capital he was only a man. Sacrifices were performed for the emperor but not necessarily offered to him.16 Though power was concentrated in a single man, the empire respected local autonomy and local variations in religion and even in law. Jews in Palestine were not forced to adopt polytheism and were permitted to live by their own cultural and legal traditions. Augustus was able to balance Senate and military, old and new, religion and power, in a system that maintained the Roman Empire for two centuries." This was the religiopolitical system of the Principate, and, despite bumps and hiccoughs, it worked fairly well for a long time.

  By the end of the second century, this system was fracturing. The Senate was losing its ability to check imperial power, and the Severans of the third century began to draw their administrators from the lower equestrian class rather than the senatorial class that was originally essential to the Principate. Within the military, a meritocracy had replaced the old senatorial elite.18 Led by the youthful and bizarre Elagabalus (218-222), the Severans began to
adopt some of the trappings of Eastern kingship. Xenophon captured the Hellenistic notion of kingship in the life of Cyrus, who wore high heels, makeup, and dazzling clothing to enhance his power by overawing his subjects: he intended to "cast a sort of spell upon them."" Virgil had implicitly castigated Aeneas for the splendor of his Carthaginian attire; to dress like an African prince was a temptation to be resisted, and we know Aeneas is recovering his sense of destiny when he sheds his exotic attire for the simplicity of a toga. The marks of Roman imperial power were modesty, simplicity of dress, and self-restraint personally and, it was implied, militarily.20 Over time, the luxurious ways of the East-of Persia and North Africa, of Egypt and the Middle East-eroded Roman simplicity. By the time of Diocletian, emperors went about in purple robes, their golden shoes studded with jewels, accepting the prostrations of their subjects. Only the most intimate of the emperor's court could kiss his garment or enter behind the veil that screened the emperor from lesser men and see his Dominus face to face.21 In place of a Principate (the rule of the "first man") the empire of the early fourth century was a Dominate-the rule of a Dominus, a god on earth. Elagabalus had been assassinated for his excesses and his flouting of custom, but by the early fourth century a style similar to his had taken over the court.

  Just as important was the revision of citizenship that took place with the Antonine Constitution of 212. Promulgated by Caracalla, this edict granted citizenship to all free residents of the empire. It was an act more of economic desperation than of political generosity. A declining population and increasing military expenditures had created a serious financial crisis. Heavier taxes were laid on a smaller tax base, and in response many peasants abandoned the countryside, where they could no longer make a living in agriculture. Invaders meanwhile seized crops and animals from farmers, and when the invaders were expelled, the army seized them too.22 Agricultural production declined, and with it the base of taxation. Desperate for funds, Caracalla extended citizenship to every resident of the empire, and in doing so imposed the inheritance tax of Augustus on all.23

  Though fiscally motivated, the constitution had a profound effect on the character of the empire. The empire was transformed from a patchwork of cities with their own local cults, customs and laws into a single civitas, all its residents cives. Around the same time (223), Ulpian's treatise De officiis proconsulis was distributed to provincial governors as "the first standard collection of laws and their underlying principles that provincial governors had ever received."24 By the middle of the third century, the empire was theoretically a single city, with one law and one worship uniting its citizens. In such a situation, deviation from Roman religion was by definition treason.

  Such were the constitutional arrangements when Decius issued the first empire-wide edict of persecution in 249-250. According to this decree, all inhabitants of the empire, considered citizens since 212, had to sacrifice to unspecified "ancestral gods," taste sacrificial flesh, and take an oath to the effect that they had always sacrificed. Libelli from Egypt indicate that there was also a procedure for local confirmation that the sacrifice had taken place. Those who refused to sacrifice were exiled, lost property, or put to death. Though the edict applied to everyone, Decius may have had Christians particularly in view.25 If it was not wholly unprecedented, the theory behind Decius's edict represented a "substantial reversal of the ordinary practice of religion in the classical world" in its union of "local cult to the imperial government, on the imperial government's own terms."26 Valerian's persecution edict of 258 was explicitly aimed at Christians. He attempted to force Christians into normalcy by arresting leaders and demanding that they sacrifice, prohibiting Christian meetings, and forcing Christians out of the cemeteries where they honored the dead.27 By treating the whole empire as a religiously as well as politically united polis, Decius and Valerian were setting the foundations for Diocletian's later, more vicious, persecution.

  ROME MILITARIZED

  Another inevitable result of the external threats was an increase in the political importance of the army. Even before the third-century crisis, the army had spread throughout the empire, patrolling distant borderlands and suppressing rebellion. A single emperor could not be in all the places he was needed, and a single emperor had his hands full suppressing rivals who might take control of territory along the empire's frontier. As a result, the army was not always under imperial control. Quite the contrary: the emperor was beholden to the army for his power, and the army knew it. Rome's government became "militarized .112' As is often the case, iconography tells the story best. Octavius depicted himself on coins and statuary as a clean-shaven youth, serene and even luxuriating contemplatively in the peace he had established. Augustus was the eternally youthful one through whom the republic was reborn. During the third and into the fourth centuries, by contrast, emperors frequently had themselves depicted in mili tary gear, their expressions energetic, their grizzled faces testimony to their Spartan life on the front and their ceaseless labors to protect the empire.29

  With the militarization of the empire went a shift in the social location of power.30 The first Roman emperors had risen from ancient aristocratic families, some of the oldest and most established of the capital. As successive emperors expanded citizenship, Roman emperors began to emerge from throughout the empire, yet they were still from the aristocratic classes. Macrinus, who became emperor in 217, was the first Roman emperor who had never been a Roman senator. Through the third century, the emperor's physical distance from the original centers of Roman power increased. After 268, many of the emperors rose through the ranks of the military and had little contact with the traditional Roman aristocracy. Diocletian and Constantine both hailed from the Danubian provinces, regions known less for honorable ancestry than for banditry, barbarians, beasts and beer.3' The age of "soldier-emperors" had dawned.32 The effects of the erosion of power among traditional elites spread far beyond the ranks of those elites. Gone were the days when a Caesar could gain a following by sheer virtue of his august name. Disentangled from the networks of the capital, emperors of the late empire depended less and less on personal connections, social influence or family heritage and leaned more and more heavily on the sheer military power they could threaten or wield. The Dominate simply brought into the open a secret more chilling than the one Tacitus had already seen behind the facade of legitimation during the Principate-there was in fact nothing to stop an emperor from ruling by sheer terror.33

  The political and military challenges facing the empire had further interconnected cultural, economic, social and political consequences. Sol diers liked to be paid, and there were more to pay and they were more threatening. Taxation was increasingly levied directly by the state, not farmed out to semi-independent collectors; this new practice created both the impression and the reality of an increasingly intrusive government. In the provinces, locals grumbled about big government, as people do in Alabama and Idaho today. Eventually, the Roman government did what governments do-they debased the currency, reducing the silver content of denarii so low that in the 270s Aurelian issued "silver" coins that were only 5 percent silver.34 That was not the most disastrous of Aurelian's fiscal policies. For decades, inflation was held in check because the debased silver denarius was kept in a fixed ratio (1:25) to the gold aureus; even though the silver coins were not so silver anymore, they could always buy the same number of gold coins. Aurelian broke the link. Prices shot up eightfold in Egypt almost overnight, and no doubt his policies had similar effects throughout the empire.3s

  Given the need to patrol the borders of a far-flung empire and the need to lead the army personally, emperors were often far from home, and as a result Rome and Italy declined in strategic and functional importance.36 Some emperors rarely visited the city at all, apart from ceremonial occasions. Of the emperors and pretenders with whom Constantine contended for power, only Maxentius made Rome his base of operations. A generation later, Constantine's son Constantius was overwhelmed by the beauty
of the city when he first visited, long after he had become emperor.37 Increasingly, eastern cities, closer to the Persian and barbarian enemies, replaced Rome as centers of imperial power. Wherever the emperor stayed, a court developed, with buildings, baths, courtiers and probably courtesans aplenty. Milan in Italy, Trier and Arles in Gaul, Serdica, Sirmium, and Thessalonica in the Balkans became every bit as much capitals as Rome itself. Nicomedia was Diocletian's first city, and Constantine transformed the ancient backwater of Byzantium into mystical Constanti- nople.3S Rome was not the only city in decline. Populations were ravaged by periodic plagues'39 and taxes and other financial pressures limited the ability of civic elites to build on the extravagant scale of previous generations. Local leaders were responsible for funding local building, and they had no funds. Many tried to escape the responsibility of rule because of the financial burden. Cities were losing financial independence and were less autonomous in other ways, as power became concentrated in the emperor. It was a sign of the times when Diocletian executed the entire city council of Antioch because they presumed to raise an army for their own defense.40

  Religious invasions were equally a threat, especially strange sects from the direction of Persia, Rome's perennial enemy. Given the porosity of the political boundaries of the empire during the period, it is no surprise that the emperors felt the need to reassert traditional Roman religious standards 41 Most notably, there was Christianity. During the period of peace after Valerian's death in Persia, the church grew rapidly. Cities and city cults grew less popular, and Christianity was displaying impressive intellectual leadership, organizational strength, and, in persecution, courage. Christians were increasingly integrated into all aspects of imperial society, and despite disputes over lapsed bishops and monarchianism, the church was resilient. Though only 10 percent of the empire was Christian, by the end of the third century the church was too big and well organized to be safely ignored.42 The problem was not merely that the church was a growing and wellorganized religion; it was the kind of religion that the church was. It is surely an overstatement to say that Roman religion had nothing to do with belief,43 but Roman religion had never confronted anything like Christianity.