Diocletian was making one more effort to refine that troublesome idea of Roman. Instead of submission to an emperor, the citizens of Rome were now being asked to submit to the idea of imperial authority. The change of clothing was more than public theatrics. Diocletian was attempting to demonstrate that the emperor represented Rome, for a time, but that the task of representative was greater than the personality who undertook it.
85.3 The Roman Empire, Divided
Briefly, this worked. Constantius became emperor of Gaul, Italy, and Africa; Galerius became emperor of the east; and two more Caesars were chosen to become their junior colleagues. But when Constantius died in 306, only a year after his accession, the army pushed its way back into the succession. The troops had not grasped Diocletian’s subtle redefinition of imperial power, and Constantius had been enormously popular with the army in the west. Now they demanded that young Constantine, his son from his previous marriage, inherit his power. The irrational desire for a king’s son to inherit his power, no matter what his character, had existed in the human race ever since the days of Etana of Sumer. It was still strong three thousand years later.
This was exactly what Diocletian had hoped to avoid, but now the old habits clashed with his new institution. The eastern emperor, Galerius, insisted that Constantius’s junior Severus become emperor of the west as planned. And then the lust for power (which had existed at least since Gilgamesh) reappeared as well. Maximian, who had never wanted to retire in the first place, threw his hat back in the ring. He marched on the unfortunate Severus—with the help of Constantine, who was Severus’s rival for rule of the west—and defeated him.
Now the empire was in a more complicated mess than ever before. The only man with the legal right to rule was Galerius; Severus was dead and Maximian was supposed to be retired, Constantine was supporting Maximian’s return to power and had also married Maximian’s daughter, which meant that his step-grandfather was also his father-in-law. And Maximian’s son, Maxentius, could now see that if his father became full emperor, he would be next in line—as long as Constantine, his brother-in-law, didn’t interfere.
A whole welter of battles broke out, with power shifting from one man to another, and from east to west, while the inhabitants of the empire covered their heads and waited it out. By 312, the array of conflicts had funnelled down into one looming conflict: Constantine and his army, north of Rome, planning an attack on Maxentius. Maximian himself had committed suicide two years earlier, humiliated by his inability to reclaim his old throne; Maxentius was in control of Rome, with troops of his own.
Constantine began his march down towards Rome in October. According to the church historian Eusebius, whose source for his accounts seems to have been Constantine himself, he justified this attack in a very familiar way: “Theroyal city of the Roman empire, was bowed down by the weight of a tyrannous oppression,” Eusebius writes, “…[and] he said that life was without enjoyment to him as long as he saw the imperial city thus afflicted, and prepared himself for the overthrowal of the tyranny.”19
85.1 Shifts of Power in the Roman Empire.
But the days were long past when the simple claim to be a liberator would serve to unite an empire behind a conqueror; the Romans in the capital city had seen too many liberators who offered a different version of enslavement. Constantine needed some more powerful flag under which to march.
Eusebius himself seems uncomfortable with what happened next. Constantine, considering whether he might claim some Roman god as the sponsor of his quest (something which had worked well for Shapur I over in Persia) had a vision.
A most marvelous sign appeared to him from heaven, the account of which it might have been hard to believe had it been related by any other person. But since the victorious emperor himself long afterwards declared it to the writer of this history, when he was honored with his acquaintance and society, and confirmed his statement by an oath, who could hesitate to accredit the relation…? He said that about noon, when the day was already beginning to decline, he saw with his own eyes the trophy of a cross of light in the heavens, above the sun, and bearing the inscription, Conquer by this. At this sight he himself was struck with amazement…. [W]hile he continued to ponder and reason on its meaning, night suddenly came on; then in his sleep the Christ of God appeared to him with the same sign which he had seen in the heavens, and commanded him to make a likeness of that sign which he had seen in the heavens, and to use it as a safeguard in all engagements with his enemies.20
Eusebius’s gingerly account may reflect an orthodox Christian doubt about the latter part of this vision, since Christian theology generally discouraged this kind of magical thinking. But Constantine acted on it, engraving the first two Greek letters in the name of Christ, the chi and rho, onto his helmet and placing it on his standard.
At Constantine’s approach, Maxentius and his army came out of the city and marched along the Via Flamina, across the Tiber river, to make their stand in front of the Milvian Bridge. Constantine would have to go through them to cross the bridge into the city.
Maxentius’s army outnumbered Constantine’s, but Eusebius mentions that there had been famine inside the city; possibly his soldiers were not at the strongest. Constantine’s attack turned them back towards the Tiber. The Milvian Bridge was too narrow to hold their retreat, so the fleeing soldiers tried to build a makeshift pontoon bridge beside it. The overloaded boats sank, drowning hundreds of them. Among the retreating soldiers drowned was Maxentius, dragged down into the Tiber by his armor. Constantine was master of the city; before long, he would be master of the empire as well.
85.2. Constantine. Marble bust of Constantine the Great, Emperor of Rome 306–337. Palazzo dei Conservatori, Rome. Photo credit Archive Timothy McCarthy/Art Resource, NY
Eusebius, telling the story of Maxentius’s end, cannot keep himself from quoting the words used by the victorious Israelites when they emerged from the Red Sea with the Egyptians drowning behind them: “So the victors might well say: Let us sing unto the Lord, for he has thrown the horse and chariot into the sea.”21 Those were words sung by a people whose faith was connected to their political existence as a nation; something Christians had never been. But Constantine saw in Christianity some hope for the future of his own nation. In three centuries of perseverance, that Christian identity—an identity that became absolutely central to those who held onto it, yet did not wipe out the other identities that had come before it—had proved itself stronger than any other.
The Roman Empire had drawn lines around itself, subjugated its allies, and demanded submission first to an emperor, and then to some ideal of the emperor’s authority; and the empire had grown more and more ragged and contentious. Meanwhile, the Christians had survived bloody wars and had spread across a good part of the known world. Christianity had done what Rome had never managed: it had spread out from its land of origin, from its narrow beginnings as a Jewish cult, and had become an identity which had drawn Jews, Gentiles, Thracians, Greeks, Syrians, and Romans into a single fold.
In allying himself with the Christian God at the Milvian Bridge, Constantine had turned the empire into something new. He had abandoned that fruitless quest to find a Romanness that was rooted in the city of Rome, but could also transcend it. Instead, he had chosen something else to take its place. When he went forwards into the battle with the name of Christ on his standard, he was staking his future on the gamble that this would be the key to holding the whole thing together.
This was the end of the old Rome. But it would turn out to be the rise of something much more powerful, both for good and for evil.
Notes
Preface
1. From the collection published in Archives royales de Mari, vol. X, 123; translated and quoted by Bertrand Lafont in “The Women of the Palace at Mari,” in Everyday Life in Ancient Mesopotamia by Jean Bottéro (2001), pp. 129–134. I am grateful to Mr. Lafont for summarizing the quarrel between Kirum and Shimatum.
2. Bott
éro, p. 130.
Chapter One The Origin of Kingship
1. Translated by Samuel Kramer, as Appendix E of The Sumerians: Their History, Culture, and Character (1963), p. 328.
2. See, for example, Charles Pellegrino, Return to Sodom and Gomorrah (1994), p. 155 ff.
3. In M. E. L. Mallowan, Early Mesopotamia and Iran (1965), p. 7.
4. Translated by Gwendolyn Leick in Mesopotamia: The Invention of the City (2001), p. 1.
5. Translated by Diane Wolkstein and Samuel Noah Kramer in Inanna, Queen of Heaven and Earth: Her Stories and Hymns from Sumer (1983), p. 33.
Chapter Two The Earliest Story
1. My paraphrase, drawn from the prose translation by N. K. Sandars, The Epic of Gilgamesh (1972), p. 110.
2. My paraphrase, drawn from the translation offered by Bottéro, p. 69.
3. Quoted in William Ryan and Walter Pitman, Noah’s Flood: The New Scientific Discoveries about the Event that Changed History (2000), p. 54. I am grateful to Mr. Ryan and Mr. Pitman for their cogent summary of scholarly research on the flood.
4. Ryan and Pitman, p. 57.
5. This is the position taken by Charles Pellegrino, for example, in Return to Sodom and Gomorrah.
6. Quoted in John Keay, India: A History (2000), pp. 1–2.
7. See Peter James and Nick Thorpe, Ancient Mysteries (1999), p. 13.
8. Sandars, p. 112.
9. Quoted in Ryan and Pitman, p. 50.
10. Origin de los Indias, quoted by Lewis Spence in The Myths of Mexico and Peru (1994), p. 108.
11. Translated by Samuel Kramer and quoted in Bottéro, p. 19.
12. Richard J. Mouw, “‘Some Poor Sailor, Tempest Tossed’: Nautical Rescue Themes in Evangelical Hymnody,” in Wonderful Words of Life: Hymns in American Protestant History and Theology, ed. Richard J. Mouw and Mark A. Noll (2004), p. 249.
Chapter Three The Rise of Aristocracy
1. Michael Rice, Egypt’s Making: The Origins of Ancient Egypt 5000–2000 BC (2003), p. 73.
2. Stephanie Dalley, ed. and trans., Myths from Mesopotamia (2000), p. 196.
3. Ibid., pp. 198–199.
4. Pellegrino, p. 39.
5. Harriet Crawford, Sumer and the Sumerians (1991), p. 23.
Chapter Four The Creation of Empire
1. Rice, p. 11.
2. David P. Silverman, general ed., Ancient Egypt (2003), p. 107.
3. A. Rosalie David, Religion and Magic in Ancient Egypt (2002), p. 46.
4. Gerald P. Verbrugghe and John M. Wickersham, Berossos and Manetho, Introduced and Translated: Native Traditions in Ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt (1996), p. 131.
Chapter Five The Age of Iron
1. Stanley Wolpert, A New History of India (2004), p. 11.
2. Keay, p. 2.
Chapter Six The Philosopher King
1. J. A. G. Roberts, The Complete History of China (2003), p. 3.
2. Anne Birrell, Chinese Mythology: An Introduction (1993), p. 46.
Chapter Seven The First Written Records
1. Steven Roger Fischer, A History of Writing (2001), pp. 25–26. Fischer gives credit to Denise Schmandt-Besserat as the “leading proponent of this theory,” and points out that this theory (like pretty much every other theory about the origin of writing) is still debatable.
2. Quoted in W. V. Davies, Egyptian Hieroglyphs: Reading the Past (1987), p. 47.
Chapter Eight The First War Chronicles
1. “Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta,” translated by J. A. Black, et al., in The Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature at http://www.etcsl.orient.ox.ac.uk/(1998–); hereafter abbreviated as ETC.
2. Translated by Sandars, p. 61.
3. Sandars, p. 71. I am indebted to N. K. Sandars for highlighting, in the introductory essay to her translation, the various historical possibilities that might lie at the root of Gilgamesh’s journey north.
4. The version of the Tummal Inscription I am working with is found in Kramer, The Sumerians, pp. 78–80. Dr. Kramer also matches the inscription to the king list to show the progress of the war between the three cities.
5. “Gilgamesh and Agga of Kish,” in ETC.
Chapter Nine The First Civil War
1. Herodotus, The Histories, translated by Robin Waterfield (1998), 2.99.
2. Ian Shaw, ed., The Oxford History of Ancient Egypt (2002), pp. 68–69.
3. Rudolf Anthes, “Egyptian Theology in the Third Millennium B.C.,” Journal of Near Eastern Studies 18:3 (1959), p. 171.
4. Ibid.
5. Ian Cunnison, The Luapula Peoples of Northern Rhodesia (1959), p. 98.
6. Edmund Leach, “The Mother’s Brother in Ancient Egypt,” RAIN [Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland] 15 (1976), p. 20.
7. Shaw, p. 9.
8. William Flinders Petrie, Researches in Sinai (1906), p. 41.
9. Rice, p. 14.
10. Peter A. Clayton, Chronicle of the Pharaohs: The Reign-by-Reign Record of the Rulers and Dynasties of Ancient Egypt (1994), p. 28.
Chapter Ten The First Epic Hero
1. Dalley, p. 42 ff.
2. The quotes from the Epic of Gilgamesh are, more or less, mine. I have based them on the structure of the N. K. Sandars translation, but I have slightly condensed some of them, clarified the difficult words, and often modified them based on the translations supplied by Samuel Kramer, Maureen Gallery Kovacs, and Stephanie Dalley.
3. Drawn almost entirely from the Sandars translation, pp. 118–119.
Chapter Eleven The First Victory over Death
1. Clayton, p. 33.
2. Richard L. Zettler and Lee Horne, Treasures from the Royal Tombs of Ur (1998), p. 29.
3. This is J. M. Roberts’s suggestion in The Penguin History of the World (1997), p. 71.
4. Herodotus, 2.12.
5. Paul Jordan, Riddles of the Sphinx (1998), p. 73.
6. Clayton, p. 45.
7. Herodotus, 2.124.
8. Herodotus 2.126.
9. Bruce G. Trigger, “Monumental Architecture: A Thermodynamic Explanation of Symbolic Behavior,” World Archaeology 22:2 (1990), p. 119.
10. Dean Hardy and Marjorie Killick, Pyramid Energy: The Philosophy of God, the Science of Man (1994), p. 169.
11. Peter Tompkins, Secrets of the Great Pyramid (1971), p. xiv.
12. James and Thorpe, p. 208.
Chapter Twelve The First Reformer
1. Translated by Samuel Kramer, The Sumerians, p. 51.
2. Ibid., p. 313.
3. John Winthrop Hackett, ed., Warfare in the Ancient World (1989), p. 4.
4. Leick, Mesopotamia, p. 149.
5. I. M. Diakonoff, ed., Early Antiquity (1991), p. 82.
6. Translated by Samuel Kramer, From the Tablets of Sumer (1956), p. 48.
7. Diakonoff, p. 82.
8. J. S. Cooper, Sumerian and Akkadian Royal Inscriptions, vol. 1, Presargonic Inscriptions (1986), p. 78.
9. Nels Bailkey, “Early Mesopotamian Constitutional Development,” American Historical Review 72:4 (1967), p. 1222.
10. Translated by Kramer, The Sumerians, pp. 323–324.
11. Leick, Mesopotamia, p. 150.
12. Translated by Kramer, The Sumerians, pp. 322–323.
13. Cooper, p. 95.
14. Crawford, p. 25.
Chapter Thirteen The First Military Dictator
1. Adapted from the translation provided by James B. Pritchard, ed., in The Ancient Near East: An Anthology of Texts and Pictures (1958), pp. 85–86, with clarification of certain terms from the explanation provided by Gwendolyn Leick in Mesopotamia, p. 94.
2. J. M. Roberts, p. 51.
3. Translated by Kramer, The Sumerians, p. 330.
4. Xenophon, The Education of Cyrus, translated by Wayne Ambler (2001), 1.3.8–9.
5. “The Sargon Legend, Segment B,” in ETC.
6. Translated by Kramer, The Sumerians, p. 324.
7. Diakonoff, p. 85.
8. Ibid.
9. Translated
by Kramer, The Sumerians, p. 324.
10. H. W. F. Saggs, The Might That Was Assyria (1984), p. 19.
11. Adapted from Benjamin R. Foster, Before the Muses: An Anthology of Akkadian Literature, vol. 1 (1996), p. 254.
12. Michael Roaf, Cultural Atlas of Mesopotamia and the Ancient Near East (1996), p. 97.
13. A. Leo Oppenheim, Ancient Mesopotamia: Portrait of a Dead Civilization (1977), p. 154.
14. Diakonoff, p. 86.
15. Bailkey, p. 1225. Bailkey’s footnotes contain a full bibliography of the Old Babylonian inscriptions, the so-called Omen Texts, that record the revolt.
16. Leick, Mesopotamia, p. 99.
Chapter Fourteen The First Planned Cities
1. Keay, p. 6.
2. Wolpert, pp. 14–15.
3. Fischer, p. 61.
4. Wolpert, p. 18.
5. Keay, p. 13.
6. Hermann Kulke and Dietmar Rothermund, A History of India (1998), p. 23.
7. Ibid., pp. 22–23.
8. Terminology and measurements supplied by Kulke and Rothermund, p. 23, and Keay, pp. 8–9.
Chapter Fifteen The First Collapse of Empire
1. Herodotus, 2.127–128.
2. Jordan, p. 80.
3. Ibid., p. xvii.
4. Herodotus, 2.129.
5. Herodotus, 2.133.
6. Herodotus, 2.131.
7. Clayton, p. 60.
8. A. Rosalie David, The Egyptian Kingdoms (1988), p. 16.
9. Spell 217 translated by J. H. Breasted in Development of Religion and Thought in Ancient Egypt (University of Chicago Press, 1912); the following spell, 309, translated by R. O. Faulkner in The Ancient Pyramid Texts (Clarendon Press, 1969); both quoted by Jon E. Lewis, ed., Ancient Egypt (2003), pp. 27–29.
10. Clayton, p. 64.
11. Quoted in Clayton, p. 67.
12. Colin McEvedy, The New Penguin Atlas of Ancient History (2002), p. 36.
Chapter Sixteen The First Barbarian Invasions
1. Kramer, The Sumerians, p. 61.
2. Roaf, p. 98.
3. First noted by Hugo Radau, Early Babylonian History Down to the End of the Fourth Dynasty of Ur (1899), p. 307.
The History of the Ancient World: From the Earliest Accounts to the Fall of Rome Page 81
