Ten Caesars

by Barry Strauss

  As was customary for many emperors, Constantine planned his burial place long before his death. Like Diocletian and Galerius, he turned his back on the city of Rome. Instead, Constantine chose a site on a hill in the western part of Constantinople, a place with views of the sea. There his remains would rest in a building that was both a mausoleum and a church. Called the Church of the Holy Apostles, it contained Constantine’s sarcophagus lying near memorials for the twelve apostles. The church housed the remains of apostles and other church fathers as well as relics from the Holy Land. There was also an altar, so that Constantine’s soul would enjoy the benefit of people worshipping the apostles.

  It was a magnificent building: tall, domed, and decorated with marble, bronze, and gold. Although no longer extant, it was fit for a king from what we know of it. More than a millennium after Constantine, in 1453, the Ottoman Turks conquered Constantinople. By then, the Church of the Holy Apostles was already falling down. The city’s new Ottoman ruler, Sultan Mehmed II the Conqueror, ordered that the remaining church be demolished and replaced by a mosque. The result was a splendid structure, the Conqueror’s Mosque (Fatih Camii), designed by the leading architect of the day. Damaged by a series of earthquakes, it was rebuilt several hundred years later according to a different design and still stands. Outside of the mosque is the tomb of Mehmed, the conqueror who made Constantinople a Muslim governed city. By associating himself with Constantine’s resting place, Mehmed strengthened his claim to be Kayser-i-Rum—that is, Caesar of Rome. So potent was the reputation of the man who remade the Roman Empire in a new image.

  LEGACY

  If another man rose from a minor position and defeated powerful opponents to conquer the empire, reform the military, overhaul administration, and create a dynasty, all the while displaying a remarkable energy that saw him fight in battles from northern Britain to the Rhineland, from Rome to the Danube, and from the Hellespont to the Euphrates, we would consider him a major figure. Yet Constantine is such a historical giant that these feats, all of which he achieved, seem minor. Instead, Christianity and Constantinople mark him. Like other emperors, Constantine left many monuments but none greater than the city that bears his name. Nor was he the only emperor to intervene in religion, but not even Augustus made as fateful a change as he did.

  Orthodox Christians recognize Constantine as a saint. Helena is a saint not only for Orthodox Christians but also for Roman Catholics and Anglicans. If Constantine was the father of Christianity as the Roman religion, then Helena was the mother.

  The triumph of Christianity was one of the most remarkable turnarounds in history. The preaching of an executed holy man in a corner of the empire became the favored religion of the Roman state and, indeed, by the end of the fourth century, the official state religion.

  The church was already a powerful force in Roman society when Diocletian unleashed the state against it, and its ability to survive the Great Persecution only made it stronger. It was necessary to find some way to reconcile the Roman state with what was, in a sense, a state within the state. Constantine was the way.

  Not since Augustus, had any emperor been so strikingly both insider and outsider before his rise to power as was Constantine. Both Augustus and Constantine made key allies of men in their own images; men with power and influence but not quite in the inner circle. For Augustus, it was the Roman knights of Italy and the surviving senatorial elite, while for Constantine, it was bishops, bureaucrats, and even barbarian kings. Both men courted provincial elites and, of course, the army.

  History offers few examples of men who understood power better than Constantine. His staggering ambition was matched only by his genius at self-presentation. We needn’t doubt his possession of a genuine strain of spirituality, but it was equaled by a taste for violence and a lust for power.

  He was one of history’s most creative and original statesmen. He changed Christianity from a minority religion to the dominant cultural force of the western world. He founded one of the greatest cities in history and shifted Rome’s strategic balance.

  Christianity’s change from victim of the Great Persecution to imperial religion seems dizzying, if not miraculous. Yet it follows a familiar Roman pattern. Whatever else they were, the emperors were pragmatists. Starting with Augustus, they survived by embracing change while maintaining what they could of the past. Sometimes change was relatively minor, like the uplifting of the Greek East under Hadrian. Sometimes it was radical, like the destruction of free, republican institutions under Caesar and Augustus and their replacement with monarchy. Often, change was violent, entailing civil war, confiscation of property, and execution.

  In retrospect, the Great Persecution and Constantine’s civil wars can be compared with the proscriptions under Augustus and his civil wars. In both cases, the result was a new regime but one rooted in the old one. In both cases, conservatives groaned and resisted, sometimes violently. Yet both times, the empire adjusted and survived. One big difference between the two cases, however, was geographical.

  Like many of his predecessors, Constantine looked to the East. The East gave Augustus his richest conquest, Egypt, but Augustus remained rooted in the West. The East propelled Vespasian to the throne—in Rome. It gave Hadrian his ideal, Marcus Aurelius his philosophy, and Septimius Severus his wife, but they too all focused on the Eternal City. Then Diocletian made the East his base. Constantine went further: he moved the axis of the empire eastward, both with a new capital city and with the new spiritual capital of Christianity, which was still rooted in the East.

  No one could see at the time of Constantine’s death that he had opened the door for the eclipse of Rome. Without meaning to, Constantine created the conditions for a Roman Empire without Rome, without Italy, and even without most of Europe. Constantine laid the foundation for three great eastern empires: the Muslim Caliphate, Russia, and the Eastern Roman Empire or, as it is better known today, the Byzantine Empire.

  At the same time, he unwittingly weakened the props that held up the Western Roman Empire. In the three generations after Constantine, no one man ruled the entire empire for more than fifteen years. Finally, in 395, within sixty years of Constantine’s death, the empire was officially divided into eastern and western halves. Never again did a single emperor rule from Britain to (northern) Iraq.

  The Roman West had always been poorer than the Roman East. Now it became less powerful as well. In the fifth century, Rome was sacked twice. Constantinople, meanwhile, was so well fortified that no adversary took the city for nine hundred years after Constantine founded it.

  Perhaps with better leadership and wiser use of resources, the Western Empire could have survived. But 139 years after Constantine died, the Roman Empire in the West ceased to exist. Invaders had already conquered most of its provinces, then they forced the emperor to abdicate. Young Romulus Augustulus gave up his power in the Italian city that had served for three generations as the capital of the Roman West, Ravenna, on September 4, 476.

  It was a sad end to the saga of the Roman West but not to the Roman Empire. The pragmatic Romans had simply moved eastward. The successors of Augustus continued to rule but not from Rome. The grandeur that was Constantinople had only just begun in 476.

  EPILOGUE

  THE GHOSTS OF RAVENNA

  Ravenna sits in northern Italy a few miles from the coast of the Adriatic Sea. For centuries, it was a seaport, but its harbor eventually silted over, and now the sea lies several miles away, connected to Ravenna by a canal. These days the town is a sleepy place, often overlooked among its famous neighbors, spectacular Venice and seaside Rimini. Yet Ravenna acquired a series of exquisite attractions long ago, in particular an alluring set of mosaics. They quietly recall the forgotten time when the Roman Empire fell in the West and rose in the East. More than any place else, Ravenna evokes Rome’s imperial twilight.

  Today a visitor there confronts a set of ghosts. The first ghost is the imperial palace that once dominated the town. In the years a
fter Constantine, the usual capital of the Western Roman Empire was Mediolanum, rather than Rome or Augusta Treverorum. But over the course of the fourth century, the empire lost the ability to defend Italy from attack. After a Germanic tribe laid siege to Mediolanum, it was apparent that the city was too exposed on the northern Italian plain to continue to serve as the capital. Ravenna was safer. It enjoyed the protection of a ring of marshes, breeding grounds for malaria until recent times. Ravenna also had a good harbor in those days, allowing for reinforcements by sea—or for escape. Augustus had recognized Ravenna’s strategic advantages and made it the eastern Italian homeport of the Roman imperial fleet.

  So in the fifth century, Ravenna became the capital of the Western Roman Empire. A dozen men ruled as emperor from Ravenna, and their palace was grand. At least, it must have been grand, but we don’t know for sure because nothing remains of it.

  The last of the Ravenna Roman emperors lived there. His name was Romulus Augustus, and he came to power in 475. He had two famous names: that of Rome’s legendary founder and its first king, Romulus, as well as its first emperor, Augustus, but they belied the new emperor’s feebleness. His nickname, Augustulus, “Little Augustus,” is closer to the truth. He was only fifteen when he came to the throne. His father, a general, was the real power. He had conquered Ravenna and deposed the previous emperor. For some reason, he preferred putting his son in power rather than rule himself. Romulus Augustulus governed an empire that had shrunk to Italy and southern Gaul. He lacked legitimacy, as the Eastern Roman emperor did not recognize his rule.

  The real power in Italy was Flavius Odoacer. He was the foreign chieftain—perhaps a German, although that is uncertain—who led the Germanic mercenaries of Italy. Like many earlier Roman soldiers, those mercenaries wanted land of their own. Romulus Augustulus’s father refused them, so they revolted. The mercenaries killed both Romulus Augustulus’s father and uncle, and then took Ravenna.

  They spared the young emperor’s life, but they forced him to leave the palace. They gave Romulus Augustulus a generous pension and exiled him to a seaside villa overlooking the Bay of Naples. Along with him went his relatives, possibly including his mother. Odoacer was proclaimed king of Italy. Meanwhile, the Senate in Rome—that body still existed—took the symbols of imperial power, including the diadem and cloak, and sent them to the emperor in Constantinople, as if to say that the western emperor no longer existed.

  The date of Romulus Augustulus’s abdication, September 4, 476, came a little more than five hundred years since Octavian was proclaimed Augustus in Rome, and 139 years after Constantine died. The Roman Empire in the West ceased to exist, although Odoacer and the other Germanic rulers who came after him considered themselves worthy successors to the purple. They supported Italy’s Roman art and literature, just as earlier emperors had. They continued to sponsor gorgeous mosaics and monuments in Ravenna, for example.

  But Germans now ruled the Western empire. Roman citizens of the West would hold very high governmental office, but none of them would be emperor again.

  Writing about a century later, an author described Romulus Augustulus as the last ruler of “the Western Empire of the Roman race,” noting that from “then on, kings of the Goths, a Germanic people, held Rome and Italy.” A rival Western emperor, Julius Nepos, claimed to rule as late as 480, but not from Italy; he lived in exile in Dalmatia, where the father of Romulus Augustulus had forced him to flee in 475. Nepos was eventually murdered.

  What went wrong? Why did men “of the Roman race” cease ruling in the West? Suffice it to say that, one by one, the provinces of the Western empire fell into the hands of various non-Roman invaders. Here are some dates of note: By 410, the Romans had pulled out of Britain. In 418 they settled Goths, a Germanic people, in southwestern Gaul. In 435 they conceded much of North Africa to Vandals, another Germanic invader.

  Then there were attacks that terrified Romans without depriving the empire of land. In the 440s and 450s, Attila and the Huns, a nomadic Mongolian people who were fierce cavalrymen, invaded the Balkans, Gaul, and Italy. Although they plundered several cities and extorted gold, they did not conquer any Roman territory. Meanwhile, barbarians sacked the city of Rome itself in 410 and again in 455.

  By conquering Rome’s vital grain-producing provinces in North Africa, the Vandals cut Italy’s food lifeline. Only the Eastern Roman Empire, based in Constantinople, had the resources to raise a military expedition to try to reopen it. Yet when the Eastern Roman fleet tried to land in what is now Tunisia, the Vandals destroyed it in a fire-ship attack launched at night. The Battle of Cap Bon in 468 spelled doom for the Roman Empire in the West.

  Gibbon suggested long ago that Christianity played a big role in the fall of Rome because it sapped the fighting spirit of its people. This is nonsense. The eastern half of the Roman Empire was more passionately Christian than the west, and it did not fall in 476. In fact, it remained as an empire for another 150 years, until the Islamic conquest of most of it. Afterward, it survived as a regional power for another 800 years, finally coming to an end only in 1453, nearly 1,000 years after the fall of the West. Nor did Christianity stop European states from fighting one another and conquering much of the world for the better part of two millennia.

  The Roman Empire in the West fell because of bad leadership as well as poorly deployed military resources, internal division, strong enemies, unfavorable geography, and a decline of resources. The empire would have other great leaders before the West fell, but most of them would be in the East.

  The money, the talent, and the power flowed eastward. The great capital city of Constantinople had no western equivalent. Nor was there any comparable fortress in the West.

  Constantine fortified his new city well, both on land and sea. Within a century, the town expanded far beyond his land walls. So, early in the fifth century, the Romans built a new and even stronger set of walls about a mile farther west, which doubled the area of the city. The mighty set of land walls—an inner and outer wall protected by a moat—stretched for three and a half miles. They were connected to sea walls that guarded the city from attack by sea.

  While Rome reeled from its sacks, Constantinople rose higher. And that will bring us, by a roundabout way, to the second set of Ravenna’s ghosts. They are found, at the outset, in Constantinople, which reached one of its peaks during the reign of Justinian (527–565) and Theodora (527–548), the emperor and empress. They dominate the early history of the Byzantine Empire, as it is known today. (Ironically, the term Byzantine did not come into use until after the Eastern Empire fell.)

  In the tradition of Augustus and Constantine, Justinian was a great conqueror, legislator, administrator, and builder who presided over an era of great literature and art. In the East, he maintained Byzantine rule against a powerful Persian offensive. In the West, his generals conquered Italy and part of North Africa. He was unable to stop attacks in the Balkans and incapable of preventing the settlement of Slavs and Bulgars in Byzantine territory.

  As a legislator, Justinian was one of the most influential in history. He sponsored an initiative to codify Roman law that led to the Justinian Code, a magisterial reference work that had a major influence on the Western legal tradition. As an administrator, he promoted good government, attacked corruption, and promoted trade.

  As a builder, Justinian sponsored a grand program of public works including bridges, forts, aqueducts, orphanages, and even whole cities. His most famous project was the Church of the Holy Wisdom, or Hagia Sophia, in Constantinople, which still stands today, now as a museum. Like Nero and Hadrian, Justinian built a domed structure as his architectural masterpiece. Decorated lavishly inside by mosaics, it was the world’s largest cathedral for a thousand years. Justinian was so stunned by the magnificence of the building when he first saw it completed that he exclaimed, “Solomon, I have outdone thee!” referring to the Jewish king who built the First Temple in Jerusalem.

  As head of the Orthodox Christian Church
, Justinian turned the screws on heretics, pagans, Jews, and Samaritans (who followed a different version of Judaism than the rabbinical tradition observed by most Jews). He expelled pagan teachers from the Platonic Academy in Athens and alienated many Christians in Egypt and Syria, who followed a non-Orthodox theology. He prohibited an essential part of Judaism, rabbinical interpretations of the Hebrew Bible. Many of Justinian’s prohibitions were honored only in the breach, but he did stir up riot and revolt.

  Theodora came from a humble background and worked as an actress, a disreputable profession. But she was shrewd and brilliant as well as beautiful. She earned Justinian’s love. He married her and named her Augusta. She had great influence in his regime. Theodora is remembered for bucking up Justinian’s courage in the face of riots in Constantinople that almost drove him from his throne. “Royal purple is the noblest shroud,” she told him and convinced a shaky emperor to stand and fight. Soon afterward, one of his generals crushed the rioters. Theodora is also remembered for sponsoring legislation to help women by stopping forced prostitution and giving women greater rights in divorce and in owning property.

  There would be many great Byzantine emperors and empresses after Justinian and Theodora, but, in a sense, they represented a final flowering for Rome, for they were the last great rulers of the Eastern Empire to speak Latin. Afterward, Greek became the language of the rulers and their government, as it was of the eastern Mediterranean. Yet they continued to call themselves Roman.

  And so did the people of Ravenna. They too were part of Justinian’s empire. His greatest general captured Ravenna from the Germanic people who had seized it earlier. He “reclaimed” Italy for the Roman Empire, although Italy had not been ruled from Constantinople since 395. But now the Byzantines were in Italy, and they stayed for two hundred years, with Ravenna serving as their seat. The city experienced a long cultural Renaissance, but its iconic moment came at the start. Shortly after the Byzantine conquest, a fabulous set of mosaics was executed in the city’s Church of San Vitale. Twin mosaic panels flanking the apse depict Justinian and Theodora. Each ruler appears in a halo against a shimmering gold background, surrounded by a splendid set of lords and ladies and by clergymen and armed soldiers, as if they and their retinues were right there in the church. These gorgeous images are the iconic portraits of the two rulers. They hold a place of honor in the history of medieval art.