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

by Peter J. Leithart

  The emperor was also a sacral figure, surrounded by an impenetrable glow of holiness.74 When he became emperor, Constantine maintained aspects of this ceremony but treated it lightly. According to Eusebius, Constantine displayed the best of both worlds: he dutifully wore his "raiment, interwoven with gold, finished with intricate blossoms," for the sake of his "subjects' sense of proper style," but he "laughed" at it and had himself depicted in a traditional toga, distributing coins to senators, on the final panel in the frieze of his arch .71

  Jupiter was more than the emperor's distant patron. Diocletian fancied himself virtually an incarnation of the chief god of the Roman pantheon. A panegyrist honoring the emperor in 291 called him a "visible and present Jupiter, near at hand."76 Jupiter was the "creator of Diocletian,"77 and Diocletian the only begotten son of father Jupiter. Other panegyrists drew on the mythologies of Jupiter to add a mystical glow to Diocletian's political accomplishments:

  Jupiter Optimus Maximus was the preserve of the Roman community, the god who had defeated the old race of the Titans and founded a new Olympian race.... In selecting Jupiter as his divine father, Diocletian claimed responsibility for defeating the usurpers, asserted his right to command the empire, and identified himself as the source of the other emperors' authority and the founder of a new golden age. In choosing to call Maximian "Heraculius," Diocletian conveyed similarly important information about his partner. Hercules was Jupiter's son by the mortal woman Alcmene and, as Jupiter's helper, a hero for whom nothing was too difficult.... Consequently, Maximian's new name symbolically asserted that he owed his power and divinity to Diocletian. It further confirmed his subordinate role by suggesting that, like Jupiter, Diocletian initiated action and, like Hercules, Maximian carried it out 78

  The two Caesars likewise adopted divine patrons-Galerius, appropriately, worked under the oversight of Mars, while Constantius was under the patronage of Apollo, the sun god so often linked with his son.79

  Lactantius took Diocletian's political theology seriously. Like other pagan and Christian writers, Lactantius adopted the euhemerist theory, which taught that the gods were mere men whose reputations had inflated after death, and from this angle he criticized the political theology of the Tetrarchy. To Lactantius, Diocletian's association with Jupiter was no compliment: Jove was "a traitor from his early youth since he drove his father from his reign and chased him away. Nor did he wait for the death of the broken old man in his desire for rule."80 Jupiter, further, did not preside over the golden age; Saturn did, and the reason for the prosperity of Saturn's tenure was that he permitted the worship of the true God. By now excluding that worship, Diocletian was undermining the aspirations of his own political program. Further, the Tetrarchy did not adhere to the structure of the world. Since there was only one God, there should be a single princeps, and Lactantius attempted to convince pagan monotheists as well as Christians of the point.S1

  Diocletian ruled for nearly two decades without persecuting Christians, so it would be a mistake to say that persecution was a deliberate part of his program for Roman renewal. 12 Yet persecution of Manichaeans and Christians was not some strange aberration of imperial policy but consistent with Diocletian's entire political theology. For Diocletian, the Tetrarchy was rooted in traditional Roman religion, and loyalty to the former had to be expressed by participation in the latter. The peace that Diocletian aimed to preserve was not a secular peace. It was the "peace of the gods," a pax deorum.83

  CONCLUSION

  On Roman terms, Diocletian's reign was a success. The empire was safe and free of internal strife. He stayed in power twenty years, a reign long enough to provide some measure of stability. His reorganization of the empire outlasted him. Together with Constantine, he could be considered a savior of the Roman Empire.

  On the three crises of the day-the border, the succession, and the Christians-Diocletian achieved midterm success only with the first. As we will see in the next chapter, his solution to the succession problem barely outlasted his retirement. His economic policies were a disaster. He attempted to arrest inflation by issuing a Price Edict that set maximum prices on many goods, which had the expected effect of driving goods and services to the black market. Lactantius complained loudly of the brutality of Diocletian's tax policies, and he was not the only one who did so.

  When things went badly, Diocletian adopted the time-tested policy of finding someone to blame. He blamed the Christians for failing to honor the gods, just as later pagans would blame Christians for the evils suffered at the hands of barbarians. Once Diocletian got started persecuting, however, he had no chance of success. Too many Christians stood their ground, and the church was clearly not going anywhere. Pagans had grown in their admiration of Christian fortitude, and some pagans even offered sanctuary to Christians fleeing from the authorities. Diocletian had forced the issue and was faced down by a vigorous and growing minority within the empire, a minority who by the Antonine Constitution were citizens of Rome but who consistently and courageously refused to take part in sacrifice, one of the central defining acts of Roman citizenship. Something would have to budge, either the demands of Roman citizenship or the church, and the church showed no signs of budging.

  You must share some secret with that divine mind, Constantine, which has delegated care of us to lesser gods and deigns to reveal itself to you alone.

  PANEGYRIC XII, CA. 313

  On May 1, 305, Diocletian gathered his troops in his capital Nicomedia and led a procession out to a hill three miles from the city. A column had been erected on the site, topped by an image of Jupiter. Twenty years before, Diocletian had stood on this same hilltop, slaughtered the "boar" Aper, and taken command of the Roman Empire as the "son of Jupiter." On this spring day, still under the aegis of the king of the gods, he was preparing to do something no Roman emperor had ever done.

  Surrounded by common soldiers wearing red or undyed tunics, centurions with breastplates adorned with ornaments of valor, senior commanders whose white helmet plumes fluttered in the breeze blowing off the Sea of Maramara, Diocletian mounted a platform and began to speak. Galerius Armentarius ("cow-keeper")' glared down from the dais, and Diocletian was also joined by the young commander Constantine-tall, his large head, hooked nose, and intense eyes giving him a look of confident mastery-along with Galerius's friend Maximinus Daia.

  In a gesture as dramatic as it was unprecedented, Diocletian announced that he was retiring as Augustus and was prepared to name his successor. A few years before, he had suffered a sickness serious enough to raise rumors of his death, and he was weary from years of care, travel, and battle. It was time to remove himself and leave power to others. The senior Augustus of the Tetrarchy bid a tearful farewell to the troops on whose loyalty and skill the stability of his empire had depended.

  According to Lactantius, who had taught rhetoric in Nicomedia until the persecution decree of 303, all eyes were on Constantine. His father was Caesar of the West, and Constantine had distinguished himself in service to the aging Diocletian. He had marched with Diocletian to Thebes and was in the emperor's army when Diocletian visited the ruins of ancient Mesopotamia.' He appeared to be an imperator oriens, a "rising emperor," groomed to take his position as Caesar. It was no surprise when Diocletian appointed Caesar Galerius as his successor as Augustus of the Eastern empire, but by Lactantius's account, everyone was astonished when Maximinus Daia3 stepped forward to stand between Diocletian and Galerius and receive the purple cloak that Diocletian had removed from his shoulders. Constantine held his composure, but he and many in the crowd were deeply disappointed.

  A civilian again, no longer Diocletian but Diodes, the former emperor descended, climbed into a cart, and returned to Nicomedia. Soon after, he retired to his splendid villa on the waterfront in the city of Salonae (now the Croatian city of Split) on the Dalmatian coast, to enjoy the subtropical warmth, tend his cabbages, and wait for death.'

  On the same spring day on the other side of the empire, a sim
ilar event was taking place. In Milan, the Western Herculian Augustus Maximian also returned to civilian life, elevated Constantius to the position of Au gustus, and appointed Severus to replace Constantius in the junior position as Caesar.

  With its four armies and four emperors, the Tetrarchy was fairly successful at meeting the threats to the empire's periphery. But Diocletian's solution to the religion problem, which was destined to be the determining factor in the empire's future, had backfired, and so had his abortive efforts to solve the empire's fiscal crisis. His solution to the succession program fared no better. Diocletian had no sons, and he had constructed the Tetrarchy to ensure a peaceful transition of power to the next generation. By this mechanism the empire would, Diocletian hoped, be spared the bloodletting that had stained the succession for generations.

  If the basic rationale behind the simultaneous abdications of the emperors was obvious enough, the import of their decision was not. A panegyrist claimed in 307 that the decision had been made some time before when Diocletian and Maximian met behind the gold-plated doors of the temple of Capitoline Jupiter in Rome.5 Perhaps, as Jacob Burckhardt has argued, Diocletian intended to initiate a system in which tetrarchs would retire after a twenty-year term, and perhaps too he intended to initiate a system that undermined dynastic pretentions.b All of this is speculation, since neither Diocletian nor Maximian left any record of their reasons or the plan for successions in the future.

  Lactantius claimed it was a sudden and rash decision and, as usual, blamed Galerius. Whether or not Galerius pressured Diocletian into abdication, he was certainly the beneficiary of the new arrangements. Neither of the Caesars was well known prior to their elevation-except to Galerius. The new Eastern Caesar, Daia, was Galerius's nephew, and Severus had fought alongside Galerius for years. Behind the decision Lactantius saw a Galerian plot, an effort to isolate the one independent member of the imperial college, Constantinius, force him to retire, and replace him with another ally, Licinius. Eventually Galerius planned to leave the empire to Candidianus, his own son.7

  Galerius's actions gave some support to Lactantius's suspicions. Later he "did promote Licinius to the rank of Augustus over the head of Maximinus, and he constructed a great palace for himself at Gamzigrad in Serbia on the model of Diocletian's at Split."' For the first time in Roman history, he imposed the census on the cities of Italy and Rome, overturning tax exemptions that had been granted centuries before.' Not only was this a novel act of tyranny-at least it was viewed as such by the citizens of Italy-but it indicated that Galerius was claiming the role of the senior Augustus. Under Diocletian's system, all four emperors were allowed to issue edicts, but only Diocletian himself, as senior Augustus, had the right to issue laws governing the whole of the empire. Galerius was Eastern Augustus, yet ignoring his senior colleague Constantius, he imposed a policy, and a controversial one, on Western territory? Without the original chief Augustus, Diocletian, the Tetrarchy began to fracture.

  CONSTANTINE'S EARLY YEARS

  For Lactantius, the clearest sign of Galerius's ambition was his treatment of Constantine. Though his father was Western Caesar and then Augustus, Constantine had spent his life in the eastern part of the empire. He was born in Naissus, a military outpost near the Danube, on February 27, probably in the year 272,11 when his father Constantius was an officer in the army.12 He later claimed descent from the emperor Claudius, and medieval legend made his mother, Helena, a descendant of British royalty. Other legends made her a barmaid and claimed that Constantine's birth was illegitimate. Constantius, so the story went, stayed at an inn belonging to Helena's father while on a military excursion. Having been fed, he asked for a woman to enjoy for the night, and the innkeeper offered his beautiful daughter. During the night, portents in the sky, which the religious Constantius took as messages from Apollo, puzzled and amazed him. When he departed the next morning, he left behind an embroidered purple mantle as thanks. Helena became pregnant and had a son, Constantine. Some years later, when Constantius had been promoted to the governorship of Dalmatia, some soldiers were visiting the same inn and teased Helena's child. She warned them that they were teasing the son of an emperor, and when the soldiers mocked her, she produced the mantle of Constantius. When the soldiers returned to court, they told Constantius what they had found, and he summoned both Helena and his son to be at court with him.13 Though the story is a fanciful romance, it is likely that Helena was of humble origins, as her marriage to Constantius was not a fully endowed marriage. Helena was a concubine, and Constantine's somewhat questionable parentage cast a shadow over his claim to power."

  During his early years, Constantine served in Diocletian's army. He later reminisced about seeing the ancient ruins of Mesopotamian civilizations and traveling in Diocletian's entourage to Memphis in Egypt.15 According to the anonymous Origo Constantini, Galerius distrusted and hated him from early on, thrusting him into military danger in the hope that he would be killed. Fighting the Sarmatians, however, Constantine seized one barbarian by the hair and dragged him back to Galerius. When Galerius sent him into a swamp, he went boldly in on horseback, making a way for the rest of the army to follow him to victory.16

  Even when his father was transferred to the West to secure Gaul and Britain, Constantine stayed behind. After Diocletian's retirement, he re mained in the court of Galerius. It was not a happy arrangement. Galerius was evidently suspicious of both Constantine's ambition and his father's prospects in the West, and keeping Constantine close at hand allowed the emperor to keep an eye on the rising young officer, to maintain leverage against Constantius, and to prevent a dangerous concentration of power in the West. "We beseech you, bend you to remain / Here," Claudius of Denmark said to his nephew Hamlet, "in the cheer and comfort of our eye, / Our chiefest courtier, cousin, and our son" (Hamlet 1.2). Galerius might have used the same rhetoric concerning Constantine, to the same effect: Stay close, so I can keep my eye on you.

  Constantius repeatedly requested that Galerius send Constantine to join him in the West, and finally Galerius agreed. Fearing that Galerius might change his mind, Constantine left that same night, reputedly moving at great speed and maiming the post horses along the way to block pursuit." Eusebius and other writers claim that Constantine arrived at his father's deathbed, but in fact his father was in Boulogne, in the last stages of preparation for his invasion of Britain, when his son arrived, and Constantine accompanied his father on this successful British campaign. Shortly after Constantius had brought Britain back under Roman dominion, he fell ill. On July 25, 306, scarcely fourteen months after assuming the position of Augustus, Constantius died at York and with his dying breath designated Constantine as his successor, a decision gladly confirmed by the troops."

  Constantine was emperor in his midthirties.

  END OF THE TETRARCHY

  If Galerius's plots were one reason for the breakdown of the Tetrarchy, the elevation of Constantine highlights a more basic weakness in the system. The flaw in Diocletian's plan was obvious. So long as the members of the imperial college respected one another and restrained their own ambi tions, it would work. But what would happen when one member attempted to bypass his colleagues? And what would happen to imperial sons who were not chosen for succession? As Burckhardt perceptively notes, sons must either join the imperial college or be controlled-and controlling rivals in fourth-century Rome meant killing them.19 It is not at all surprising that in the generation following Diocletian's retirement there were periods when as many as six men claimed the position of Augustus.

  The Tetrarchy's treatment of the role of family ties was ambiguous from the beginning.20 Constantius married Theodora, daughter of Maximian, while Galerius married Diocletian's daughter Valeria. But Constantius and Galerius did not marry to join the original Tetrarchy; they joined the Tetrarchy because they were already sons-in-law of the two Augusti. Diocletian arranged the marriages ahead of time so that the Tetrarchy would be anchored in more traditional family bonds.2' From the beginn
ing, then, marriage tied the Tetrarchy together, and the intermarriages of the Tetrarchs continued into, and confused, the following generation as well. Maxentius, the son of Maximian, married Galerius's daughter, while Constantine married Maximian's other daughter Fausta, thus making him brother-in-law to his father and both brother-in-law and nephew of Maxentius.22 These marriages created kin relations that resemble the fictive kin relations of the Principate, when emperors "adopted" a successor. It is not altogether clear that Diocletian intended to change the rules of succession; then again, it is not clear that he wanted to retain old rules.23 The ambiguity proved fatal.

  No doubt it seemed perfectly natural to the troops in York to acclaim a new emperor and to confer that honor on the son of the dead emperor. Armies had been making emperors for several generations, and the transfer of power from father to son was one of the most ancient of succession systems. But Burckhardt describes Constantine as "the usurper," and many scholars since have followed his lead.24 That is an ahistorical designation. In Latin, "usurper" translates tyrannus, and a tyrant is not a ruler who attempts to gain power without authorization but a ruler who attempts but fails to gain power. In the fourth century, it is a retrospective designation; a ruler legitimizes his rule by hanging on to power against his rivals.25 By the rules of the Tetrarchy, too, Constantine had a legitimate claim to the emperorship. His father was senior Augustus, and if the precedent of Diocletian was to be followed, it was the senior Augustus who selected his successor.26 In any case, Galerius was less rigid than Burckhardt and his followers. When Constantine sent the Eastern Augustus an image of himself crowned with laurel, Galerius accepted him as a constitutionally legitimate member of the imperial college.27 The acceptance was grudging, no doubt, but Galerius had no constitutional basis for refusing.