Defending Constantine: The Twilight of an Empire and the Dawn of Christendom
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81J. H. W. G. Liebeschuetz (Continuity and Change in Roman Religion [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979], pp. 298-99) notes that the church was being "Romanized" as "more members of the ruling classes were converted" and "the social status of bishops and that of secular dignitaries began to converge." The church's organization mirrored "the imperial administration based on cities, provinces, and dioceses."
'This version of the story is told by Livy, From the Foundation of the City 7.6. It is summarized in Alison Futrell, Blood in the Arena: The Spectacle of Roman Power (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997), pp. 191-92, and Florence Dupont, Daily Life in Ancient Rome, trans. Christopher Woodall (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), p. 74.
2Livy From the Foundation of the City 8.9-10; summarized in Futrell, Blood in the Arena, pp. 192-93.
'See now Catherine Edwards, Death in Ancient Rome (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2007).
4Futrell, Blood in theArena, pp. 184-203, carefully reviews all the evidence, concluding that "human sacrifice can be found in the oldest strata of Roman religious practices, used, as elsewhere, as a means of propitiating angered deities" (p. 205). George Heyman, The Power of Sacrifice: Roman and Christian Discourses in Conflict (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2007), also connects devotio to sacrifice (pp. 180-84).
STertullian De spectaculis 12. Though not all modern historians make so direct a connection between human sacrifice and gladiatorial combats, most recognize that the shows originated as funeral games. See Carlin A. Barton, "The Scandal of the Arena," Representations 27 (1989); Futrell, Blood in theArena, pp. 2-4, 10; Edwards, Death in Ancient Rome, p. 59.
6Futrell, Blood in theArena, pp. 84-85.
'Erik Gunderson, "The Ideology of the Arena," ClassicalAntiquity 15, no. 1 (1996): 139. Futrell (Blood in the Arena, p. 208) agrees that the munus "cloaks another foundation sacrifice in Rome's mythical history."
10The more subtle impact of the games was to reinforce a specular notion of power within Roman society (Shadi Bartsch, The Mirror of the Self Sexuality, Self-Knowledge and the Gaze in the Early Roman Empire [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006]; Florence Dupoint, L'acteur-roi: Le theatre dans le Rome antique [Paris: Societe d'edition, 1985], pp. 19-40). Power flowed from spectacle; to have power was to be the object of an adoring or fearful gaze, or to be the subject of the gaze, able to fix eyes on others and subject them to your scrutiny. In the colosseum the emperor was on stage, the object for thousands of fans. He exercised power by being seen in glory, in awesome splendor.
'Gunderson, "Ideology of the Arena," pp. 123-26; Futrell, Blood in theArena.
9OvidArs amatoria 1.99.
"Gunderson, "Ideology of the Arena," examines the reviews of Suetonius and others concerning the emperors' conduct at games; see also Fergus Millar, The Emperor in the Roman World, 2nd ed. (London: Duckworth, 1992), pp. 368-75.
14Ibid., pp. 209-10. Futrell dedicates much of her book to examining the arenas themselveswhere they were built and by whom, how they were funded and by whom.
15Ibid., p. 207.
"Gunderson, "Ideology of the Arena," p. 141.
17Pliny the Younger Panegyric 33.1, quoted in Barton, "Scandal of the Arena," p. 7.
12Futrell, Blood in the Arena, p. 46, with note (p. 245).
13Ibid., pp. 45-46.
20Seneca Epistle 7.
"Quoted in Edwards, Death in Ancient Rome, p. 70.
19For Cicero, see ibid., pp. 69-72.
21Seneca On Providence 3.4. On Seneca and the games generally, see Pierre Cagniart, "The Philosopher and the Gladiator," Classical World 93, no. 6 (2000): 607-18; Gunderson, "Ideology of the Arena," pp. 135-38; Barton, "Scandal of the Arena," p. 13; Edwards, Death in Ancient Rome, pp. 72-77.
22Carlin Barton, The Sorrows of the Ancient Romans: The Gladiator and the Monster (Princeton, NJ.: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 39.
"Robert Dodaro (Christ and the Just Society in the Thought ofAugustine [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004], p. 50) notes that Augustine discerned connections between priests and actors, shows and sacrifice. So too Tatian (quoted in Maria-Zoe Petroupoulou, Animal Sacrifice in Ancient Greek Religion, Judaism and Christianity, 100 BCtoAD 200 [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008], p. 250).
24This is the view of David S. Potter, The Roman Empire at Bay, AD 180-395, Routledge History of the Ancient World (London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 428-29. He argues that Constantine was "simply abolishing the penalty of damnatio ad Judos," which, he points out, is not a sentence to become a gladiator but to be "condemned to fight other humans to the death." He also notes that Constantine does not take the opportunity to abolish damnatio adbestias, which would be expected "if he were indeed reforming the penal code to eliminate all penalties that might be thought offensive to Christian sentiment." This law, he says, was only a "minor step." Potter also notes (p. 683 n. 134) that Constantine granted Hispellium the right to have gladiatorial shows. Finally, Constantius prohibits soldiers and men of palatine rank from participating in the shows at Rome (CTh 15.12.2), which assumes that the shows were still being held in the capital. In the same passage where he records Constantine's prohibition of pagan sacrifice, Eusebius (Life of Constantine 4.25) claims that he made it illegal "to pollute the cities with the sanguinary combats of gladiators." Potter, to the contrary, says that is the import of the first part of the edict (Potter is forced to say that the law "belies the force of the opening clause," p. 429), the beginning of whose second sentence he translates as "Since therefore we altogether forbid those who would be accustomed to receive this status and sentence, to become gladiators." My colleague Tim Griffith tells me that the Latin will not bear this meaning and that the edict explicitly outlaws gladiatorial shows. Even if Potter is correct, however, Constantine's legislation would damage the munera, since gladiators were frequently condemned criminals.
"Timothy D. Barnes, Constantine and Eusebius (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981), p. 53.
26 Christopher Bush Coleman, Constantine the Great and Christianity, Columbia Studies in History, Economics and Public Law 146 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1914), p. 26, available in full at Google Books. T. G. Elliott (The Christianity of Constantine the Great [Scranton, Penn.: University of Scranton Press, 1996], p. 97), estimates that we have 420 laws from Constantine.
27A. H. M. Jones, The Later Roman Empire, 284-602: A Social, Economic and Administrative Survey, 2 vols. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1964), 1:471-73; see also Simon Corcoran, The Empire ofthe Tetrarchs: Imperial Pronouncements and Government, AD 284-324, rev. ed., Oxford Classical Monographs (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 2.
28The Codex Theodosianus is available in Latin online at
29Coleman, Constantine the Great and Christianity, p. 25, says that he was "not a systematic nor a careful legislator."
3oRamsay MacMullen, "What Difference Did Christianity Make?" Historia 35, no. 3 (1986): 329-32.
31Ibid. See also similar judgments in Ramsay MacMullen, Constantine (London: Croom Helm, 1987), p. 203; A. H. M. Jones, Constantine and the Conversion ofEurope (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978), p. 188.
32Barnes, Constantine and Eusebius, p. 220. On the sexual legislation, see Charles Matson Odahl, Constantine and the Christian Empire (London: Routledge, 2004), p. 204. Hermann Dorries, Constantine the Great, trans. Roland Bainton (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1972), p. 213, speaks of the irresponsible sexuality of the age. Barnes describes the legislation as "morbid and unwholesome" and immediately connects it to the mysterious events surrounding the execution of Constantine's son Crispus and the empress Fausta. On Crispus and Fausta, see chapter 10 below.
33A panegyrist in 307 states that Constantine himself condemned Frankish captives to the beasts after a victory.
34MacMullen, "What Difference,"
pp. 333-34.
"Craig A. Carter, Rethinking Christ and Culture: APost-Christendom Perspective (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2006), p. 96.
"John Howard Yoder, The Priestly Kingdom: Social Ethics as Gospel (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), p. 146.
37John Howard Yoder, Christian Attitudes to War, Peace and Revolution, ed. Theodore J. Koontz and Andy Alexis-Baker (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2009), pp. 43-48.
38Alan Watson (The Spirit of Roman Law [Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995], p. 45) points out the more curious fact that Justinian's Institutes rarely mentions God or Jesus either, even though Justinian insisted that law involves "knowledge of things divine and human" (CJ 1.1.1).
39Eusebius saw this as a Christian calendrical change, and Christians in the empire drew the same conclusion; even some magistrates took to naming the day as hiera kuriake, the "Lord's day," a designation that found its way into a number of European languages (Potter, Roman Empire at Bay, p. 427; see also Dorries, Constantine the Great, pp. 118-29; Odahl, Constantine and the Christian Empire, p. 173). On the development of the week in Roman culture, see Eviatar Zerubavel, The Seven Day Cycle: The History and Meaning ofthe Week (New York: Free Press, 1985), pp. 20-25, 45-46.
40I concur with Barnes, Constantine andEusebius, p. 51: "Constantine ... began to mold Roman law and the attitudes of Roman society in a Christian direction." See also A. D. Lee, "Decoding Late Roman Law," journal of Roman Studies 92 (2002); Michele Renee Salzman, "The Evidence for the Conversion of the Roman Empire to Christianity in Book 16 of the `Theodosian Code,"' Historia 42, no. 3 (1993), notes the various ways in which post-Constantinian legislation encouraged conversion.
41Thomas Wiedemann, Emperors and Gladiators (London: Routledge, 1992), chap. 4. Weidemann calls these arguments "elitist" and concludes that no pagan opposition to the arena was strictly "humanitarian."
42Lactantius Divine Institutes 6.20.
43Tertullian De spectaculis 22.
44Cyprian Ad Donatum 7.
45Judith Evans Grubbs, Law and Family in Late Antiquity: The Emperor Constantine's Marriage Legislation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), is indispensable but suffers from an insistent, even pedantic focus on the "influence" of Christianity on Constantine's marriage legislation. This misses the bigger picture that she herself glimpses, as from a great distance through heavy fog. She concludes that Constantine encouraged the church's growth as an alternative social organization; he helped the church be the church, rather than attempting to Christianize Rome by legislation (319). Surely, though, empowering and funding an already wellorganized Christian counterpolity counts as a Christianizing program, and one that Constantine pursued legislatively. Did Constantine intend to Christianize the empire in this fashion? No one can know, and no one needs to know: his intentions did not determine the outcome.
461bid., p. 103.
47Ibid., pp. 120-23, 137.
48Alan Watson, The Law of the Ancient Romans (Dallas: Southern Methodist University, 1970), pp. 11-12.
49Mathew Kuefler, The Manly Eunuch: Masculinity, Gender Ambiguity and Christian Ideology in LateAntiquity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), p. 73.
"Ibid., pp. 70-87.
"Grubbs (Law and Family, pp. 256-57) claims that "at no time in the pre-Constantinian Empire had Roman law attempted to restrict the right of husbands or wives in general to terminate their marriages." This oversimplifies the situation. Marriage in Roman law was of two types, cum manu and sine manu. Under the first the wife came under the oversight of her husband as paterfamilias, while in the second she remained under the oversight of her own father's patria potestas (Watson, Law oftheAncientRomans, p. 32). Marriage sine manu was well established by the second century B.C., and sometime in the early first century B.C., in Cicero's time, cum manu marriage became very rare (ibid., p. 33). A woman married sine manu was never under her husband's potestas to begin with and could divorce only through her father, who sent his son-in-law the messenger who delivered the repudium. Until the mid-second century A.D., though, women married cum manu had difficulty divorcing (Susan Treggiari, "Divorce Roman Style: How Easy and How Frequent Was It?" in Marriage, Divorce and Children in Ancient Rome, ed. Beryl Rawson [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996], pp. 31-46).
`Watson, Law oftheAncientRomans, p. 36.
"Grubbs, Law andFamily, pp. 255-56.
53Kuefler, Manly Eunuch, p. 76.
56This is how Barnes characterizes the legislation: Timothy D. Barnes, "Constantine After Seventeen Hundred Years: The Cambridge Companion, the New York Exhibition and a Recent Biography," International Journal ofthe Classical Tradition 14 (2008).
55Kuefler, Manly Eunuch, pp. 83-84.
17 See Dorries, Constantine the Great, pp. 83-84. Even MacMullen (Constantine, p. 194) admits that Constantine turned a kind legal face toward slaves and humiliores.
"Grubbs, Law and Family, pp. 206-7. Constantine's definition of adultery is similar, defined in terms of social status (ibid., p. 255).
591bid., pp. 26-27; Georges Depeyrot, "Economy and Society," in The Cambridge Companion to Constantine, ed. Noel Lenski (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 249.
60See Peter Garnsey, "Legal Privilege in the Roman Empire," Past and Present 41 (1968): 3-24; John A. Crook, "Ivs Romanvm Doli Revm," review of Social Status and Legal Privilege in the Roman Empire by Peter Garnsey, Classical Review 22 (1972): 238-42; P. A. Brunt, review of Social Status and Legal Privilege in the Roman Empire by Peter G arnsey, Journal ofRoman Studies 62 (1972): 166-70.
61Lactantius Divine Institutes 5.14.
12 See CJ 8.52.2.
'G. E. M. De Ste. Croix, "Why Were the Early Christians Persecuted?" Past and Present 26 (1963).
'A. H. M. Jones, The Later Roman Empire, 284-602: A Social, Economic andAdministrative Survey, 2 vols. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1964), 1:470. Simon Corcoran (The Empire ofthe Tetrarchs: Imperial Pronouncements and Government, AD 284-324, rev. ed., Oxford Classical Monographs [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000], p. 240) also notes Constantine's frequent railings against the venality of his officials and his desire to give access to justice to poor and rich alike.
'Jones, Later Roman Empire, 1:502.
4T. G. Elliott, The Christianity of Constantine the Great (Scranton, Penn.: University of Scranton Press, 1996), p. 100.
'Jones, Later Roman Empire, 1:499.
6H. A. Drake, Constantine and the Bishops: The Politics of Intolerance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), p. 331.
'Diocletian launched similar efforts to curb the corruption of the court system; Corcoran, Empire ofthe Tetrarchs, pp. 239-44.
Blbid., 1:503.
9Ibid.
10Elliott, Christianity of Constantine, p. 100.
"For a revealing analysis, see Drake, Constantine and the Bishops, pp. 325-44; the text is included as an appendix in Drake. Unfortunately, Drake concentrates so heavily on refuting Norman Baynes's view that Constantine's policies were motivated by a desire to ensure the success of the church that he misses the important religious thrust of the legislation. He rightly notes that Constantine's concern was for "fair and speedy trials" (p. 327) and an effort to empower the poor (p. 339). He also recognizes that the emperor's solicitousness for the poor had little support in traditional Roman legal practice, where social privilege played an enormous role. Yet he doesn't put these two insights together to ask how Constantine came to be convinced of the need to use the power of the emperor to open up avenues of redress for those who could not afford the Roman courts. The answer, it seems clear, is that Constantine was following Christian imperatives and impulses. Drake, somewhat contradictorily, claims that the purpose of the legislation on appeals was to "correct the notorious tilt of Roman courts in favor of the rich and powerful," adding that the emperor did this "in the belief that by this means he will secure divine favor" (p. 336). If he is courting divine favor by attending to the poor, how is the legislation "social" rather than "
religious"?
12Ibid., pp. 333-35. The phrase "oppressed lower classes" is from CTh 1.16.4.
130ne of Yoder's examples of living out the gospel is the judge who opens "the court system to conflict resolution procedures" and resists "the trend toward more and more litigation." Perhaps he would have had some sympathy with the intentions of Constantine's legislation on appeals (Body Politics: Five Practices of the Christian Community Before the Watching World [Scottdale, Penn.: Herald, 2001], p. 27).
14Paula Fredricksen, Augustine and the Jews: A Christian Defense of Jews and Judaism (New York: Doubleday, 2008), pp. 312-14. A. D. Lee ("Decoding Late Roman Law," Journal of Roman Studies 92 [2002]: 192) notes that bishops often played the role of arbitrator or mediator.
15See Jean Gaudemet, Formation du droitcanonique etgouvernement de 1'Eglise de 1'antiquite a Page classique (Strasbourg: Presses universitaires, 2007).
16 Lactantius Divine Institutes 6.12.
17Eusebius Life 1.43; 4.1, 4. This is perhaps overdrawn, but Zosimus too comments on Constantine's generosity but describes it as "voluptuousness" (New History 2.53).
"Drake, Constantine and the Bishops, p. 342; Hermann Dorries, Constantine the Great, trans. Roland Bainton (New York: Harper, 1972), pp. 160-62.
"Cicero De Domo 29, 77.
20Max Radin, "The Exposure of Infants in Roman Law and Practice," Classicaljournal20, no. 6 (1925): 338-39. Cf. W. V. Harris, "Child-Exposure in the Roman Empire," Journal ofRoman Studies 84 (1994).
21Harris, "Child-Exposure," pp. 11-15, summarizes the reasons for exposing children.
22Lactantius Divine Institutes 6.20.
23For a summary of the complexities of this legislation, see Harris, "Child-Exposure," pp. 20-21.
24This is evidence against Raymond MacMullen's claim ("What Difference Did Christianity Make?" Historia 35 [1986]: 160) that Constantine did not attack the practice of exposing children. While it is true that he never outlawed the practice, his legislation made clear his disapproval. Dorries, Constantine the Great, p. 83, is correct to say that Constantine condemned exposure as a form of murder.