Ten Caesars

by Barry Strauss

  THE MILVIAN BRIDGE

  The Milvian Bridge spans the Tiber River north of Rome. First built in 206 BC and often reconstructed, the modern bridge still contains some ancient stones. As long ago as Nero’s youth, it was a place for nighttime escapades, and today it remains a magnet for lovers. But it is best known for the Battle of the Milvian Bridge on October 28, 312, when Constantine defeated Maxentius and conquered Rome. It was the empire’s most decisive military engagement since the naval victory at Actium sealed Augustus’s power on September 2, 31 BC.

  The battle actually took place not on the bridge but north of it, on land. By coincidence, Constantine’s army marshaled just under the hill on which Livia’s suburban villa had stood. By that point, Constantine had enjoyed a string of victories, and Maxentius was so worried that he buried his regalia of office on the Palatine Hill, where archaeologists discovered them in 2006. The prize find was Maxentius’s scepter, the only imperial scepter ever uncovered. Imperial scepters often were two-to-three-foot ivory rods holding a globe or eagle. Maxentius’s scepter features a blue orb representing the earth and held in place by a gold-colored brass alloy grip.

  In order to keep Constantine away from the city, Maxentius tore down enough of the Milvian Bridge to make it impassible. Then he changed his mind and decided to march out and fight Constantine, so he had a pontoon bridge put up as a replacement. Maxentius led his troops into battle and suffered a crushing defeat. Afterward, he tried to find safety back within the city’s walls, but he fell off the bridge in the crush of refugees and was drowned in his armor. Maxentius’s body later washed up to shore.

  Maxentius and Constantine were brothers-in-law, but the two men did not hesitate to fight to the death. Nor did Constantine protest when Maxentius’s severed head was paraded through Rome on a pike. Later, it went to North Africa in order to prove Maxentius’s death to his supporters there. It was another blow to Fausta, whose brother and father had been killed at her husband’s command.

  More important than his conquest of Rome was what Constantine did with it. He announced to the world that he was now a friend of the Christian Church. In fact, he was a Christian himself.

  How Constantine reached this position and just what being a Christian meant to him makes a fascinating story, debated among scholars.

  THE CONVERSION OF CONSTANTINE

  Several years before 312, Constantine declined to enforce persecution decrees against Christians. In this, he followed his father, who was no Christian. But Helena possibly was a Christian. Our most important source for the life of Constantine says otherwise and maintains that the emperor converted his mother to Christianity. Yet later church historians say that Helena raised him as a Christian. All of these authors had their own agendas, and it is hard to say where the truth lies.

  At a minimum, it is clear that Christianity meant a great deal to Constantine if he wanted his mother to convert, and his mother meant a great deal to him (emotionally as well as politically) if he cared about her religious affiliation. Helena went on, later in Constantine’s reign, to play a key role in Christianizing the Roman world.

  Two years before the Battle of the Milvian Bridge in 310, Constantine and his army saw a dramatic sight in the afternoon sky: a solar halo, or ring around the sun. It happened near a temple of Apollo in Gaul. Apollo is the sun god, but the temple was also understood to praise another Roman deity, the Unconquered Sun (Sol Invictus in Latin). This was the favorite deity of Constantine’s father, Constantius, although it had come to Rome only fairly recently during a military campaign in the east, when the emperor Aurelian saw a local sun god promising him victory in a battle in Syria.

  Young Constantine believed that he had a special relationship with the sun god, yet he was not sure what to make of the remarkable sight in the sky over Gaul. He consulted various wise men, including Christian bishops. They assured him that the vision was a sign not from the sun god but from Christ. Christians already associated Christ with the sun. In the Gospels, Jesus describes himself as “the light of the world,” and Matthew says that Jesus’s face shone like the sun. Early Christians saw Christ as a source of spiritual illumination.

  The final persuader for Constantine was a dream in which Christ showed him a sign to use as protection against the enemy. Constantine now put a well-known early Christian symbol on (or above) his personal banner: the Greek letters chi and rho, the equivalent of the Latin CHR for Christ. This took place probably while Constantine was still in Gaul and before he crossed into Italy. It was now that Constantine declared himself a Christian. Later, before the Battle of the Milvian Bridge, he made his men put the chi-rho symbol on their shields. And he reiterated his Christian faith after entering Rome.

  Was Constantine a sincere convert? Although the words sincerity and politician don’t usually go together, there is reason to think that he was. Ancient people took dreams and omens seriously. Previous emperors certainly did, and they consulted astrologers as well. Modern Westerners always look for the “real motive,” but we are often blind to the reality of religious motivation.

  It is possible that Constantine was a cynic from start to finish who manipulated religion to gain power. But was converting to Christianity the smart move in 312? Only in hindsight does it seem so. Nothing guaranteed that a pagan-majority empire would tolerate a Christian emperor. Only a man with a high capacity for risk—or a man who believed that God had chosen him for a mission—would behave as Constantine did. As early as 314, Constantine stated that God Himself had entrusted him with the direction of human affairs, provided that Constantine handled them well, and he would return to the theme of his mission in later years.

  Constantine continued to behave as a pagan in various ways for years after converting. For example, he still had to work out the relationship between his new god, Christ, and his old god, the Unconquered Sun. He saw no reason at first why he couldn’t worship both. For years, his coins continued to bear the image of the sun god, often stating the legend TO THE INVINCIBLE SUN, COMPANION OF THE EMPEROR UNCONQUERED CONSTANTINE.

  But Constantine was the ruler of an empire in which the vast majority of people were pagans, particularly in the military, where Christians were a distinct minority. During the Great Persecution, individual Christians died as martyrs for their principles. Yet when it came to reaching a wider pagan audience, it could be useful to blur the difference between the old gods and the new one.

  For a dozen years after the Milvian Bridge, Constantine faced Licinius, the ruler of the East, a dangerous rival who tolerated Christianity without embracing it himself. The pagan Licinius could use the majority’s religion against Constantine. After becoming sole emperor by defeating Licinius in 324, Constantine had more flexibility, but he still faced formidable anti-Christian odds. Rulers who don’t do the math don’t survive, and Constantine was always a good student.

  Even after 312, Constantine engaged in murder and bloodshed that would make even a pagan blush. But conversion does not make someone perfect. Constantine undoubtedly spread the gospel and made the church splendid and safer. Surely that made him a Christian.

  CHRISTIANIZING THE CITY OF ROME

  When Constantine entered Rome in late October 312, it was his first visit to the city. He was nearly forty years old, a seasoned military veteran, and the ruler of much of the western empire before ever visiting the Eternal City. It says quite a bit about the decline in Rome’s status that Constantine could reach such heights without having seen it.

  Constantine stayed only two months, long enough to win over the city’s pagan elite and to shower favor on its Christian community. Maxentius was an avid builder, and Constantine took over and finished his projects, including a massive basilica used for public administration and for shopping. Nowadays we think of a basilica as a church, but basilicas were originally public buildings.

  Constantine destroyed the basis of the defeated regime’s military power by abolishing its elite cavalry units and by finally dissolving the Praetori
an Guard—or what was left it, since the Guard had suffered heavy casualties at the Milvian Bridge. The Guard had begun with Augustus, but Diocletian had reduced its role, and now Constantine ended its long run. Pause for a moment to consider the impact of the Praetorians on Roman history, from the power of the Praetorian prefect Sejanus to the Guard’s part in choosing Claudius and Nero as emperors, to its murder of Pertinax and selling off the throne to the highest bidder.

  Constantine replaced the Praetorians with other elite units to protect the emperor. He created new select cavalry regiments—2,500 men by the end of his reign—to accompany him and keep away trouble. Of these, 40 men were picked to serve as the emperor’s bodyguard. They were known as candidati from the white tunics they wore, just as centuries earlier, office seekers in the Roman Republic wore white togas, which gives us our word candidates.

  Constantine began immediately the process of making Rome a more Christian city, but in a careful and diplomatic manner. Except for setting up a cross in his new basilica—an unpopular measure with Rome’s old guard—he kept all Christian-themed building projects away from downtown. Instead, he placed a series of new churches on the edge of town and on imperial property. The largest of them, Saint John in the Lateran, still stands. It was the first great Christian church. Before Constantine, Christians usually met in simple structures, often private houses. Although the sources speak of some separate churches, we know nothing about their appearance. Whatever they looked like, Constantine surely built something grander.

  The Lateran was a great building, about three hundred feet long from the entrance to the original end of the apse. Like all of Constantine’s Roman churches, it was magnificent only on the inside; the outside was plain and modest, almost as if not to cause offense. Despite later renovations to the Lateran, a visitor today can still make out its heavy, five-aisled structure, typical of a Late Roman public building. The basilica church resembled the basilica government office building. Seeing the architectural similarity, a Roman visitor in Constantine’s day took away the clear lesson that church and state were now connected. One other detail stands out: Constantine built the new church on the site of the demolished headquarters of Maxentius’s elite cavalry troops. The message was unmistakable: a new day had dawned.

  Next to the Lateran basilica stood a wealthy person’s house, owned by Constantine. He presented it to Pope Miltiades, and it became the official residence of the Popes for centuries to come. The Pope was bishop of Rome. He already claimed a special status as the successor to Peter and Paul. Constantine showed respect to Miltiades and his successor, Pope Sylvester I, but the emperor did not hesitate to exercise supreme authority in the church. The Popes of Constantine’s day were important, but they had nothing like the power of later Popes.

  Constantine also put energy into building shrines to saints and martyrs on the outskirts of the city. The best known is the Church of Old St. Peter’s, which rose over the traditional site of Peter’s tomb in the Vatican region west of the Tiber River. It stood for more than a thousand years but eventually fell into disrepair. Between 1506 and 1626, the magnificent Renaissance basilica that we see today was built, replacing Constantine’s church.

  At first, Constantine acted more like a friend of the church than its supreme governor. His Christian construction projects were essentially private acts of charity and not state policy. The official face of Constantine in Rome, as it were, was inoffensive to pagans.

  The best official example is also Constantine’s most famous Roman monument, at least to today’s tourists: the triumphal arch that bears his name and rises up beside the Colosseum. It was built by the Senate to commemorate the victory at the Milvian Bridge three years before. There was nothing openly Christian about the arch. In fact, a contemporary visitor saw a pagan symbol—a colossal statue of the sun god, Constantine’s original patron—looming up in the distance through its central arch.

  The artwork is a series of sculpted reliefs. Some of them, specially commissioned for the arch, show Constantine’s military victories in Italy, his entrance into Rome, and his distribution of money to the Roman people. The other reliefs were plundered from earlier imperial monuments. Works of Trajan, Hadrian, and Marcus Aurelius display scenes of war, hunting, and pagan sacrifice, and even Antinous makes a cameo appearance. The presence of old art works placed Constantine in Rome’s imperial tradition although it might indicate that the arch was built under time pressure, forcing the reuse of earlier works.

  Only the dedicatory inscription lends itself to Christian interpretation—but it also lends itself to pagan interpretation. It says that the Senate and people of Rome dedicated the arch to the emperor Constantine and his triumphs because he was moved by greatness of spirit and “divine inspiration.” The latter term could refer to Jupiter or the Unconquered Sun as well as to Christ. Both this inscription and two shorter ones refer to Constantine as a liberator from tyranny and the founder of peace, both traditional Roman designations.

  CONQUERING THE EAST

  In 313 Constantine held a summit conference with Licinius in Mediolanum. They agreed to divide the empire. Constantine sealed the deal with Licinius the traditional Roman way by giving him his half sister, Constantia (Flavia Julia Constantia), in marriage. But the meeting is best known for the famous Edict of Milan. The title is a misnomer. It was neither an edict nor from Milan but, rather, a letter issued later by Licinius from his base in the East.

  The letter was important but not as much as historians sometimes make it. The western empire already enjoyed religious freedom and the restoration of property confiscated from Christians during the Great Persecution. Before his death in 311, the persecutor Galerius gave in and restored toleration. Only Daia continued persecuting Christians in the eastern empire, most of which he controlled until 313. Now Licinius promised to extend those policies to Daia’s realm.

  He was soon able to make good on his promises because he defeated Daia in battle and took control of the East. Daia committed suicide. Two men, not four, now ruled the empire, but it wasn’t big enough for Constantine and Licinius. They were each too ambitious and too suspicious of the other. They struggled in a series of civil wars between 316 and 324. Ever a man to lead from the front, Constantine was wounded in one of his civil war battles.

  In spite of having also to deal with fighting on the Rhine and Danube frontiers and of a tactical misstep, Constantine defeated Licinius at Hadrianopolis. Then Constantine’s son, Crispus, won a victory over Licinius’s fleet in the Hellespont, the narrow strait dividing Europe from Asia at the entrance to the Aegean Sea. The final battle took place on September 18, 324, at Chrysopolis (modern Üsküdar, Turkey), in what is today the Asian part of Istanbul. The religious contrast was stark. On one side, Licinius displayed images of the pagan gods, while on the other side, Constantine brandished a military flag with the chi-rho Christian image. Constantine felt confident enough to launch a frontal attack and won complete success. With large numbers of his troops slaughtered, Licinius took the rest of his army and fled.

  Constantia now acted as a go-between between her defeated husband and her half brother. They agreed that Licinius and their son, Licinius Junior, would lose their power but keep their lives. They were sent into internal exile. Constantia was welcomed back into Constantine’s house and became a power at court.

  Constantia was not the only formidable woman in Constantine’s family. His wife, Fausta, received the title of Augusta in 324. At the same time, so did Helena. With two powerful women attached to the emperor, rivalry was inevitable and conflict a constant danger.

  Coin portraits show Helena as a handsome and dignified woman. She wears a diadem, the sign of royalty, and a modest mantle. Fausta too bespeaks self-possession and noble bearing in her coin portraits. She sometimes has the lovely profile of a classical Greek statue. Her hair is elaborately coiffed, and she sometimes wears a diadem too. Each woman stands on the reverse of her coins. Helena’s coins show a robed female figure holding a l
owered olive branch, with the legend SAFETY. Fausta’s coins show a woman holding two children and the legend HOPE, a reference to Fausta’s motherhood.

  TOWARD A CHRISTIAN EMPIRE

  After the defeat of Licinius, Constantine became more openly Christian. In 326, when he visited Rome to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of becoming emperor, for the first time he refused to sacrifice to Jupiter, which led to protest.

  The emperor had a sense of mission. He believed that God had chosen him to convert the empire to Christianity. In a speech delivered to a Christian audience in 325, Constantine said:

  We strive to the best of our ability to fill those who are uninitiated in such teachings with good hope, having summoned God to assist us in the endeavor. For it is no mean task for us to turn the minds of our subjects to piety if they happen to be good or, if they are wicked and unfeeling, to lead them to the opposite, making them useful instead of good-for-nothings.

  Roman religion always depended on government support. Constantine diverted subsidies from pagans and gave them to the Christian Church. It was a huge boon.

  Constantine had promised toleration in the West before 324, but he had a free hand in the East now. Although he allowed the East’s pagan temples to continue to stand, he confiscated their wealth, from gold to bronze. He also prohibited sacrifice, which rendered temples all but empty shells.

  One purpose for these funds was to build churches, and many new churches rose thanks to Constantine’s generosity. A pagan author criticized this as a waste of public money, but Christians surely thought differently. Another purpose was to distribute charity to the poor. Roman emperors had helped the poor before, but not on the scale that they did now, under a Christian emperor. It would mark a permanent change in Roman government.