The Emperors of Rome

by David Potter

  The legacy of Constantine

  Yet Constantine, whose first spell of military service is thought to have been as a junior officer in Galerius’ successful campaign against Narseh some 40 years earlier, was fated never to return to Iraq. In the spring of AD 337 he fell dangerously ill, and died on 22 May after having himself baptized. His body was taken to Constantinople, where it was interred in the great mausoleum he had built for himself in his new city. Although he died a Christian, he intended to be buried as a Roman emperor in the tradition of Diocletian or Galerius. It was only later that his son, Constantius, transformed the mausoleum into the Church of the Twelve Apostles. This was just one of many indications that Constantius failed to appreciate the importance of Constantine’s conviction that a person could be both a Roman emperor and a Christian concurrently, rather than simply a Christian emperor.

  Constantine was a very dangerous person to be related to: his execution of a son, a wife, a father-in-law and two brothers-in-law is a record of domestic carnage unequalled in the annals of Roman history. Yet he reigned for nearly 31 years after his seizure of power in Britain. His longevity as emperor may in part be attributed to his great personal ability, yet it also highlights radical changes in the way that the imperial office was now perceived at Rome. While the emperor might now have colleagues in the imperial office, the position was inherently less collegial than it had been when Commodus succeeded Marcus. Commodus had been surrounded by men whose personal status was independent of their position at court. By contrast, in the empire of Diocletian and Constantine status at court defined status beyond the walls of the palaces. Although the post of senator was still highly attractive – ensuring a person great wealth (while also rendering him liable to new taxes) – the mere fact of sitting in the senate no longer guaranteed access to power at the imperial level.

  The imperial role changes

  In the course of his 20-year reign, Diocletian had fundamentally changed the landscape of power, driving home the point, time and again, that emperors could be created only by other emperors. When the army assembled to watch him retire it was not being invited to the ceremony in order to choose a successor, as it had done in the murky hours after the death of Pertinax or in the Danubian camp of Severus. It had gathered to pay homage to the man whom Diocletian had already marked out as the new Caesar. The emperor would still be presented, and, indeed, present himself through his edicts to the public as a creature of virtus, but as the community of Romans had extended far beyond Rome, the virtus of the emperor was an increasingly artificial construct, detached from the domus, which was now on a grander scale, and definitely off limits to the average person. If, as Diocletian realized, the emperor could only rule effectively if he was distanced from his subjects, then he could no longer be the ideal dinner companion. The Severans had fatally compromised the old system by courting only one element of the empire – the army – and offering no viable alternative. As the successors of Septimius Severus failed in the collective exercise of virtus, their conduct within the domus, ranging from the ghastly to the bizarre, undermined their authority.

  However, internal factors alone cannot explain the transformation of the imperial office from one that depended upon the collective action of members of the aristocracy in Rome to one of mastery over an imperial bureaucracy. For much of the trouble that followed the reign of Alexander Severus, due measure of blame must be apportioned to failures by the military. While the inability of the army to defeat either the Sassanians under Ardashir and Shapur or the northern tribes was partly due to the sheer skill of these adversaries, the major role played by the inflexibility of Roman generals cannot be ignored. It was only after the disasters of the AD 250s that new, more professional, fighting soldiers came to the fore and built a new, more flexible army.

  One key question remained: now that the emperor controlled an imperial rather than a Roman bureaucracy, could the empire survive with just one emperor? The bureaucracy naturally divided along the major economic lines of the empire, suggesting that multiple emperors would provide a better focus for regional administrations. Diocletian had believed as much, and at the end of his life it appears that Constantine thought so too.

  FOUR

  Losing Caesar

  Carving up the Empire:

  From Constantine’s Sons to Valens

  (AD 337–375)

  In the century and a half after the death of Constantine, the western empire ceased altogether to be governed by Rome, while the east continued to assert its essential Roman ancestry for almost a millennium. These momentous developments occurred under a system of governance that had first seen the light of day in the late second century. Yet key differences distinguish earlier attempts to find a more practical way of administering the empire from the modus operandi of Constantine and his successors.

  Towards the end of a life spent unifying the empire, Constantine clearly concluded that it should be carved up into four prefectures and run by a college of emperors. The division of the monolithic empire into more manageable administrative units had already been foreshadowed in the reign of Marcus Aurelius, when Marcus authorized the creation of large military commands encompassing several provinces in both the east and the Balkans. The tripartite division of the empire that began under Gallienus in AD 260 was a later variation on this same theme. Yet Constantine’s scheme, while preserving the naturally self-contained units of the Balkans and the east, further split the western Mediterranean away from Europe north of the Pyrenees and the Alps. Geopolitically, this represented a natural division; the two regions had been separate entities before the advent of the Augustan empire and continue to be thought of as essentially distinct from one another to the present day.

  A sprawling bureaucracy

  The prefectural model also harked back to Diocletian’s dispersal of power in the AD 290s. The only difference was that in Constantine’s system the college was made up of blood relatives, whereas Diocletian’s had ultimately placed more of a premium on experience, supported by marriage into the imperial family. Hand in hand with their conviction that the empire needed collegiate government went the firm belief that it was in the empire’s best interests not to be governed from Rome. This particular aspect is what distinguishes the shared governance schemes of the fourth century from those of earlier periods.

  With the benefit of hindsight, it is tempting to regard the empire that Augustus created as an anomaly that was inevitably doomed to failure. Yet hindsight, as we know, is always twenty-twenty. The more remarkable fact is how long the Roman empire in this guise managed to sustain its precarious balancing act – 290 years all told, from Augustus’ seizure of Alexandria to Shapur’s capture of Valerian, the final death knell of unitary rule.

  The empire had always been defined by its systems of taxation and provincial administration; as the style of government changed, then so too did the empire. The system of governance that Augustus put in place was surprisingly decentralized, as were the modes of provincial government that operated in the centuries that followed his reign. One consequence of this decentralization was that the emperor was obliged to negotiate with different groups and balance the interests of one against another. Under the Augustan and Antonine system, personal status determined the broad outlines of a career, as emperors were constrained to recruit their senior officials from people who were usually important in their own right. By contrast, after the death of Diocletian, all power flowed outwards from the palace; personal status was determined by the offices that a person held rather than the other way round. As central government expanded, the pressure to obtain these offices became ever greater, and official power was increasingly defined by a person’s ability to secure jobs within the government for his clients. It is one of the great paradoxes of imperial history that as the struggle for status became ever more focused on the palace, the emperor actually lost power rather than gained it. Before a century had elapsed after the death of Constantine the bitterest partisan battles would
be fought not over who should be emperor, but rather over who should control the offices that gave access to him. In other words, Caesar was by now little more than a figurehead.

  The fractious sons of Constantine

  Constantine had hoped that his sons and nephews would manage to govern the empire among themselves. These hopes foundered on the ambitions of Constantius II (AD 317–361), the second of his sons by Fausta, and, quite likely, on those of a number of senior officials that had been held in check during the last decade of Constantine’s life. Young men of twenty, as Constantius was in the summer of 337, are not usually able to organize major changes in government on their own; and it is presumably not accidental that both of the long-serving praetorian prefects who were still in office when Constantine died on May 22 were both out of office very soon afterwards, and one was killed shortly after that. Although the cause of the subsequent discord between Constantine’s heirs is lost in the mists of time, it is likely connected with the fact that, in the late summer of AD 337, Constantius suddenly ordered the arrest and execution of Dalmatius and Hannibalianus, as well as that of every other male descendant of Constantius I and Theodora, with the exception of the sons of his wife’s brother Julius Constantius. These boys, Gallus and Julian, were taken away to Nicomedia, where they were confined in Diocletian’s former palace. The three sons of Fausta now assumed the title of Augustus, though it appears that the eldest, Constantine II (AD 316–340), was made regent for the youngest, Constans (c. AD 323–350), who was still a minor.

  Relations between the brothers soon proved to be as little imbued with Christian charity as their actions towards their cousins had been. Animosity between Constantine II and Constans – or perhaps more accurately the staff of Constans – reached boiling point by the spring of AD 340. Constantine II led an army from his domain (the western empire) into his younger brother’s territory (Italy and Illyricum), claiming that he was on the way to help Constantius II, who was then engaged in a tough struggle against the Persian king Shapur II (r. AD 309–379). As he did so, Constantine was ambushed and killed. And so, no military help ever arrived for Constantius from the west; the court of Constans, which annexed all Constantine II’s lands after his death, apparently harboured a deep suspicion of the eastern establishment. The hostility of the western court was a genuine problem for Constantius, since his resources for the war against the Persians – a conflict his father had been planning just before his death – were limited. Unlike earlier rulers, he could not draw troops from the entire empire. It is therefore to his credit that the defensive strategy he employed succeeded in keeping Shapur II’s forces in check for the next two decades, despite some bitter criticism from within his own staff.

  A would-be theologian

  Constantius was far less quiescent on the matter of his subjects’ faith. The point at issue was not that he had been raised as a Christian; the same was true of Constans, yet he turned out to be far less dogmatic in his attitudes than his elder brother. Constantius’ unyielding stance was the source of many quarrels with powerful opposing forces in the Eastern Church, notably those in Alexandria led by Bishop Athanasius (c. AD 293–373). Constantius convened council after council in an attempt to arrive at a modified version of the Nicene Creed that would restore church unity – but without much success.

  Although he spent much of his career in exile from his see in his hometown of Alexandria in Egypt, Athanasius’ career shows how important the model that Constantine set for relations between Church and state at Nicaea proved to be, and how the Church was injecting a powerful new dynamic into imperial politics as a whole. Emperors were finding that Constantine had created a structure that could challenge their own power. The key was the fact that at Nicaea Constantine had allowed the Church to be self-governing, albeit with guidance from the imperial government. Bishops who defied that council (or later ones) could be exiled, but they were not executed, and other bishops could be involved in determining their fate.

  Although Christian bishops were not inclined to treat fellow bishops with whose doctrines they disagreed with great charity, they were not remotely interested in creating new martyrs of their enemies. This was a crucial change, and one need not have a great deal of imagination to feel certain what an emperor like Septimius Severus would have done with a subject who proved as recalcitrant as Athanasius. In part because Constantius could not have him executed, Athanasius could become a symbol for those who would assert that when spiritual values did not accord with the demands of government, conscience should triumph over expediency. Athanasius was able to achieve this status because he was his own best publicist, whose voluminous writings in defence of his position hide the fact that he authorized violent attacks on his ecclesiastical enemies, and that his own election as bishop was scandalous.

  In addition to managing to keep himself at the forefront of ecclesiastical opposition to Constantius, Athanasius’ major contributions to the development of Christian thought were two. One was his division of emperors into two categories: ‘true believers’ – that is to say, Trinitarians who followed the Nicene Creed – and Arians, which is what he accused his rivals of being, a gross distortion of their actual positions). The other was his promotion of an ascetic lifestyle, which he popularized through his biography of St Anthony (AD 251–356), the Egyptian founder of the monastic movement.

  The influence of Athanasius extended beyond the realm of theology and church politics, making it plain that disputes about the nature of God masked deeper concerns about the nature of imperial authority. As early as AD 341, differences between Constans and Constantius emerged in their attitude to polytheism. Constantius made moves to abolish public sacrifice, which Constans initially went along with. However, he then chose to reinterpret the proscription as applying only to secret sacrifices that involved casting spells to distress one’s neighbours or seeking information about the health of the emperor (practices that had always been illegal). The following year, when yet another council of eastern and western bishops was summoned, this time at Serdica (modern Sofia, Bulgaria), to discuss proposed ‘improvements’ to the Nicene Creed, matters came to a head. The western churchmen, sensing that they enjoyed strong support at the court of Constans, rejected the eastern document and demanded that Athanasius be permitted to attend. In AD 344, and for most of AD 345, the storm clouds of civil war appeared to be gathering, as different consuls were recognized in the two parts of the empire. Then, quite suddenly, Constantius, who was hard pressed by the Sassanians, gave in and allowed Athanasius to return to Alexandria.

  The challenge of Magnentius

  Though Constans had emerged victorious from this clash, major problems were looming for him elsewhere. He had been forced to spend the bulk of the AD 340s in the Danubian lands. The bureaucracy that had once served his brother Constantine in Gaul began to resent the lack of attention it was receiving, with results that would ultimately prove fatal to Constans when he decided to visit there in AD 349. On 18 January, AD 350, Flavius Magnentius (AD 303–353), the commander of the Gallic armies, declared himself emperor and hired assassins to murder Constans. Meanwhile, Constantius’ rule teetered on a knife-edge, as Shapur II once again attacked his eastern frontier.

  Constantius recognized that the problem he faced in the former realm of Constans would take years to sort out, and that nothing could be done about it until the Persian threat had abated. Thus it was that Constantius delayed his response until Shapur withdrew after a failed siege of the key stronghold of Nisibis in Mesopotamia in the summer of AD 350. Even then, before venturing west to take on Magnentius, Constantius saw that he would need to appoint a reliable deputy – someone who could show the dynastic flag during his absence but not do anything rash to put his realm at risk. Having no son, he called his oldest cousin, Gallus, out of the enforced seclusion in which he and his half-brother Julian (AD 331–363) had been living for the past decade and appointed him Caesar. At the same time, he released Julian from house arrest, allowing this ke
en scholar to resume his education at Constantinople and other cities along the Aegean seaboard.

  Advancing into the Balkans during the winter of AD 350, Constantius first received the submission of the army under Vetranio and then prepared to deal with Magnentius. Diplomatic negotiations brought some significant desertions from Magnentius’ camp before the two emperors met in battle at Mursa, a city near Sirmium on the Danube (modern Osijek in Croatia), in AD 351. The outcome was a bloody disaster for both sides, with Magnentius losing some two-thirds of his force while Constantius allegedly sacrificed nearly 40 per cent of his own army. This horrific casualty rate was a sign of just how great could be the difficulties any emperor would face if he tried to insist upon unified government. But insist Constantius must, for he could not possibly share power with a rival as determined as Magnentius. Constantius completed the destruction of the western regime at the battle of Mons Seleucus in Gaul in the spring of AD 353.