Chapter 6

At the Threshold of the Palace

From the details we’ve collected, across cities and centuries, we can now discern a pattern. In Ephesos in Asia Minor, Jews won a worship space to call their own by petitioning their local Roman magistrates for it, not by unilaterally withdrawing from civic dialogue. In Italy, Isis’s worshippers pledged their allegiance to Pompeii by appointing Venus, patron goddess of the colony, to act as their local ambassador. And on the banks of the Euphrates in Roman Syria, Christians depicted a shepherd caring for his sheep, the image of goodwill, or philanthrōpia, in their baptistry. Their choice of this popular image, in their own church, reminded them to show concern for their neighbors. Each of these groups was finding a greater visibility in its town, but in none of these instances was the group’s success dependent on someone else’s conversion. It was dependent on conversation.

We have come full circle, back to A.D. 313, moments away from hearing that the emperors had granted Jesus’s followers the right to worship openly. Christians, a disenfranchised minority, were about to celebrate their indisputable political accomplishment. We should not escort the non-Christians of Rome off stage so fast, however. At the turn of the fourth century A.D., they comprised almost 90 percent of the empire.

To some, that’s an inconvenient number, but it’s an essential benchmark for us. Jesus’s followers did not win their legal rights because the majority of their neighbors were hungering for an alternative to their way of life. Their sacrifices, their temple celebrations, and their urban festivals were not dying, defunct, or even in need of “revival”—not in the early fourth century, the mid fourth century, or even the late fourth century, as archaeological evidence has now made clear.1 Romans would be restoring their temples, sacrificing their animals, burning incense at their statues and altars, and worshipping the gods at the theater, at the racetrack, and at their baths well into the late fourth century, as we will see. Indeed, the ways they worshipped their gods—the very conservative social fabric of their empire—would prove more resilient than we usually give them credit for.

These weren’t people suffering from a deep, aching spiritual malaise. Rome’s Isis worshippers have taught us that people could join “mystery cults” for reasons that had very little to do with spiritual needs. They, like the initiates of other “mystery cults,” were often looking for a community. That’s one reason the emperor Augustus went to the Greek city of Eleusis.

Three hundred years later, what Romans valued, what they believed, even how they worshipped—what Romans described as their religio—was never fixed or immutable. It was flexible and open to change. That’s why what it meant to be a Roman was always getting bigger. And that’s why, at the dawn of the fourth century, the Roman people show no symptoms of a terminal spiritual “illness.” Some scholars have claimed that Romans needed Christianity, that it offered them “a revitalization movement that arose in response to the misery, chaos, fear, and brutality of [ancient city] life.”2 The fact is that Romans didn’t need Christianity at all. The majority of them were doing just fine.

Without a doubt, the age of Constantine is one of Rome’s defining moments. Jesus’s followers had not only found their way from Judaea into a smattering of Roman cities. They had taken up residence in the palace on the throne. By century’s end, one brand of Christianity would be enrolled in the law codes as the only official religio of the empire, and every act of Roman sacrifice—in public and at home—would be summarily outlawed.

How did an empire of sixty million people change so quickly, given that nearly 90 percent of them were non-Christian a century before? Had all of them finally converted to Christianity? Or was it that Edward Gibbon was right all along and the Christians were now poised to unleash their “intolerant zeal” on a naïve, unsuspecting empire?

The time has come to look up from the dirt and dust. For the story that we built from the ground up five chapters ago is about to take us to the top of the Roman government. There, we will rejoin the debate already in progress about what it meant to be a follower of Jesus in Rome. Enter Constantine, Rome’s first Christian emperor.

Rome, A.D. 312

It is night in Italy. Constantine and his army are encamped north of Rome, perhaps having pitched their tents somewhere near Malborghetto, in Latium, where an old farmhouse today preserves the shape of an arch erected as a Roman victory monument. Was it Constantine’s? The picture is no clearer now than it was in October A.D. 312. That day, no one could say which way the winds of war would blow, and war was upon the Roman Empire.

The embers of the fires must have been dying as the general’s weary troops sought rest. The past few weeks, they had marched across the Alps and across northern Italy. The years before Constantine came into power, the middle to late third century A.D., had also been bumpy, roiled with political and military troubles; but Rome had weathered the storm. These had been trying times for the government. Emperors were being killed on the battlefield—one of them died at Fallujah, Iraq—fighting a rising superpower, a reborn Persian Empire. Rome’s new geopolitical neighbor would be ruled by a family called Sasanians, and under their leadership the word “Iran” would be chiseled into history for the first time. For Romans, the rise of the Sasanians would prove a steady source of diplomatic and military engagement for the next three hundred years. There would also be moments of quieter conversation.

The mystery cult of the god Mithras is thought to have come from Persia although Romans had likely invented these origins to give the cult an exotic cachet. Initiates of Mithras would find their place in Caesar’s empire, too. In Rome, we can detect a healthy pulse among their communities throughout the fourth and early fifth century A.D.3 Even during times of significant political challenge, not everything about “Persia” was culturally threatening.

Traditionally, however, this period in history, prior to Constantine’s ascent, shoulders a substantial part of the explanation for why Christianity triumphed in the fourth century. Admittedly, rampant turnover in the palace, calculated at one new emperor every two years, does not look good on paper. What new research has shown is that this period of turbulence was limited to Rome’s upper atmosphere.

In cities throughout the Mediterranean, taxes continued to be collected. Town councils continued to deliberate about local concerns. Buildings, including temples and shrines, continued to be repaired and, in some cases, entirely built anew. The third century bishop of Carthage, Cyprian, may have framed this time in apocalyptic terms (“These things have all been predicted to happen at the end of the world!”); but the world actually never came to an end. By the early fourth century, Rome’s government had rebounded, and the mundane reality of life in many Roman cities went on through at least the sixth century A.D.4

A reorganized constitution helped. In A.D. 284, Diocletian established a framework to ensure more institutional continuity in the event of crisis. Two men, each with the title Augustus, would work with two junior partners, each with the title Caesar, to ensure the steady management of the state, geographically. This creative exercise in power sharing between the eastern and western halves of the Mediterranean would remain in effect until A.D. 324, when the son of an imperial bodyguard, fresh off the defeat of his eastern co-ruler, put an end to it. For the first time in nearly forty years, the Roman Empire would be under the management of a single ruler: Constantine. At Malborghetto, however, those battles were still to come. In A.D. 312, Constantine’s eyes were focused on Rome.

 

Born in the Balkans, acclaimed Augustus at York, in England, by A.D. 312, Constantine was eager to acquire a larger swath of political territory. That fall, he marshaled his army. Together, they crossed the Alps, descended through Turin, and blazed through Verona.5 Their destination? Rome. Their mission? To topple its ruler, Constantine’s brother-in-law, Maxentius. Constantine and his army would celebrate a resounding triumph, inspiring many to wonder how it could have happened.

According to a later source, the Christian writer Lactantius, a tutor in Constantine’s palace, the emperor’s victory had been inspired by a miraculous vision. Lactantius tells us what happened that night inside the general’s tent—and what followed: “Constantine was moved in his sleep to put the heavenly sign of God on his soldiers’ shields and then to go into battle. And so he did as he was ordered. The next morning, turning a letter X on its side, with its top bent around, he branded christ [the Messiah] on all the shields. Equipped with this sign, the army took up their weapons.”6

Maxentius marshaled an impressive defense. He did everything he could, in fact—followed every governmental recommendation—to stop Constantine’s attack on the city, even consulting the Sibyl’s prophecies. What had she and her priests foreseen? “An enemy of Rome would die that day.”7 At the now famous battle of the Milvian Bridge, it was Maxentius who drowned in the Tiber. Constantine seized the city. The next morning, the man whose army had elevated him to junior emperor in York, England, now controlled Roman Spain, Gaul, Italy, and parts of North Africa. Constantine had stumbled onto a territorial fortune, matched only by his rivals in the eastern empire.

One year later, A.D. 313. The co-ruler of Rome and his partner in the east, Licinius, would meet at Milan to settle a pressing social question: the status of Rome’s Christians. It was not the first time that Roman emperors had chosen to confront this perennially thorny issue. Just two years earlier, April 30, A.D. 311, Christians who had awoken in the city of Nicomedia (modern Izmit, Turkey) had heard from their emperor that they were now able to practice their faith legally. No longer branded followers of an illegal set of worship practices, Christians had finally won the hard-earned triumph they had been fighting for.

With one swift decision, the emperor had rolled back almost a decade of legalized discrimination. In the words of this edict, Christians were now permitted “to be openly Christian [Christiani] again.”8 It was a dramatic reversal for the empire’s Christian community, but Constantine had nothing to do it. It was the lesser-known ruler, Galerius, married to a rather savvy diplomat, Valeria—Diocletian’s daughter—who had been the first to wake up to the changing times, perhaps because he was comfortable waking up next to a Christian. The jubilation would not last long. Galerius’s edict of toleration, from April 30, A.D. 311, would quickly be repealed after the emperor’s death. Christians and their supporters must have been justly disillusioned, rocked with so much political uncertainty. They were getting close. They were so close to carving out their own space in the world they lived in.

Then, A.D. 313. Constantine’s victory, followed by his meeting at Milan. The joint rulers of the Roman world resolved once and for all to end the policies that had been dividing one Roman from another. The co-emperors’ statement was made available for immediate release, announced to cities of the eastern Roman Empire from the imperial palace at Nicomedia (hence its rather erroneous name, the “Edict of Milan”).

Christians and their allies were probably holding their breath as members of the government read it aloud in the town’s forum, in the law courts, and in the markets:

When we, Constantine and Licinius, were fortunate enough to convene in Milan and began to take under consideration everything that pertains to the public good and to its security, among the many things that we felt would be beneficial for the people by and large was that certain matters must first and foremost be set in order, matters which preserved the respect for divinity.

Consequently, we gave to Christians and to all people a free ability to follow the worship practices [religio] that each one wished, so that whatever divinity there is in the heavenly seat above may be appeased and made favorable to us and to everyone who has been put under our rule.

Indeed, in accordance with sound and most virtuous reasoning, we believed that this course of action should be enacted so that the opportunity would not be denied to anyone at all—whether he wished to dedicate himself to the worship practice of Christians or whether he wished to dedicate himself to another kind of worship practice [religio] which he judges perfectly appropriate for himself.

Either way, the result is intended to be the same: that the highest divinity, whose proper worship [religio] we pursue with our free minds, may preserve his accustomed favor and goodwill for all.9

The law was unequivocal: Christians were not to be harassed any further—a remarkable protection for a group that comprised no more than 10 percent of the population at the time—but the emperors’ concern was larger than one minority group. Their task was managing the well-being of the entire empire, not just one part of it.

As Constantine and Licinius explained, “When you see what we have granted to Christians, you are going to understand that the ability to practice one’s own way of worshipping (religio) openly and freely has been granted to others, too, for the peaceful well-being of our time, so that each person may have a free opportunity to worship whatever god he has chosen.”10 What it meant to be Roman had just gotten a little bit bigger, as it had been doing for centuries.

 

What really happened to Constantine on his march to Rome? How much weight should those events bear in explaining the political victory of Rome’s Christian community? Galerius’s edict, from A.D. 311, frustrates any easy attempt to connect Constantine’s conversion to the new legal rights for Christians, as does Licinius’s own participation in the conference at Milan. (Like Galerius, Licinius worshipped Rome’s traditional gods.) Christianity’s gains hadn’t been predicated upon everyone’s conversion, regardless of what Emperor Constantine saw, or thought he saw, before the battle against Maxentius.

But what did the emperor see? Even in the early fourth century A.D., the history of what happened at the bridge, of these seminal events, was the combined product of the emperor’s memory and the memory of everyone who had heard him speak about them.11 Lactantius narrated the scene one way. Many years later, Eusebius would sit down with the emperor to listen as the aging general told war stories about how he came to power, and the story would change.

The two men, bishop and emperor, had first met in A.D. 325, on the Asiatic side of Istanbul, at the ancient city of Nicaea. By then, more than a decade had gone by since Constantine’s victory in Rome, but more had changed than just the seasons. In A.D. 325 Constantine had taken complete control of the empire.12 The emperor and the bishop would forge their friendship shortly after this period of consolidation. The project of promoting the emperor’s legacy had begun.

Over next fourteen years, until Eusebius’s own death in A.D. 339, the bishop would write and revise four versions of what happened that day at the Milvian Bridge almost two and half decades earlier.13 Eusebius says that he laid eyes on the military standard under which Constantine’s army had fought. Just like Lactantius, he, too, relates its backstory. The emperor, Eusebius says, remembered calling out in prayer that day, asking for help in the pending battle. While he was praying, a marvelous sign appeared. About noon, Eusebius says, “when the day was declining into evening, the emperor said that he saw in one part of the sky the trophy of a cross of light above the sun, and along with it had come a text message: BY THIS, YOU ARE GOING TO CONQUER. Not knowing what to make of the vision, Constantine had gone to bed, puzzled. In his sleep, everything was illuminated.

A second vision—this time, of the one called the Messiah, Christ—appeared with the same sign and explained its meaning. If Constantine put this symbol on his soldiers’ shields, it would protect his army in battle. When the emperor awoke, he immediately resolved “to worship no other God than the one who had appeared to him.” By mid morning, Constantine had a new symbol; the first two Greek letters of christ, X and P (chi and rho) were to be fashioned atop the army’s standards. The soldiers had a new banner, and Maxentius had a meeting with the Tiber.14

What do we make of these reports? Treat them with skepticism, cynicism, or credence? Could Constantine’s vision have been politically calculated? What had he really seen in the sky? Might Rome’s first Christian emperor have not fully converted to Christianity in A.D. 312? We should tread carefully here. From Chloe’s people to Martial and Basilides to the home renovators at Dura Europos, Jesus’s followers had been seeing their world in shades of gray for three hundred years. Even at the start of the fourth century, there was more than one way to be a “Christian.” Now, that included the Roman emperor.

 

Constantine must have fascinated the Roman people. An emperor who was openly Christian, he was a living sign that, at least for this one minority group in Rome, things could and did get better. Constantine certainly fascinated his biographer. “Serving as an ambassador for the Messiah of God with all outspokenness,” Eusebius of Caesarea tells us, “Constantine persevered in all things. If any one accused him of being a ‘Christian,’ he did not take that name as a mark of shame but spoke about it solemnly and openly.” The emperor, Eusebius reports, was a man who “prided himself” on his Christianity.

Constantine must have struck quite a pose. The same Greek verb, “to pride oneself” (enabrunomai), had been used to describe men like Julius Caesar who made risky fashion choices, such as wearing loose-fitting clothes. Caesar prided himself on his look, but he was also derided as too effeminate by his conservative peers.15 Three centuries later, if language is any key, Constantine was acting with similar audacity. He had taken the stigma associated with the word “Christian” and had wrapped himself in it, proudly. Many Christians, maybe even their allies, must have been overjoyed at the emperor’s self-confidence.

Christian visibility soon increased everywhere—from the hill country of Jerusalem, where a church was built to commemorate the site of Jesus’s death to the Balkans, Greece, and North Africa. The early fourth century was also a time of church councils, at Arles and Nicaea, meetings that were attended by opinionated bishops who wrestled with theological ideas.16 No wonder many still want to characterize this time as one of Christian cultural triumph as well. Seen from the inside of the movement, it really does begin to look as if the scales of the Roman world had begun to tip toward Christianity’s favor with this one man’s rise to the top.

But did it? The answer is most definitely not.

The worship of Rome’s gods continued: at temples, at the baths, in the streets, and at the racetrack. Beastly, bloody, but wildly entertaining gladiator games and animal hunts remained popular entertainment in the Colosseum and elsewhere. There were a few structural changes to Roman society. Bishops had now earned the right to adjudicate legal disputes, much the same way that members of the Jewish community had been granted a similar privilege; but overall, the Roman world was not suddenly divided into opposing camps. Christians and non-Christians did not begin to live their lives on the squares of a chessboard. Cities remained diverse, dynamic places. Many people in them saw the Constantine they wanted to see.17

In A.D. 310, one poet lauded Constantine’s military might by attributing it to Apollo. Urban planners in the empire’s new, second capital, Constantinople, would erect a statue of Apollo as the sun god atop a victory column in the city’s new forum. Romans elsewhere would develop their own artistic vocabulary to portray their ruler. A delicately carved stone cameo, an expensive piece of jewelry, presents us with a portrait of Constantine shown wearing a lion skin on his head.18 In the fourth century, this exquisite gem must have been one of its owner’s most valuable possessions, pinned on for special occasions. Anyone who complimented it would have spied Rome’s first Christian ruler looking back at them in the guise of Hercules, just as everyone in Constantinople saw Apollo, in the guise of the sun god, looking down at them from the center of the forum.

The emperor’s public image in Rome, too, suggests that the fourth century did not witness any radical break with centuries of tradition. Among the many spaces open for business in the capital was the soaring vaulted hall known as the New Basilica. A stroll from the Colosseum, the New Basilica has bequeathed us a template for our lofty urban train stations and grand museum spaces. In antiquity, it’s where judges officiated and where magistrates met with concerned citizens. In the fourth century, everyone who entered it was greeted by a colossal marble statue of the emperor. Seated at one end was Constantine in the guise of the god Jupiter, king of Olympus, the Best and the Greatest (figure 13). Rome’s rulers had been fancying themselves in this role for three centuries. Rome’s first Christian emperor was still speaking the same language.19

Even the Roman Senate, that quaint institution of the Republican past, seemed confused—or couldn’t bring itself to say what everyone else already knew. In A.D. 315, they had commissioned an arch to celebrate Constantine’s ten years as a ruler (and to celebrate his recent victory over Maxentius). For the message inscribed across the top, they settled upon the vaguest Latin possible. Stonemasons were told to ascribe the emperor’s success to “the inspiration of a divinity.” Looking up at the Latin as tourists still do today, scholars have long scratched their heads and wondered, “Which divinity?” Seventeen hundred years later, the masons who chiseled the news are dead; their work orders have vanished; and the Arch of Constantine—one of the most famous monuments in the Eternal City—still won’t talk.20

Constantine as Apollo, Hercules, and Jupiter, a triumphant ruler “inspired by a divinity”: how do we reconcile so many apparently conflicting images of a Roman emperor who, we are told, was unabashedly “proud” of coming out a Christian? Airbrush these many pictures into a composite, or try to think some of them away? One thing’s for sure: it’s not as if Constantine was trying to pass as something he was not. During his reign he met with bishops, and cities saw a building boom in Christian architecture. Many new churches would be paid for out of the emperor’s purse—at Rome’s Vatican Hill, for example, and in the suburbs of the city. What it meant to be a Christian was still very visibly under construction at the start of the fourth century, but many Romans did know the obvious about their emperor. Constantine had come out Christian, even if there were a few who were grumbling about it.21

 

What was about to happen in later Rome, the wholesale proscription of an earlier way of life, has been tackled from various angles. One historian thinks that by the end of the fourth century A.D., it was “perhaps inevitable” that Christians would try (and succeed) to restrict the worship practices of non-Christians.22 The implication, of course, is that Jesus’s followers couldn’t help but be the radically intolerant worshippers they inherently were. History is not the story of what’s “inevitable,” though. These were downright confusing times for Jesus’s followers. We must not fail to appreciate that.

In A.D. 312, Constantine had accomplished what many of them had likely never thought possible. Christianity had found its way to the most intimate chambers in Caesar’s palace. But whose Christianity? After three hundred years of family quarreling, to whom did this patchwork quilt of obedient soldiers, quiet home remodelers, and fervent martyrs belong?

Did it belong to the memory of Chloe’s people, the men and women of Corinth who had feasted at banquets but had been chastised by mail for doing so? Would bishops in third century Spain have a voice in the matter even though one of them, Martial, had flirted with the apocalypse by holding a chair in a local Roman social club? And what about the Christian daughter of the emperor Diocletian? Would there be any room for the memory of people like her? Valeria’s Christianity had hardly caused a scandal in the palace—even when her dad asked her to take part in affairs of Roman state—until someone leaked the information and tried to use it against her (Valeria would later be executed when her husband, Galerius, died). For Jesus’s followers who cared even moderately about their group’s cohesiveness, the social chasms that existed among them must have seemed daunting, if not downright impossible, to bridge.

And so we come full circle to rejoin a debate three hundred years in the making. The conversations that Jesus’s followers had been having for centuries—“What does it mean to be a Christian in the Roman world?”—were now about to be fought, awkwardly at times, in plain view of their friends and neighbors.

Without a doubt, the age of Constantine was a far different time than the second century empire of Trajan or the early third century world of Septimius Severus. In A.D. 212, all freeborn residents of Roman cities had been granted citizenship, transforming the empire into a larger political entity than it ever had been before. In this geographically diverse world, many people would find their own way of being Roman: speaking two languages, creatively mixing local and Roman customs. In the largely Greek-speaking cities of the empire, for example—places like the Balkans, Greece, Syria, Egypt, and Turkey—many Romans began to explore, adopt, and adapt Greek literature and philosophy. By the fourth century A.D., many of these Roman citizens were justly proud of their own Hellenistic heritage.

Followers of Jesus navigated this changing world, too. Many did so deftly. We know because, just like Chloe’s people in the time of Paul, they earned the scorn of their uncompromising peers. “Being openly Christian is not about ‘acting like a Greek,’” the bishop Eusebius of Caesarea would insist, in the years after A.D. 313.23 For Eusebius, the threat to his community must have seemed grave. As Christians in the Eastern Empire had begun to live more openly in their cities, many were doing so in ways that downplayed their differences and played up their connection to the local culture. For Eusebius, such behavior was unacceptable. In his mind, people who called themselves Christians were not supposed to look or act like something they were not.

By the end of the fourth century, other churchmen in the Eastern Roman Empire, such as John Chrysostom in Antioch and Bishop Athanasius in Egypt, can be heard speaking to their communities in these same terms. At Antioch on the Orontes River, a resplendent imperial city of the late fourth century A.D., men and women dined in grand houses amid exquisite mosaics that must have been the pride of the workmen who laid them.

One priest, John Chrysostom, had his vision for what it meant to be Christian in such a thoroughly Greek and Roman environment. “‘If a man sees you, who have a knowledge’ of how to worship God, passing the whole day in unprofitable and hurtful associations, won’t the conscience of a weak man be emboldened to pursue these acts even more earnestly?” If the chastisement sounds vaguely familiar to us, it should. Chrysostom, writing in the late fourth century A.D., was playing a cover version of Paul’s letter to the Corinthians (1 Corinthians 8:10).

In the mid first century, Paul had been warning people in Corinth not to participate in their civic dinners. Four centuries later, Chrysostom was warning his community not to flock to Antioch’s racetrack and root for their favorite horses, or go to the theater and applaud their favorite actors. Any Christian who did so risked engaging in what Paul had called “unprofitable and hurtful associations.” The solution? No games, no races, no theater; Christians should not be caught acting like Greeks.24 John Chrysostom was fighting the same cultural war that Eusebius had been, a generation earlier.

Being caught acting like a Greek was not the only existential threat that fourth century Christians faced, however. Three hundred years after Jesus’s Jewish ministry, none of his followers could quite agree yet on how to understand their own Jewish heritage.25 In Eusebius’s day, some were holding the “Lord’s Supper” on the Jewish Sabbath, Saturday. Many leaders were still circumcising their initiates, not baptizing them, as Paul had recommended.

Eusebius would point his pen at these people, too. “Being openly Christian is not about ‘acting Jewish,’” he would lament to his Christian readers.26 If that warning also sounds familiar, it should. Eusebius was singing the same tune Ignatius of Antioch had in the early second century A.D. Back then, Ignatius had coined the idea of being openly Christian (Christianismos) so that Jesus’s followers would stop identifying as Jewish. Two hundred years later, Christians of Eusebius’s day were still coming to their own conclusions about what that meant.27

These were not heady theological debates. Within a generation after Eusebius’s death, the force of Roman law was being summoned to address these perceived problems. If someone found a “Jew” who was previously a “Christian,” an edict of A.D. 357 decreed, that person’s property would be confiscated by the Roman state. By A.D. 388, Jews and Christians were forbidden to marry. The issue of Jesus’s Jewishness was one that had not been resolved by his later followers.28

To put it bluntly, Christians had walked straight into fourth century Rome lugging some fairly significant cultural baggage. Both of Eusebius’s anxieties—that Christians not act like Greeks and that they not seem too Jewish—would fester throughout the rest of the century. Soon, these unresolved identity issues would begin to cause massive headaches for everyone else, not just for the empire’s Jewish community. Very few Romans would have seen this explosion coming, but then again, why should they have? Why should the curious struggle of one minority group in Rome to find their place in Caesar’s empire ever have been an urgent concern to them? By the end of the century, one of the least studied eruptions in Roman history was about to disrupt the lives of everyone in the empire: Christians, non-Christians, and Jews alike.

 

By A.D. 337, Constantine would be dead, interred alongside tombs for the holy apostles. As the roughly 90 percent of non-Christian Rome went about its usual routine—gods, temples, sacrifice—those who had been looking for guidance about being Christian would face a daunting task. They would have almost twenty-five years of the emperor’s public life, policy pronouncements, and personal experiences to pore over. It was a sizeable but confusing legacy. Less than a decade before his death, in A.D. 325, the emperor had given one of his final answers to the idea of what it meant to be a “Christian.” It was also one of the strangest.

This period marks a crucial time in Roman history. Only a year earlier, in A.D. 324, Constantine had raised an army against his co-ruler Licinius and summarily defeated him. For the first time in a generation, Rome was now reunited under one ruler.

Then, sometime after his defeat of Licinius, Constantine set to work planning a new palace for the empire’s second capital to be named after himself, Constantinople. The city’s formal dedication would not be celebrated until six years later—in A.D. 324, there was still much to be done to build it—but at least Constantine did not have to start from the ground up. A Roman settlement, replete with temples, a forum, even a racetrack, had been situated here, at the tip of the Golden Horn since the late second century a.d. By the time Constantine was finished investing in it, the city would have its own senate; and its residents would receive a free grain allowance, a quality-of-life perk that was held only by residents of Rome. The empire, in effect, would now have two capitals, not just one. There, amidst the temples, forum spaces, new churches, walls, fountains, houses, and harbors—all the things that distinguished a fourth century Roman city—Constantine would leave an important clue about his Christianity. It was displayed above the door of the imperial palace.29

Eusebius stood at the threshold of the palace and described what he saw. Above the door was the familiar logo of CHRIST, the chi-rho, placed like a talisman above Constantine’s head. Below it was Licinius. Licinius wasn’t shown as a flesh-and-blood Roman sporting a conservative toga or military cuirass, however. “The hated enemy and savage beast,” Eusebius says, the one who had “besieged the God’s Church through godless tyranny and brought it into the abyss [was depicted there] as a snake.” What was the reason for depicting a Roman emperor with such artistic license? Eusebius explained: “Passages in books that belong to God’s prophets have talked about this man [the enemy who would besiege God’s Church] as a dragon and a crooked snake.” Constantine himself would use the same imagery in a letter sent to bishops after A.D. 324. Licinius, he wrote to them, had been the embodiment of evil: the snake, the serpent.30

In Istanbul today, there is nothing left of Constantine’s palace—not even the door. Yet the image Eusebius saw, which Constantine references in his own correspondence, does survive. It appears on a series of coins issued at roughly the same time (figure 14). One side (“heads”) shows Constantine. The other (“tails”) show a military standard, topped by the chi-rho, piercing a writhing snake beneath it. The coin’s legend celebrates, in Latin, the dawn of a new period of “Public Hope.”31 From the palace door to coins in people’s purses, Rome’s first Christian emperor had started talking about his victory over Licinius, a fellow Roman, by drawing upon imagery and language expressing an apocalyptic world view.

Why?

The defeat of the end-time beast, the battle of good versus evil, and visions of a spiritual, metaphysical conflict did have a long history. Among Jesus’s followers, they had provided something in short supply once: hope. During the first, second, and third centuries A.D., when few could worship openly, images like these reassured them that things would get better. (We remember that one way people may have interpreted John’s phantasmagorical Revelation was to read it as an uplifting message. Visions of victory may have inspired hope in times of crisis, real or perceived.) Their journey to hope had taken slightly longer than expected, of course. But by A.D. 313, Jesus’s followers had reached the promised land. No longer “sojourners” in someone else’s empire, they were fully recognized good neighbors. They were also Roman citizens whose worship practices benefited the state.

By all reasonable accounts, the political rhetoric of the “evil serpent” as a cipher for Rome should have been stamped with an expiration date—A.D. 313—the year when that hope had finally become a reality. In A.D. 325, however, little more than a decade after their political triumph, Constantine was drawing upon polarizing images he had dug up from a bygone era, talking about his recent military conquest as if it had been a victory in a spiritual war. That same year, he would deliver one of the oddest speeches in Roman political history.

 

The Easter holiday was twenty-four to forty-eight hours away. Nearby, at Nicaea, bishops would soon begin debating the relationship between Jesus and God. (A creed that some Christians still recite today is one of the best-known products of their deliberation.) Constantine was about to reflect on the role that divine providence had played in leading Rome to a new Golden Age. A copy of the emperor’s remarks has, almost miraculously, survived. No scholar today doubts its authenticity. One historian has even described it as a kind of “stump speech.”32 It is a thrilling text to read, a kind of behind-the-scenes political document so rarely found in the archives of ancient history.

The Christian God was guiding his “holy ones,” Constantine said. It was the very term John of Patmos had used to describe the angelic army of believers in Revelation. John himself had adapted the imagery from the Jewish book of Daniel—with one significant change. In Daniel, the “holy ones” referred to heavenly beings, otherworldly protectors, angels who fought demons.33 John had transformed the term and applied it to human beings who saw themselves as waging a battle on earth.

Constantine developed this theme in his speech. The emperor, a man who had come to power after seeing visions in the sky, was now convinced that everything around him had taken place according to God’s plan: the people around him, “they have witnessed the battles,” he said. “They have seen the [recent] war, when God’s providence granted victory to his people [over Licinius]. They have seen God coming to aid our prayers.”34 Licinius’s resounding defeat had made everything clear, to him.

How could the emperor be so certain? Constantine was about to take his audience on a grand tour, unwinding the spools of time and pausing to show them “proof” of God’s intervention. First, Virgil, the closest Rome ever came to having a poet laureate, whose golden verses were memorized by schoolchildren even in Augustine’s day. Virgil had foreseen the birth of the Messiah, or so the emperor was now proclaiming in his speech. Never mind that Virgil died in 19 B.C. and that the poet from Verona had been writing four decades before Jesus was born.35

Next, Daniel. Daniel was a Jewish prophet who had survived a night in a Babylonian lions’ den, where he had seen a vision of Jesus the Messiah, too, Constantine declared. Never mind that this chronology, too, was off. Jews had been forced to live in Babylon as captives after the destruction their First Temple, in 586 B.C. After their liberation, many Jewish writers would return to that period to tell unsung stories about their outspoken heroes and resistors. One of these resisters was Daniel. Punished by the king, left to be devoured by lions, Daniel had survived because he had been protected by God’s hand. Later, he wrote about several visions that provided comfort to him and were passed down to fellow Jews.

These visions are recounted in the Book of Daniel, narrated in his name, included in the Jewish Bible. In it, horned beasts threaten the existence of God’s people, and the end-time is fast approaching. Of course, even Roman writers were able to suspect what biblical scholars today state with confidence: the book was edited during the tumultuous cultural world of the Hellenistic kings, the writer Porphyry said in the early fourth century a.d.36 The beast was a reference to Antiochus IV Epiphanes, the Hellenistic ruler whose policies contributed, directly or indirectly, to the Maccabean revolt. Daniel’s visions have come down to us as a piece of political rhetoric, a “historical apocalypse” meant to offer hope for a Jewish community who may have felt deep pangs of disaffection during the second century B.C.37

Constantine was a great admirer of Daniel’s resolve. Thrown amid lions, Daniel had survived, the emperor said, because of his “immaculate piety toward the true God.” That’s why, on the morning after his incarceration, his enemies were amazed to discover him alive! When they peered inside the cave, they could see Daniel standing there “with his hands upraised, praising Jesus the Messiah.”38 Never mind that Jesus does not appear in the version of the story read by Jews.

Constantine would later place statues of Daniel and the lions at fountains in Constantinople. It was a curious choice. Eusebius had urged Christians not to seem so Jewish, but both bishop and now emperor were vocal that Jewish prophets—Daniel, Moses, Abraham, and others—had “predicted” Jesus’s coming.

The emperor had even more to say about the topic of Jewish-Christian relations. “No one,” Constantine went on, “would ever have been more blessed than this people”—here he was referring to the Jewish people—“had they not willingly cut off their souls from the Holy Spirit.”39 In a letter, Constantine would make this point even more explicit. Jews, he wrote, were guilty of “killing the Lord.”40 It’s an astonishing accusation. For the first time in the annals of Roman history, the midlevel functionary who executed Jesus, Pontius Pilate, was being issued an imperial pardon. At a distance of three centuries, Constantine was fully absolving him for any liability in connection with Jesus’s death.41 Roman authorities hadn’t killed Jesus. In Constantine’s mind, Jews had.

And then, the emperor started talking about the “Sibyls,” the inspired women who have haunted our story since 63 B.C. Even these homegrown Mediterranean prophets, Constantine said, had recognized the inevitability of a Christian future. In one of their poems, the Sibyls had delivered a secret message to him.

The clue had been written as an acrostic: “Jesus the Messiah [Christ] was the Son of God, the Lord and Savior.”42 Constantine then assured his audience about the poem’s authenticity. It was not just some document conveniently cooked up to support his argument. Cicero, he said, that respected Republican statesman who had quashed Catiline’s revolt, had actually seen it. (Fact check: Cicero never laid eyes on it.) In his well-read Latin treatise On Divination, which includes a discussion of the Sibylline prophecies, Cicero does allude to acrostics—each line in a prophecy might begin with a letter that spelled out a secret word or theme—but the man whose head and hands were cut off in 43 B.C. for having executed Catiline without a trial never gets around to mentioning “Jesus.”43

Constantine believed that Rome’s Sibyls had predicted Christianity’s success. But had they? The answer is definitively no. Constantine’s “Sibyl” was not a prophet. Like all the so-called Sibylline Oracles we possess today—handed down to us in a sixth century A.D. manuscript—“she” was a fraud; and “her” text was a Christian forgery.44

Constantine was not alone in his zeal for these righteous prophecies. Many individuals, both Christians and Jews, had been circulating false “Sibylline Oracles” for centuries and citing them as if they had the force of scriptural authority. A hundred years earlier, Clement, bishop of Alexandria at Egypt—he who railed against the use of fancy pots and sauces at the “Lord’s supper”—cited one so-called Sibylline Oracle in this way. Alexandria was spiritually depraved, Clement thundered. The city was doomed; its destruction was near. The historic Temple of Serapis, the architectural and cultural wonder of their resplendent Hellenistic seaside town, was going to be sacked and burned. How did he know? A “Sibyl” had told him: “And you, Serapis, who are set upon so many glistening-white stones, you will lie in ruin in thrice-unhappy Egypt,” Clement claimed “she” said.45

By the fourth century A.D., others were still putting their faith in poems like these. Lactantius would quote them. Tutor to Constantine’s son, he may have been reading them and sharing them while working in the palace.46 Emperor Constantine was now citing these texts as if they were divine pronouncements, too. He was using them to articulate a new vision for Rome, even relying upon ones that had not originally been written by or for Christians. “‘Memphis’ and ‘Babylon’ have received a just reward for their wayward worship,” he told the audience in his speech. “[These cities have been] left desolated and uninhabited, together with their gods.”47 If these words look familiar, they should, too. An anonymous Jewish rebel in Egypt had “predicted” the imminent destruction of “Memphis” and “Babylon” at the start of the second century A.D.48

Two centuries later, that obscure Jewish “prophet” had found a distinguished following.49 His frenzied words were now being attributed to a “Sibyl.” (That is where we find the fragments of his poetry today, in a text that scholars have named the Fifth Sibylline Oracle.) Constantine was quoting it—one more Christian appropriation of Jewish history—to talk about his recent triumph over Licinius.50

Virgil, Daniel, Rome’s Sibyls—everywhere Constantine looked, in A.D. 325, he was convinced by the predestination of a Christian empire. It must have been an extraordinary speech to hear. Did anyone ever question his interpretations? We don’t know. Some of his statements probably did raise a few eyebrows. To say that “Memphis” and “Babylon” had been punished was to imply that an evil, godless empire had been toppled. Constantine, the leader of sixty million Romans, was claiming to have seen the “fall” of Rome. Meanwhile, outside the room—from the Forum of Constantinople, crowned by Apollo, to the Forum of Rome, lorded over by Jupiter—no such thing had actually happened. If people were looking to the emperor to figure out what it meant to be a Christian, by A.D. 325, many of them must have been downright confused by the kind of Christian the emperor had become.

In Constantine’s rich public life, which spanned almost a quarter century, where was the real Christianity Christians were supposed to use as a model for their own? It always seemed to be shifting, changing. Did it come from after the Milvian Bridge, when the emperor showed no signs of a dualistic world view? Or did it come from after Licinius’s defeat, A.D. 325, when the emperor’s Christianity was increasingly being fed on the poetry of “Sibyls,” the visions of Daniel, and revelations of John? The first set of documents was falsely represented to be something it was not: a government sanctioned prophecy. The second belonged to the Jewish people. As for the third, Christians in Constantine’s day hadn’t decided whether to keep it or throw it out. Revelation wasn’t even an accepted part of the Christian canon yet. It would remain an outlier, too, until later in the fourth century.51

Indeed, Revelation had become a toxic text. In the mid third century A.D., one bishop in Egypt had become so convinced of its literal truth, he thought that God’s kingdom would reign for a millennium and that it would happen on earth, soon. A fellow bishop tried to disabuse him of that timetable, but whether this friendly intervention swayed his colleague is unclear. Still, by Constantine’s day, the tide may have been turning against John’s visions, as Christians began to muse whether it was right to classify them as a “revelation.” That word seemed entirely inappropriate for a story that was, on first reading, so maddeningly incomprehensible.52

By A.D. 337 then, the year Constantine died, many of Jesus’s followers must have thought of themselves a bit like the blind man in Mark’s gospel. They could see things now—a world full of Romans—but everything around them still looked cloudy. Many of them couldn’t even agree on the composition of their own Bible. With the “Edict of Milan,” Jesus’s followers had merely passed from one stage of uncertainty to another.

As for the Roman world, what did it look like from the outside? How much did Constantine’s conversion change society for everyone else? The answer is, very little. Few Romans lived their lives as if they were waging a metaphysical war. Even fewer were anxious about the return of someone else’s Messiah. Christians may have won their place in the empire, but Rome wasn’t hastening toward a fiery end because of any social change.53 Life in the Roman world was never a zero-sum game—unless, that is, someone had been taught to see it that way.