Nikopolis: victory city – Location and foundation – The monumental core – A Christian city? – A second senate –A new Alexander, a new Moses
To mark his victory over Licinius, Constantine re-founded the city of Byzantium as ‘the city of Constantine’, in Greek Konstantinoupolis, or Constantinople. Unfortunately, the visitor to modern Istanbul sees little of Constantine’s city. Much of the original construction was destroyed by fire in AD 532, during the infamous Nika riot, which was quelled only by the emperor Justinian’s murder of 30,000 in the city’s hippodrome. The Sphendone, the curved end of the hippodrome, survives today as it was in the early fourth century, although to access its substructure one requires a small boat to navigate its flooded vaults. Much around it was rebuilt by Justinian, whose majestic domed church dedicated to Holy Wisdom, Hagia Sophia, still stands with minarets added by Mehmet the Conqueror in 1453. “As one exits it to the east …” one may glance up and see a mosaic of the later tenth century, which depicts the Mother of God holding the infant Christ. To her right a youthful Justinian offers her the church, and to her left Constantine, almost identical to his pair, offers her the city represented by its walls (fig. 43).
The Church of the Holy Apostles, which incorporated Constantine’s mausoleum, fared less well at Mehmet’s hands than Hagia Sophia. Being sufficiently distant from the heart of the antique city, it had survived the Nika riot, but not Mehmet’s determination to rid Constantinople of its imperial line of succession. The tombs of the Christian emperors were removed and the building razed, to be replaced by the Fatih Mosque, ‘the mosque of the conqueror’, which was also a mausoleum for the new rulers, the Ottoman Turks. Little of the imperial palace was known until recently, but now, in addition to those parts preserved in the Great Palace Mosaic Museum,”one can see elements in the excavations at the site which incorporates the Four Seasons Hotel.”
The sixth-century Easter Chronicle gives an interesting perspective on the foundation of Constantinople that deserves to be read in full:
Constantine … while staying at Nicomedia, metropolis of Bithynia, made visits for a long time to Byzantium. He renewed the first wall of the city of Byzas, and after making considerable extensions also to the same wall, he joined them to the ancient wall of the city and named it Constantinople. He also completed the hippodrome, adorning it with works of bronze and with every excellence, and made in it a box for imperial viewing in likeness of the one which is in Rome. And he made a great palace near the same hippodrome, and the ascent from the palace to the box in the hippodrome by way of the Kochlis, as it is called. And he also built a forum which was large and exceedingly fine; and he set in the middle a great porphyry column of Theban stone, worthy of admiration, and he set on the top of the same column a great statue of himself with rays of light on his head, a work in bronze which he had brought from Phrygia. The same emperor secretly took away from Rome the palladium, as it is called, and placed it in the forum he built, beneath the column of his monument, as certain of the Byzantines say who have heard it by tradition. And after making bloodless sacrifice, he named the Fortune of the city renewed by him Anthousa. The same emperor also built two fine porticoes from the entrance of the palace as far as the forum, adorned with statues and marbles, and he named the place of the porticoes Regia. Nearby he also built a basilica with an apse, and placed outside great columns; this he named the Senate, and he named the Augusteion because he had also set up opposite his own a monument of his mother, the lady Helena Augusta, on a porphyry column. Likewise too he completed the bath which is called the Zeuxippon, adorning it with columns and varied marbles and works of bronze.
We must be wary of trusting this later source in all its details, and we cannot attribute the design and decoration of the new city entirely to Constantine. But it is clear that he was closely involved in all aspects of the city’s construction from foundation to dedication, through six years, and that the features identified in the chronicle were certainly in place during Constantine’s reign.
Nikopolis: victory city
Constantine chose Byzantium as the location for his city because of its proximity to the battlefield of Chrysopolis. The city was given his name so that it might be an enduring witness to his most recent and splendid victory. Thus, it joined those other nikopoleis, ‘victory cities’, founded or re-founded by his forebears. Constantinople was also to become an imperial residence, with buildings more splendid than those at nearby Nicomedia, constructed by Diocletian with whom Constantine had resided twenty years before, and where he now dwelt as he oversaw the construction of his new city. It was easily to surpass Salonica, erected by Galerius, whither Licinius had been sent into captivity and where he was put to death. It was to be more splendid than Sirmium and Sardica, Trier and Arles, in all of which cities Constantine had resided and presided over games and government in hippodromes and palaces. Constantinople was to be compared only to Rome and was accordingly referred to as New Rome.
The motivation for the situation of the new city was not that of the old: trade. The Greek colonies north of the Black Sea, whose existence had given impetus to the rise of a trading colony on the site from the seventh century BC, had ceased to be of significance a century before Constantine. If the presence of Constantinople promoted a recovery in mercantile activity across the Black Sea, this was only some five centuries later. By then legend held that Constantine had first considered the site of Troy, known to him but not to us until its rediscovery by Frank Calvert, and later by Heinrich Schliemann, near modern Cannakale in Turkey. Troy was the chosen progenitor of Rome, and the story of the foundation had been retold and fixed in tradition by Virgil’s Aeneid. Small wonder that the city of Constantine was to have returned to the source, in the tales of those who experienced its rise and wished to appropriate the common past of the two cities, Old and New Rome. But Constantine had a different idea in 324.
The victorious emperor had unified the Roman world and ruled as a single sovereign. His new city would straddle the divide between Europe and Asia. The city of Constantine was equidistant from the Rhine and the Euphrates. It sat at the end of the Egnatian Way, the great land road across the Balkans, and of the military road east. But such strategic thinking was not unique to Constantine. It had long been apparent, and the city had suffered as a consequence. The walls of Byzantium and much within them had been razed by Septimius Severus in AD 196, as punishment for the inhabitants having supported the pretender Pescenius Niger. According to Cassius Dio, writing only six or seven years after the episode, the city had resisted a siege for three years. It did without land walls for as many decades afterwards. However, by the 320s much had been rebuilt, and a new hippodrome and bath complex supplied. Later legend assigned these to Septimius Severus, safely distant and already identified as the destroyer of much of the older city. But that contradicts the testimony of Herodian, an author of the third century, who saw the city’s walls still in ruins in 240. Recently, it has been suggested that the hippodrome, at least, post-dates 260. Thus, Septimius Severus seems an unlikely re-founder. The most likely candidates are those who were based at nearby Nicomedia: Diocletian, Galerius and Licinius.
The best reason one can suggest for Constantine’s choice of Byzantium as his ‘victory city’ is, therefore, tendentious but worthy of consideration: another Tetrarch had been there first. Given his actions in Rome, following the defeat of Maxentius, one might suppose that Licinius is the most likely candidate. Licinius, like Constantine, had reason not to remain in Diocletian’s Nicomedia. He had placed a garrison in Byzantium to confront Maximinus Daia in 313. Constantine had expected Licinius to flee towards Byzantium in 317, following the battles at Cibalae and on the plain of Arda. And subsequently, when Licinius’ only possession in Europe was Thrace, he travelled frequently to the western edge of his realm. When Constantine marched against him in 324, Licinius met him first in open battle at Adrianople, but then turned back to secure his position within Byzantium. It seems likely, therefore, that Licinius had spent much time in Byzantium, and consequently had made efforts to make it suitable for the imperial presence. But so successful was Constantine’s effort to put his stamp on the city that no source mentions a role for Licinius. Constantine’s effort to appropriate and recast Byzantium was still more effective than his eradication of Maxentius’ scheme for Rome. The second great victory, unlike the first, was absolute.
Location and foundation
If Constantine’s choice of Byzantium was, in the first instance, driven by a determination to obliterate the memory and legacy of Licinius, then his motivations changed. In developing the monumental core of Constantinople, he was inspired by a trip to Rome in 326 to celebrate his vicennalia, the anniversary of his twenty years in power. He had staged events with great success in Nicomedia to mark the start of the year, in July 325. Those he staged in Rome to mark the end of the year were less successful and marred by tragedy, the result of Constantine’s own temper and ruthlessness. To this we shall return. As a consequence, the emperor would never again return to Rome and devoted himself more fully to the creation of his new city. But the site he had chosen enjoyed many natural disadvantages. It was the success of Constantinople, rather than its fortunate situation, that would alter trade patterns in the Mediterranean for centuries to come. Sitting far to the north of the regular routes, it pulled vessels through the Dardanelles despite the fact that in the summer sailing season the prevailing winds there were northerly and thus against the incoming fleet. Initially, it was the demands for building materials and provisions from the south, including the imperially mandated grain convoys from Egypt which ensured bread rations for the citizens, that made Constantinople and its hinterland an economic hot spot. That it endured as such was, however, quite surprising, as there was no reason to suppose that Constantine’s heirs would all choose to remain in the city. Its location was far from ideal.
There was little enough fresh water to supply the population of the trading colony that preceded the megalopolis, and subsequent emperors strived to ensure that the city’s vast baths and ever-flowing fountains were supplied, building a system of aqueducts and cisterns. One aqueduct had been provided by Hadrian, but Constantine undertook no further measures to supply the city, which as Cyril Mango has observed would have demanded perhaps five times more water than industrial Paris in 1900. The Roman thirst for water was extraordinary, perhaps half a million cubic metres per day for Constantinople at its height. One of Constantine’s first acts was to rebuild the Baths of Zeuxippus, also called the Zeuxippon, whose origins legend attributed to Septimius Severus but which more likely had been the work of a rival Tetrarch. The Zeuxippon was opened on the very day the city was dedicated, and which henceforth would be its birthday: 11 May.
It is remarkable, therefore, that the three vast open-air cisterns that supplied the majority of the city’s inhabitants were constructed only later, outside the walls established by Constantine but within those added by Theodosius in AD 413. Even the imperial palace did not acquire its famous underground cistern, today known as the Yerebatan Sarayi, until the sixth century. And since the city was surrounded on three sides by sea water, the freshwater supply came exclusively from the European hinterland, flowing from eighty miles away through aqueducts completed only in the reign of Valens (d. 378). While the empire’s frontier lay at the Danube, this supply was simple to ensure. But Valens died at the hands of Goths at the Battle of Adrianople, fought in Constantinople’s Thracian hinterland in 378. By then it was manifestly clear that Constantinople and its supply lines were acutely vulnerable. Although between the Danube and Constantinople lay the natural barrier of the Haemus, the Balkan mountains, once the Haemus passes had been breached, nothing stood between the mountains and the city. Elaborate long walls were later constructed, in large part to defend the city’s water supply. But the agricultural hinterland of Thrace could not effectively be protected, and this exposed it to devastation and the city to the threat of siege.
Constantine took no measures to defend the supply lines of his new city, for he had no idea that the city would grow so rapidly, and his experience of Nicomedia, Trier and Sardica had given him no reason to expect such growth. But he undertook to fill the city with a population sufficient to magnify the emperor, to pack his hippodrome and forum, to line his porticoed streets when he processed by and fill the shops otherwise, and to enjoy his largesse in doles of grain and meat. From 332 measures were in place to ensure that sufficient grain was brought from Egypt to feed up to tens of thousands of citizens. Shipowners who signed on received tax exemptions, but no efforts were made to improve harbour facilities, nor to supply adequate granaries and warehouses. Sea walls were added only in the reign of Constantius II, and it was only in his reign that the land walls attributed to his father were completed.
It would be wrong to lambaste Constantine for not considering the possibility that Constantinople would have a population of (if we follow Cyril Mango) around 350,000 a century after his death. Nor should we fault him for not anticipating the possibility that barbarians would breach the empire’s frontiers decades hence, although the dangers were manifestly clear within half a century of his death. Constantinople would prove more defensible than Salonica or Nicomedia, and indeed Milan and Rome, both of which Constantine had himself captured. But how a vast city might be fed and watered, or how it might survive an assault from without, were not pressing concerns in 324. At that time, Constantine was concerned principally with establishing an extensive ritual space, a city-sized stage upon which to act out his new majesty. No longer sharing the spotlight with a rival, for the first time in half a century a Roman emperor ruled alone, and Constantine would project that new sovereignty from his victorious foundation. Whereas Constantine had sought to place his own stamp on Maxentius’ rebuilding of the city of Rome, Constantinople was of a quite different order. It was to shine brighter than Rome in having the best of all things from across the Roman world, the old integrated with the new.
The monumental core
What Constantine could do with his new city was restricted by what was there already and by his desire to have everything in place in time for the dedication of the city on 11 May 330. Garth Fowden has compellingly sketched the problems inherent in finding a column suitable to support the statue of the emperor which stood in his new forum, just outside the old line of the city’s walls. Fowden noted that not a single suitable monolith was identified throughout the empire, or at least not such that it would reach Constantinople in time. Thus, the column is made up of porphyry, purple marble drums that have aged and worn terribly when compared to the Theodosian granite obelisk. This was apparent even before Istanbul’s air and rain became far more polluted with rapid industrialization in the twentieth century (fig. 44). As early as the sixth century the column’s drums were wrapped with iron bands. The city’s main street, the Mese (‘middle street’), had long ploughed a course through the middle of Byzantium to join the Egnatian Way (map 7). The roads that skirt the coast to the north and south, along the Sea of Marmara and the Golden Horn, were in place before Constantine’s builders arrived. This much is clear from what came after, namely streets introduced between them on a grid, and these ran across the city’s six hills or up their slopes, in which case steps were provided. The city of the mythical Byzas was concentrated on the acropolis, the elevated area between the Mese and Golden Horn, which is today occupied by the Ottoman Topkapi Palace. The hippodrome had been placed on largely empty ground, with a number of other structures and spaces that Constantine would develop as the core of his new city, the ceremonial stage where he would enact his new sovereignty.
At the heart of this ceremonial space was the imperial palace (map 8). From Constantine’s foundation would grow a mighty complex that stretched from the hippodrome to the shores of the Sea of Marmara, but the original palace endured at its core. Nothing of the Daphne Palace (as it was known in the tenth century) has survived, but we can reconstruct it from a description contained in a tenth-century text, The Book of Ceremonies, compiled for the seventh emperor with the name Constantine. The Daphne was rather modest in size, comprising a southern courtyard enclosed by a porticoed villa in which the emperor’s private apartments were situated, and a northern courtyard flanked by a reception hall (the Augusteus) to the east and a banquet hall (the Triklinos of the Nineteen Couches) to the west. The two were linked by passages which met at an octagonal hall, possibly a throne room or robing chamber – court ceremonial required frequent changes of costume. Separating the three halls from the open space beyond was a semicircular portico, which gave the courtyard the form of a horse-shoe and hence the name Onopodion. The Onopodion was enclosed to the north by a straight wall, in the middle of which stood a gateway, granting access to the palace from the Tribounalion (Tribunal), an open space to the north. In the centre of the outer wall was a gate, the Triple Door, and above this a gallery, the Heliakon, from which the emperor might address those gathered in the Tribunal. When larger crowds were to be addressed, the emperor proceeded along the Kochlis, a passageway from the southern courtyard ending at the Kathisma, which was both a room in the palace and the imperial box overlooking the hippodrome halfway down its south-eastern flank. The imperial palace complex abutted the hippodrome to the south-east, allowing the emperor direct and unmolested access to his people, but also offering the best view when he attended the games, as it was located just beyond the starting gates (carceres). The juxtaposition of the palace and hippodrome, and the orientation of both, were copied exactly from other Tetrarchic imperial residences. Indeed, the dimensions of the hippodrome correspond almost exactly to those of its counterpart in Salonica, being about 450 metres in total length.
North of the Tribunal were placed the grand imperial Baths of Zeuxippus, to which we shall return shortly. The northern entrance to the baths lay on the southern side of the Augusteion, a colonnaded square that was the point of transition from public to imperial space. From its south-western end ran the imperial road, the Regia, which terminated at the Chalke (‘bronze’) gates, later the entrance to the enlarged palace complex. From the north-western end of the Augusteion one entered the square known as the Basilika, home to schools attended by the likes of Julian, Constantine’s nephew who would become the last pagan emperor of the Romans. In the centre of the square was a double-arch, or tetrapylon, known as the Milion. This marked the eastern end of the Mese, the grand colonnaded street through the city, and was the point from which all distances would later be measured.
Proceeding along the Mese, one reached the small Forum of Constantine, in the middle of which stood his statue on its porphyry column (map 7). This marked the point identified as the exact centre of the new city, and thus called in Greek omphalos, also the word for ‘navel’. On the northern side of the forum was placed the Senate house, past which the Mese continued in a straight line to the Philadelphion, a plaza bedecked with statues honouring members of Constantine’s family. A far later source, largely mythographical, noted among these a porphyry composition of four men embracing, which it identified as Constantine and his sons. Could this be the location of the porphyry Tetrarchs, now in Venice, it was asked in the 1950s? The answer was provided rather dramatically by the discovery, during excavations at this very spot, before the Myrelaion church known today as the Bodrum Camii, of the missing foot of the fourth Tetrarch, wrenched off when the object was plundered by crusaders in 1204 (fig. 15).
At the Philadelphion the Mese bifurcated, with one branch following its established course to join the Egnatian Way, and a second now heading north-west towards Constantine’s mausoleum, a rotunda like that of Galerius in Salonica (fig. 45), which later formed part of the Church of the Holy Apostles. Where the road split, there was a most striking building, the Capitol, which was by the end of the fourth century a place of Christian worship. However, given its name, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the Capitol was conceived as a temple to Jupiter, and more particularly to the triad of Jupiter, Juno and Minerva, guardians of romanitas in the Second Rome.
Returning along the Mese to the Augusteion, one saw on its southern side the Baths of Zeuxippus, which were adorned with antique statues, numbering at least eighty gathered from across the Roman world. We know an extraordinary amount about them, for an Egyptian named Christodorus described them all in a poem later included in an anthology. Most of the statues were bronze, and most of famous men: politicians and rulers, orators and philosophers, poets and historians, even pugilists. But nine were of gods. Evidently, the Christian Constantine, while he may not have chosen them himself, expressed no concern at their inclusion in his baths. Nor was there any complaint that in the hippodrome there were statues of the divine twins Castor and Pollux, marking the site of their former temple, and tripods brought from the oracle at Delphi. Indeed, in the imperial palace, where at least for a while Constantine would have contemplated them himself, were deposited statues of the Muses, taken from Mount Helicon. These were later moved to the senate building, outside of which stood statues of Zeus and Athena.
On the opposite side of the street, on the right, was the newly completed hippodrome. Constantine’s renovations had been extensive, adding mighty foundations to the southern end of the structure to support a large bend, the Sphendone. The formal dedication of the city involved circus games, which henceforth took place each year on 11 May to mark the city’s foundation. According to Sozomen, writing at the start of the fifth century, Constantine ‘made for himself a gilded monument of wood, bearing in its right hand a Fortune of the same city [Constantinople], itself also gilded, and commanded that on the same day of the anniversary chariot races [it] should enter, escorted by troops in mantles and slippers, all holding white candles; the carriage should proceed around the further turning-post, and come to the arena opposite the imperial box; and the emperor of the day should rise and do obeisance to the monument of the same emperor Constantine and this Fortune of the city.’ Henceforth, all emperors were to bow down to the founder, who had provided them with such an imposing setting. Before that, whenever Constantine made his way to the hippodrome along the private corridor from his palace, emerging in the Kathisma, the assembled throng would cheer madly. Eunapius, a pagan author writing without such enthusiasm, complained that:
[Nothing] can suffice to satisfy the intoxicated multitude that Constantine transported to Byzantium by emptying other cities to establish them in his presence, for he loved to be applauded in the theatres by men so drunk they could not hold their liquor. For he desired to be praised by the unstable masses, and that his name should be in their mouths, though so stupid were they that they could barely pronounce it.
The hippodrome was adorned with victory monuments, which were more than allusions to the ephemeral victories of the charioteers. An ass and keeper, which commemorated Octavian’s victory over Mark Antony at Actium, was transplanted from Nikopolis (‘Victory City’) in Epirus to the victorious heart of Constantine’s new Victory City. Suetonius had earlier explained the significance of the composition: they were Eutyches (Prosper) and his donkey Nikon (Victory) who had wandered into Octavian’s camp on the eve of battle. Beside this at the mid-point of the spina, the central spine or median of the hippodrome, stood one of the three statues to survive (partly) today, the serpent column. One of the three heads is in the nearby archaeological museum, the others are lost. It had once stood at Delphi, a symbol of the Greek victory over the Persians at Plataea in 479 BC. Beside this was a statue of Hercules, which perhaps requires little further explanation, and another of an eagle defeating a snake, which recalled the images Constantine circulated on his coins of his military standard, the labarum, piercing a snake. Licinius was the snake.
A Christian city?
The prevalence of antique statuary is a strong clue that Constantine did not conceive of his new city, as has so often been said, as a new Christian capital for the Roman empire. Temples were constructed for pagan citizens, notably to the Fortune of Rome, a partner for that dedicated to the new Fortune of Constantinople, Anthousa. Eusebius attempted to explain away these lapses: ‘the city which bore his name was filled everywhere with bronze statues, which had been dedicated in every province and which the deluded victims of superstition had long vainly honoured as gods with numberless victims and burnt sacrifices, who now learnt to think correctly when the emperor held them up as playthings to be ridiculed.’ But then what is one to make of the most obvious ‘plaything’ displayed atop a tall porphyry column in the new forum? There stood a statue of Constantine himself in the guise of Sol Invictus. He held a globe in his left hand, a spear in his right (until it fell down and was replaced by a sceptre in the sixth century), and on his head the radiate crown of the Sun god. The statue was believed to have come from Phrygia, and a tradition held that it was the work of Phidias, the great sculptor of the fifth century BC, suitably modified. Evidently, this offended nobody, for it stood in place for more than seven centuries until, in 1106, it was brought down by a fierce storm. Later attempts to purify the statue had Constantine insert a fragment of the True Cross within the globe. But the discovery of the True Cross by Constantine’s mother, Helena, emerged as a legend only in the later years of the fourth century. Before that the message of the statue was mixed, and, as Garth Fowden has observed, this was quite deliberate, ‘an intended polysemy’.
The structures most strikingly absent from the monumental core of Constantine’s city are churches. The first known chapel in the palace
complex, dedicated to St Stephen, was erected no earlier than AD 421, and little further provision was made for the city’s growing population. No contemporary description of the city’s development remains before a document called the Notitia, written in AD 425, which mentions fourteen churches. If the population at the time were in the region of 350,000, each would have needed to house a congregation of 25,000, and thus significantly outdo even the modern megachurches of Texas, for example the 16,000-seat Lakewood Church in Houston. This was not the case, and it raises a question that has been debated for centuries: was Constantinople a Christian foundation? Christian writers claimed, quite obviously, that it was, but they have much to explain away. It was manifestly not the case, as claimed by Sozomen, that ‘this city … was not polluted by altars, Grecian temples, nor pagan sacrifices [but adorned …] with many and splendid houses of prayer, in which the Deity vouchsafed to bless the efforts of the Emperor by giving sensible manifestations of his presence.’
Of the fourteen churches that are known to have stood in 425, only three or four can be attributed with any conviction to Constantine. These do not include the first version of the cathedral church of Hagia Sophia, dedicated only in 360. Rather, one can best work by means of analogy with Rome, where Constantine provided a large episcopal structure, the Lateran Palace, later known as the Church of St John in Lateran, which became the seat of the bishop of Rome. There were also, somewhat later, several smaller but quite splendid churches dedicated to local Roman martyrs, as we saw above (p. 149). In Constantinople, therefore, it makes sense to credit him with the Church of St Eirene, the city’s first episcopal church (although this may predate him), and with two large basilicas devoted to the local martyrs Acacius and Mocius. The Church of St Acacius is first attested in 359 but may well date from the 330s, as may the Church of St Mocius, which is first mentioned in 402.
These would be embraced within Eusebius’ observation that Constantine, ‘being fully resolved to distinguish the city which bore his name with especial honour … embellished it with numerous sacred edifices, both memorials of martyrs on the largest scale, and other buildings of the most splendid kind, not only within the city itself, but in its vicinity: and thus at the same time he rendered honour to the memory of the martyrs, and consecrated his city to the martyrs’ God.’ A further measure of the number of churches in the city, again provided by Eusebius, is the commission for ‘fifty copies of the sacred scriptures’ that Constantine placed with the bishop of Caesarea. Constantine imagined that this number of books would satisfy all current requirements, and indeed all its future needs once the number of churches had been increased. Eusebius was clearly rather partial in his judgement on the new city and the intentions of Constantine in its construction. One might suggest instead that the city was furnished with places of worship sufficient for a middling population to perform publicly a diversity of religious rites, although it does seem very likely that Constantine banned blood sacrifice in those edifices for which he was responsible or for which he provided financial support.
Among the most splendid of Constantine’s structures was his own mausoleum, which he dedicated to the holy apostles. His son Constantius would later build a large cruciform church adjoining Constantine’s original circular mausoleum, and this many have argued was Constantine’s own work. However, it seems clear that the emperor’s principal concern was not to establish a church, but rather to ensure that his mortal remains rested beside those of apostles of Christ, who had been brought to his city to rest beside his tomb, and also within a ring of statues of Christ’s other apostles, such that in time Constantine would be recognized as their equal, isoapostolos. We shall return to this in our last chapter.
A second senate
Constantine’s act, which set his new city apart from all other Tetrarchic capitals and established it as a ‘Second Rome’, was to institute a second senate. The Roman senate met, as a rule, only twice a month, and in the third century operated almost entirely without imperial oversight. As we saw in an earlier chapter, it played a constitutional role when a usurper wished to have his seizure of power ratified, but this was rarely a decisive factor. The senate’s powers had long since been subordinated to the imperial will, as Fergus Millar demonstrates with a telling example. The city of Aphrodisias in Caria (Anatolia in modern Turkey) was granted freedom from taxation by Julius Caesar and Augustus, an immunity that was confirmed by a ruling of the senate (senatus consultum) in 39 BC. One hundred and sixty years later, the emperor Hadrian confirmed ‘the freedom and autonomy and other privileges granted by the senate and the emperors before me’. However, when in AD 250 the matter came before Decius, he told the ambassadors from Aphrodisias ‘we preserve your existing freedom and all other privileges which you have gained from emperors before us’. The senatus consultum was ignored; the imperial will was all. Yet men still clamoured to become senators, and ‘new men’ married into established families, projecting their lineage into Rome’s glorious past. Had Constantine himself not invented a past more glorious than his imperial father could offer?
In AD 300 the Roman senate was a select group of intermarried and immensely wealthy families, whose political function was stagnant, but which remained essential to the structural needs of governance and to the ideological needs of the empire. We might usefully ask why Diocletian had not created a senate for Nicomedia, whence he had governed the eastern empire for decades. The simplest answer, and therefore perhaps the correct one, would appear to be that Diocletian, and after him Galerius, commanded the support and loyalty of the east and had no interest in promoting the interests of their wealthy subjects. One senate, at a distance, was sufficient. The Tetrarchs relied on the army and promoted the interests of the equestrian class, whose rights had never been hereditary. Equestrians now governed provinces and dioceses at the expense of senators, and owed all to the emperor. Constantine did not reverse this policy, but rather promoted those who followed him, or whom he wished to recruit to his cause, to the rank of senator. Constantine, on the other hand, did not simply inherit Constantius’ position, but in competition with Maximian and Maxentius had struggled for two decades to establish his mastery of the west. In the oration of 321, by Nazarius, we learn that one facet of this effort was to expand the Roman senate and to award senatorial status to men from across the western provinces:
You felt at last, Rome, that you were the citadel of all nations and of all lands the queen, when you were promised the best men from every province for your curia [senate house], so that the dignity of the senate be no more illustrious in name than in fact, since it was composed of the flower of the whole world.
Constantine had now to ensure the loyalty of the east, and to do so overnight, having no subordinate to whom he could immediately entrust government and intending to remain there and not to return to the west. He could not remove the ruling stratum without creating a cohort of potential rebels. Still less could he kill the greatest of them and import men of his own, who would have no experience of the lands or peoples over which they might be placed. The most sensible policy, and the one that Constantine adopted, was to reward the men who had been loyal to his enemies, so that he might bind them to him and have them administer the eastern lands in his name. The Origo Constantini put it plainly: ‘There [in Constantinople] he founded a senate of the second order, [whose members were] called clari.’ That is, the members of the senate of Constantinople were initially to be addressed as clari, ‘distinguished’, rather than clarissimi, as the ‘most distinguished’ members of the senate of Rome were entitled. However, within a few decades this distinction was abolished, and all senators were clarissimi, affiliated according to whether they lived in the eastern or western part of the empire.
Loyalty in the east was purchased by spectacular largesse, which earned Constantine the opprobrium of some commentators. According to Zosimus (II.38.1), ‘Constantine continued wasting revenue by unnecessary gifts to unworthy men.’ His views reflect a pagan tradition that was well established by the later fourth century that Constantine had squandered money on the worst types and on his indulgent building projects, extracting that wealth from the cities of the east and their temples. Eusebius, as one might expect, treated the same matter with approbation (VC IV.1). He did not record the founding of a senate, but noted that ‘some received gifts in money, others in land; some obtained the praetorian prefecture, others senatorial or consular rank … for the emperor devised new dignities that he might give as tokens of his favour to a larger number of people.’ New senators benefited from a range of offices that the Tetrarchs had reserved for equestrians: they were governors of provinces, vicars of dioceses (not yet an ecclesiastical preserve), and Praetorian Prefects, or each in turn as they rose through the hierarchy. First among them, Licinius’ Praetorian Prefect Julius Julianus became consul for 325. The consulate, the crowning glory of a senatorial career, was now entirely in the gift of the emperor.
As Constantine set out in a letter from the last months of his reign, preserved in an inscription from the Forum of Trajan, he regarded the members of both senates as his own men. In 337 they numbered perhaps 300 in Constantinople and more than 600 in Rome. Constantius II, Constantine’s son, would expand this greatly to around 2000 in Constantinople alone, mostly to shore up his power and to provide for the increasing ceremonial needs of his court. It is a remarkable fact that the senate in Constantinople survived well into the Middle Ages, serving each emperor of the Romans, whom we now call Byzantines, until the fifteenth century. Every imperial entry into the city was met by a party of senators at an appropriate gate, for example the Golden Gate for an emperor returning in triumph. Each imperial coronation included an acclamation by the senate, and each imperial birth and death was attended by a senatorial act of rejoicing or mourning. Constantius’ expanded senate attended upon him as angels served the godhead, praising him continually. But the pattern was established by Constantine, who built on the innovations by Diocletian that he had witnessed at first hand.
A new Alexander, a new Moses
Now sole ruler over the whole Roman world, Constantine rapidly overhauled the imperial style. Where collegiality had prevailed, now family was emphasized, and Constantine was himself the vehicle for divine grace. This development can be seen almost immediately on coins. In place of the radiate crown and laurel wreath, the nimbus (halo) appears for the first time. More common is the diadem, a new type of crown suggesting a new conception of sovereignty; this appears on gold coinage from 324–5 (fig. 42) and on bronze from 328–9. The emperor and his family, not the imperial college, are celebrated, indeed venerated. Imperial women appear: mother Helena wearing her own diadem and Fausta without a crown (fig. 52). The busts appear to be gazing heavenwards, reviving an established type of Hellenistic origin. The most famous example of the gaze is that of Constantine’s colossal head in the Capitoline Museums in Rome, but an equally fine example graces the new Greek and Roman galleries at New York’s Metropolitan Museum (fig. 46). This would appear to represent a youthful emperor, but the hair-style reveals him to be older, with his remaining locks brushed forward towards the centre of his forehead and depicted rather more thickly than some rude commentators thought accurate. Constantine was teased for the concern he showed for his receding hair-line, and some even suggested that he adopted the diadem to mask it. However, the model for Constantine’s pose required that he have thick hair, a sign of virility. A further classic portrait is the bronze head in Rome’s Capitoline Museums, once thought to be of Constantius II but now once again held to be his father, which has extremely thick hair (fig. 47).
Constantine’s pose is not original, nor is it at all Christian in conception. One is struck by the consonance of Constantine’s busts with similarly disembodied heads of Mithras, for example that in the Museum of Ancient Arles, or that discovered in London in 1954 at the site of a Mithraeum, now displayed in the Museum of London (fig. 48). Both of the early third century, each bust is of a youth in a Phrygian cap gazing to the heavens, perhaps towards Sol in his quadriga. The ultimate source was quite clearly the heavenward-gazing Alexander, who had become the Sun god. H. P. L’Orange wrote six decades ago:
As Alexander stands at the beginning of the ancient world dominion, so the Alexander-Helios type initiates the Hellenistic-Roman representation of the Sun ruler. Not only is the tradition of this statuary type initiated here, but the actual world of ideas embodied in such representations, the whole solar explanation of the world dominion, now becomes current among the peoples of classical antiquity.
Constantine had placed himself in this line of succession, and by his pose staked his claim to world dominion, granted to him by the divine patron towards whom he gazed. In contrast with Alexander, whose pose includes a backwards-tilted head, the whole face glancing up, only Constantine’s eyes gazed up, and they were now portrayed larger than life-size. This last feature was his one major departure from third-century practice.
Septimius Severus had reintroduced the pose in the early years of the third century, but it had still earlier Roman precedents, on the coins of Nero, where the emperor also wore the crown of his Sun god, and on Republican coins struck for Pompey and Scipio Africanus. If a portrait bust of Philip the Arab, now in the Vatican Museum, has been used to support suggestions that he was a crypto-Christian, the same has not been said of Caracalla, who also favoured the pose. An excellent example of a heavenward-gazing Caracalla can be seen near Constantine at New York’s Metropolitan Museum, where one might also turn to the oversize bronze of Gallus (fig. 12), to see the same upward gaze as that favoured by Constantine’s portraitists. Even in Tetrarchic art, where one discerns a clear break in many other ways, emperors frequently gaze to the heavens.
Eusebius, as was his wont, ignored all other precedents and recognized Constantine’s heavenward gaze as an attitude of Christian prayer. However, the general tone of imperial coinage after 324–5 suggests an aura of imperial divinity. No longer wearing the crown of his erstwhile patron Sol, Constantine shares the qualities and the insignia of a greater god. The message of the coins is, moreover, even more carefully monitored, since gold and silver were now produced only in Nicomedia and, from 330, Constantinople. The city’s founding enjoys its own medallions, of course, where it is shown as the result of imperial victory, and established forms join new forms. On one issue the city’s Fortune, Anthousa, offers the emperor a Victory on a globe even as he is being crowned by a second Victory. On another, a nine-solidus multiple, the nimbate emperor sits on his throne, sons on either side, beneath the inscription SALUS ET SPES REIPUBLICAE, ‘Health and Hope of the Republic’.
Constantine’s pagan subjects, particularly those in the east, saw him as a new Alexander, a demi-god gazing heavenwards with at least some flowing locks, who had brought a vast empire under his sole rule through his leadership in war. But to Christians like Eusebius, he was also the leader of the new elect, the new Israelites, a new Moses, and this view Constantine’s propagandists also reinforced. Later sources record the transfer of the staff of Moses by Constantine to his new capital, where it was placed in a church of the Theotokos tou rabdou, ‘the Mother of God of the Staff’, and subsequently transferred to the imperial palace. According to Eusebius, Moses’ life in three cycles of forty years is mirrored in Constantine’s reign, broken up by his decennial celebrations. Porphyry had denied the antiquity of the Moses story and claimed him for the pagans, and perhaps Eusebius’ earliest drafts of the Life of Constantine, in which the comparison between Moses and Constantine is most apparent as a structural device, were written against Porphyry and thus in line with Eusebius’ earlier work, the Praeparatio Evangelica.
In this light, Eusebius’ account of the manufacture of the labarum can be seen to echo that of the Ark of the Covenant (Exodus 25–7), while its use parallels that of Moses’ staff (in Septuagint Greek, rabdos), the power of which was revealed to him by God (Exodus 4:2–6; 17:8–13). Similarly, the reworked version of Constantine’s vision may be seen as a parallel to Moses’ vision of the burning bush (Exodus 3). Elsewhere, Constantine’s palace upbringing is compared to that of Moses, who was likewise destined to free his people (VC I.12), and when Constantine fled a secret plot hatched by Galerius, he was ‘in this also preserving his likeness to the great prophet Moses’ (VC I.20). The most sustained comparison comes when Eusebius recounts the downfall of Maxentius, who has been transformed into a tyrant who oppressed the people of Rome. Of course, this reflects the propaganda disseminated shortly after Constantine’s victory at the Milvian Bridge in 312, prior to his entry into Rome as ‘liberator’. But it also demonstrates Eusebius’ mature reflection on the episode, casting Maxentius as pharaoh both in his revision of the Ecclesiastical History (HE IX.9) and in the Life of Constantine (VC I.38):
Accordingly, just as once in the time of Moses and the devout Hebrew tribe ‘Pharaoh’s chariots and his force he cast into the sea, and picked rider-captains he overwhelmed in the Red Sea’ (Exodus 15.4), in the very same way Maxentius and the armed men and guards about him ‘sank to the bottom like a stone’ (Exodus 15.5), when, fleeing before the force that came from God with Constantine, he went to cross the river lying in his path … So even if not in words, yet surely in deeds, in the same way as those who accompanied the great servant Moses, these who won this victory from God might be thought to have raised the same hymn against the wicked tyrant.
Eusebius proceeds to describe the celebrations of, and monuments to, this victory (VC I. 39–41), expanding upon his account in the Ecclesiastical History (IX.9.11). The statue of Constantine now explicitly holds ‘a tall pole in the shape of a cross’, and Eusebius records the same inscription: ‘By this saving sign … I have restored them to their ancient distinction and splendour.’
Most strikingly, between about 320 and 390 many sarcophagi, of which at least twenty-nine have survived in full or in fragments, were for the first time carved with the scene of the crossing of the Red Sea and the death of the pharaoh. The locations of these sarcophagi are important for their interpretation, with single examples found at Brescia, Metz, Pisa and Split, and eleven more found in Rome and fourteen in southern France (at Aix-en-Provence, Avignon, Carcassonne, Moustiers-St. Marie and Nîmes). Nine survived at Arles alone, one of which is now at Aix and another at Bellegarde du Garde. Sarcophagi survive in abundance at Arles, most strikingly along the cobbled path known as Alyscamps, which is lined with hundreds (fig. 49). These attest to four centuries of Roman burial, from Julius Caesar to Constantine, that included few Christians. The vast majority of sarcophagi bear simple designs and inscriptions. Only a handful, several now gathered in the Museum of Ancient Arles, feature sculptural reliefs, for example the third-century depiction of Phaedra and Hippolytus (whose story we shall recount below; see p. 222), which was produced in Greece and transported to Gaul to be completed. A second-century representation of Psyche reflects local production. In comparison, the number and quality of fourth-century sculpted sarcophagi are remarkable, as is the ubiquity of scenes from the Old Testament, often juxtaposed with those of the New Testament. Particularly striking is the so-called Sarcophagus of the Trinity, which features sculpture in three registers: Old Testament in the uppermost and miracles of Christ in the lower, between which is a medallion featuring portraits of the departed couple. The sarcophagus of Marcia Romania Celsa shows the youths in the fiery furnace, from the Book of Daniel, balanced by the New Testament’s Adoration of the Magi. The Red Sea sarcophagi are different. These feature a single narrative scene of a dramatic episode from Exodus. Of the nine discovered at Arles, two are displayed in the Museum of Ancient Arles: one a complete sarcophagus (fig. 50), the other a relief panel mounted on a wall (fig. 51). There is a striking parallel between the depiction of Pharaoh (Maxentius) and the portrayal of the bare-headed emperors of the third-century, seen on the Ludovisi Sarcophagus (fig. 11) and in the defeat of the Persians on the Arch of Galerius (fig. 18). One might consider this an inversion of the traditional symbolism.
It is worth elaborating on Constantine’s particular connection with Arles. In the years after his victory over Maxentius, Constantine spent as much time in Arles as at Trier. In April or May 313 he transferred a mint there from Ostia, surely to pay his troops, and he convened his first church council there on 1 August 314. On 7 August 316, Constantine’s wife Fausta gave birth to his second son and namesake in Arles, and in 328 the city was renamed Constantina, to mark this occurrence. Both occasions were marked by games in the splendid amphitheatre. Besides these facts, one might note the compelling suggestion in a late legendary account that Constantine had his vision near Arles. Placed beside these observations, the association between the imagery of the sarcophagi and Constantine’s victory at the Milvian Bridge is highly suggestive. Might one conclude that wealthy supporters of Constantine, perhaps even officers in his Gallic army, chose to have themselves interred in a monument to Constantine’s first decisive victory, at the same time demonstrating that they too were now Christians? It is to these Christian soldiers that we shall turn in the next chapter, but also we shall see how Constantine – the new Alexander, the new Moses – took a new first name, a Christian name: Victor.