Victor eris – The new Flavians and the Great Cameo – The deaths of Crispus and Fausta – Goths and Sarmatians – Christian soldiers? – The Greatest Victor
To mark his victory in the civil wars that ended the Roman Republic and to distinguish himself from the many generals who had so recently claimed power, Octavian dispensed with the name he had taken upon entering public life. No longer Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus, which drew attention to his adoption by Julius Caesar, he became Augustus, a name redolent of piety and authority. But Augustus was not his first name. His official title was now Imperator Caesar Augustus, with emphasis placed first on the title by which he had been acclaimed by his troops. It is from imperator that we derive the English title emperor, where Germans have preferred a derivative of Caesar. The so-called praenomen imperatoris was not taken by Augustus’ immediate successors, but in a later period of civil war, AD 68–9, it became standard for pretenders. The title was a mark of victory, and each acclamation would follow an imperial success which was almost never won by the emperor himself. From the time of Vespasian, emperors received the acclamation not only for victories won on their behalf, but also to mark each year in power, and this practice continued into the reign of the Tetrarchs. Constantine had been acclaimed imperator and Augustus by his father’s troops at York in 306. In the following years he would be acclaimed another thirty-one times, the most of any Roman emperor. He also adopted a new name, a mark of victory akin to Augustus’ first use of the praenomen imperatoris. Constantine took as his first name, his Christian name, Victor.
Victor eris
After 324 Constantine was closer to divinity and considered himself a divine vehicle and channel for grace. In a letter to the provincials of Palestine, he observed that ‘those who embark with righteous purpose on certain actions and continually keep in mind fear of the greatest god, holding firm their faith in him’ have triumphed over those ‘who flagrantly subjected to outrages and savage punishments’ fellow believers. That is to say, Constantine’s enemies’ armies ‘have fallen, many have been turned in flight, and their whole military organization has collapsed in shame and defeat’. Summarizing his rise to power, Constantine relates that the greatest god ‘Examined my service and approved it as fit for his purposes; and I, beginning from the sea beside the Britons and the parts where … the sun should set, have repelled and scattered the horrors that held everything in subjection’ (VC II.28). This imperial document, like all the others composed after the Battle of Chrysopolis, was issued in the name of Victor Constantinus Maximus Augustus. The emperor was no longer Invictus Constantinus Maximus Augustus, which surely was held too closely to echo the name of Sol Invictus. As Eusebius explained, ‘he created this title personally for himself as his most appropriate epithet because of the victory God had given him over all his enemies and foes’ (VC II.19).
Taking the name ‘Victor’ appears to have been a rather literal fulfilment of the exhortation hoc signo victor eris, which means ‘By this sign you shall become victor.’ * One can only guess that the phrase was revealed to Eusebius in Constantine’s native Latin, when the two met for the first time more than a dozen years after the episode of 312, thus at exactly the time Constantine became Victor. Eusebius recorded the exhortation in Greek rather less literally as touto nika, ‘By this you shall conquer’, and he invented the notion that it was seen as a text attached to the ‘cross-shaped trophy formed from light’. We have noted that in Lactantius’ account the exhortation to ‘mark the heavenly sign of God (caeleste signum dei) on the shields of his soldiers and then engage in battle’ comes in the dream, rather than as part of the vision, and no wording is offered. One might suggest, therefore, that to Constantine in 324 the phrase hoc signo victor eris was not a general exhortation, but rather a direct instruction to ‘become Victor’.
The new Flavians and the Great Cameo
The victorious emperor now ruled free of interference from competitors; but he did not rule alone, for he took measures to promote the interests of his family, the new Flavian dynasty. After Chrysopolis, he granted both his mother Helena and his wife Fausta the title Augusta, and struck gold coins showing their busts, not his own (fig. 52). Helena was entitled to wear the imperial diadem, whereas Fausta, the junior Augusta, was not. Constantine’s four sons, Crispus, Constantine, Constantius and Constans, were all to be emperors. Crispus and Constantine had already been promoted to the rank of Caesar; Constans, only an infant, would eventually follow in 333. In November 324 Constantius was raised to that rank, and a remarkable cameo was produced to mark the occasion, perhaps the same date that both Helena and Fausta were named Augustae. It demonstrates clearly the new emphasis on the emperor’s victorious nature, his divinity, and most importantly the imperial family.
The Great Cameo (fig. 53), formerly in the collection of Rubens and now held by the Geld en Bankmuseum, Utrecht, depicts the emperor joined on a chariot by his wife Fausta, his young son and his mother Helena. A cantharus (urn) turned on its side rests under the chariot, suggesting that Constantine is Dionysus (Bacchus), to whom the vessel was sacred. Similarly, the chariot is pulled not by tigers, panthers or leopards (fig. 6), but by two centaurs, both rearing up (compare with fig. 7). This iconography is familiar from Dionysiac sarcophagi of the Antonine era. The leading centaur bears an elegant ‘trophy’ on his left shoulder and tramples two defeated enemies dressed as Romans, the followers of Licinius. The victory thus marked, Constantine is offered a laurel wreath by Victoria, who flies over the centaurs towards the chariot. But Constantine is not only Bacchus, for in his right hand he holds a thunderbolt, evoking Jupiter.
Constantine wears a laurel wreath, his wife a veil, perhaps in the guise of Ceres, as she holds an ear of corn in her left hand. Her right hand cannot be seen, but presumably she embraces Constantine as he does her. Husband and wife face each other, Constantine looking to the front of the chariot but not at his wife. Rather, he gazes to the heavens, his left arm resting on her shoulders. The shoulder-clasp is reminiscent of the embrace of the porphyry Tetrarchs (fig. 15), but here the four colleagues have been replaced by four family members. Over Constantine’s right shoulder stands Helena, who points under the emperor’s raised right arm to his son, who is wearing cuirass, helmet and sword. Fausta also points to her son. The young boy could be any one of Constantine’s sons by Fausta, but is surely Constantius, who was born in 317 and was named Caesar a month after the Battle of Chrysopolis. This is the context for the production of the cameo, erroneously dated by others to the years after Milvian Bridge. The heavenward gaze and the focus on family which is driven home by the presence of the matriarchs are suggestive of the new imperial style, but their pointing fingers identify clearly the boy whose promotion marked his father’s ultimate triumph and the end of the Dyarchy with Licinius. The cameo can, therefore, be dated rather precisely to within two years of November 324, for by the end of 326 Fausta was dead.
Looking at the Great Cameo, one might wonder at the nature of Constantine’s Christianity. Was it not as yet incompletely conceived, laced with pagan sensibilities, offering no sanction for extreme violence? Here one might consider observations by Peter Brown on a slightly later work, the illustrated Calendar of 354. ‘The more we look at such art,’ Brown opined, ‘the more we are impressed by the way in which the parts that we tend to keep in separate compartments, by labelling them “classical”, even “pagan”, as distinct from “Christian”, form a coherent whole; they sidle up to each other, under the subterranean attraction of deep homologies. The classical and Christian elements are not simply incompatible … Rather, the classical elements have been redeployed. They are often grouped in such a way as to convey, if anything, an even heavier charge of meaning. The gods make their appearance, now, as imposing elements of power and prosperity… they add a numinous third dimension to the solidity of a saeculum restored to order by Constantine.’ In simpler terms, how else was an emperor to display his conception of power than in the language of images with which all Romans were familiar, whether they were pagans or Christians? There were more overtly Christian models, for example that of Moses and the drowning of Pharaoh, but these were only now emerging and had never been a feature of imperial art and the language of power.
The deaths of Crispus and Fausta
Constantine’s restoration was not yet complete, his world not fully ordered. The emperor’s god was Moses’ God, a vengeful god, swift to anger like the emperor himself, prone to Bacchic excess. So it came to pass that in 326, as the emperor celebrated his twentieth year in power, and even as he sought to forge the image of a new ruling dynasty, he murdered his first-born son Crispus and his wife Fausta, the mother of his three younger sons and two daughters. Crispus was now in his early twenties, a Caesar for almost a decade, and an accomplished leader. He had defended the western frontier from his base at Trier and commanded, in name or in fact, campaigns against the Franks in 320. Coins were struck to mark his victory, and in 321 Nazarius praised him thus:
Those very Franks … were felled under your arms [Constantine] in such numbers that they could have been utterly eradicated, if you had not, with the divine inspiration with which you manage everything, reserved for your son [Crispus] the destruction of those whom you had broken. For your glory, however, that nation which is fecund to its own detriment grew up so rapidly and was so stoutly restored that it gave the most valiant Caesar the first fruits of an enormous victory.
In the same year, as we have seen, Crispus was married to a girl named Helena, and by her he had recently had a son, Constantine’s first grandchild. In 323 Crispus won a further victory over the Alemans, surely now commanding in person. And in 324 he made his way from Trier to the east, where he commanded his father’s fleet in the sigma victory over Licinius. His great potential fulfilled, Crispus could look forward to his decennalia as Caesar and to the day when he would succeed his father as Augustus. Perhaps he anticipated it too keenly, and shared that desire with his father’s wife, his stepmother Fausta.
No contemporary source records how first Crispus and then Fausta were killed, so effective was the emperor’s campaign to damn their memories. Nothing is known of the fate of Crispus’ young wife and son, but one must imagine they were disposed of as ruthlessly. Eusebius, ever the sycophant, mentions neither Crispus nor Fausta in his Life of Constantine, and even wrote Crispus out of the final version of his Ecclesiastical History (HE X.9.4), where he had appeared in an earlier version as ‘an emperor most dear to God and in every way resembling his father’. Indeed, in characterizing their victory over Licinius, Eusebius had compared the relationship between father and son to that between ‘God, the universal king, and the Son of God, the saviour of all men’, proceeding further than one might expect of a bishop in his desire to flatter, and reminding some members of his audience, perhaps, of the relationship the Herculian Tetrarchs once enjoyed with the Jovians. We must wait until the later fourth century, therefore, to discover the first terse references to the murder. A passing mention by Ammianus Marcellinus reveals that the deed took place at Pola in Istria, an odd place that suggests Crispus may have died having recently been sent into exile. Writing around the same time, Aurelius Victor states that Crispus died at the command of his father but for no known reason, and Eutropius in his brief history offers a generic reason: ‘the pride of prosperity caused Constantine greatly to depart from his former agreeable mildness of temper. Falling first upon his own relatives, he put to death his son, an excellent man; his sister’s son, a youth of amiable disposition; soon afterwards his wife, and subsequently many of his friends.’ Sidonius Apollinaris, a Latin author of the fifth century, offered a pithier statement: the wife was killed in a hot bath, the son by cold poison.
How were the two deaths linked, as surely they were? There are two distinct traditions. The first sets Fausta against Crispus, for example as recorded by the anonymous author of the Epitome de Caesaribus (41.11-12): But when Constantine had obtained control of the whole Roman Empire by means of his wondrous success in battle, he ordered his son Crispus to be put to death, at the suggestion of his wife Fausta, so they say. Then he killed his wife Fausta by hurling her into boiling baths when his mother Helena rebuked him with excessive grief for her grandson.
According to this tradition, Fausta was jealous of Crispus’ successes and desperate to secure the succession of her own sons. She concocted a tale of treachery knowing that her husband was swift to anger and to judgement. Helena, Constantine’s mother, jealous of Fausta’s influence over her son and enraged by the death of her first-born grandson whom she had raised, exacted her revenge, persuading Constantine in his remorse to compound his crime. However, the story does not hang together well, for if Constantine did indeed regret his rush to judgement, one would expect Crispus’ memory to have been redeemed. It was not. Moreover, in a variant of the story related by Philostorgius in about AD 425, Fausta’s death was the result of her adultery with a servant after she had effected Crispus’ death, and the latter crime was detected by Constantine himself, not Helena.
John Chrysostomos, a Christian bishop and theologian renowned for his ‘golden mouth’, conjured for Fausta a death worthy of Prometheus who defied Zeus: ‘suspecting his wife of adultery, the emperor bound her naked to the mountains and exposed her to the wild beasts when she had born him many royal children … The same man also murdered his son.’ This would appear to verify Philostorgius’ account, but it may also imply that Crispus was Fausta’s adulterous lover. She was closer in age to her stepson than her husband, and they had grown up together for at least some years in Trier. This is spelt out by Zosimus (II.29), following Eunapius, who was unremittingly hostile to Constantine:
Without any consideration for natural law he [Constantine] killed his son Crispus … on suspicion of having had intercourse with his stepmother, Fausta. And when Constantine’s mother, Helena, was saddened by this atrocity and was inconsolable at the young man’s death, Constantine, as if to comfort her, applied a remedy worse than the disease: he ordered a bath to be over-heated and shut Fausta up in it until she was dead.
By the later twelfth century, the Greek historian Zonaras, drawing on these accounts but also on a rich vein now lost to us, sketched a vignette that combined the two tales. It is worthy of Euripides, in whose Hippolytus the tragic heroine Phaedra is compelled by Aphrodite, goddess of love, to desire her stepson, the eponymous hero. But whereas Phaedra hanged herself in shame, Fausta, ‘who was madly in love with [Crispus] but could not get him to succumb’ accordingly …
announced to his father that he [Crispus] loved her and had often attempted to do violence to her. Therefore Crispus was condemned to death by his father, who believed his wife. But when the emperor later realized the truth he punished his wife too, on account of her wantonness and for the death of his son. Fausta was thrown in a super-heated bath and there met a violent end.
This version, rather than resolving the tensions between the two traditions, suffers from the problems of both and from its close adherence to the conventions of classical literature. Would Fausta truly have acted solely through lust, a topos in classical literature that obscures rather than explains reasons for the behaviour of women? If Constantine felt duped and regretted his tragic rush to judgement, why did he not restore honour to his son’s memory? And why did Fausta die in a hot bath? Was her death an accident, suicide or punishment?
David Woods has offered a further interpretation that merits close consideration. Since ‘death by hot bath’ is not a punishment known hitherto in the Roman world, it would be a bizarre and cruel invention by Constantine, unless one can suggest an alternative explanation. And Woods does: hot baths were considered essential to inducing miscarriage. The second-century physician Soranus, in his Gynaecology, sets out the following (adapted slightly from Woods’ translation):
For a woman who intends to have an abortion, it is necessary for two or three days beforehand to take protracted baths, little food and to use softening vaginal pessaries … But if a woman reacts unfavourably to phlebotomy and is languid, one must first relax the parts by means of sitz-baths, full baths, softening vaginal pessaries … And she who intends to apply these things should be bathed beforehand or made to relax by sitz-baths; and if after some time she brings forth nothing, she should again be relaxed by sitz-baths and for the second time a pessary should be applied.
Fausta would not, of course, have wished to abort a legitimate child, so it could not have been Constantine’s. Her impregnation must have taken place, therefore, while she was apart from Constantine for some time. Perhaps she had fallen pregnant by a lover, maybe her servant, as Philostorgius alleged. Perhaps Crispus was her lover, as Zosimus would have it, or perhaps he had forced himself upon her, as would be allowed by Zonaras’ account. However she came to be pregnant, Fausta’s attempt to abort the foetus led to her death in a hot bath. If Constantine learnt of this, one can be sure that shame would ensure his silence, and that of everyone else, on the matter. This would be the case especially had his wife been raped, although that seems the least likely scenario. Whatever the truth of this episode, it ended in Rome in 326, the year and location of Constantine’s vicennalia celebrations. Constantine’s new Flavian dynasty, which he projected as a replacement for the messy meritocracy of the Tetrarchy and whose unity was so recently carved into the Great Cameo, was shattered. Shortly afterwards, the imperial residence in Trier was razed and a double church constructed on its site. It is likely that this was part of the damnatio memoriae, razing Crispus’ imperial residence and placing Constantine’s own mark on the site. Although damning the memory of his son would appear to display the opposite of contrition, a pagan tradition would associate this act with Constantine’s desire to atone for his most heinous crime.
Goths and Sarmatians
Zosimus, following his fourth-century source Eunapius, observed that after the deaths of Fausta and Crispus Constantine did three things: he became a Christian, seeking absolution for his greatest sin; consequently, he refused to sacrifice, and so earned ‘the hatred of the senate and people’ of Rome and fled east to found Constantinople; and he ‘fought no more successful battles’. On the conversion, he spins a fanciful tale:
Since he was himself aware of his guilt and of his disregard for oaths as well, Constantine approached the pagan priests seeking absolution, but they said that there was no kind of redemption known that could absolve him of such impieties. A certain Egyptian, who had come from Spain to Rome and was intimate with the ladies of the court, met Constantine and assured him that the Christian religion was able to absolve him from guilt and it promised every wicked man who converted to it immediate remission of all sin. Constantine readily believed what he was told and, abandoning his ancestral religion, embraced the one the Egyptian offered.
This story was refuted early in the fifth century by Sozomen (I.5). It omits the fact that in 326 Constantine had long associated with Christian bishops, including the Egyptian mentioned here who travelled from Spain to Rome, namely Ossius, bishop of Cordoba. More credence has been given to the claims that Constantine earned the opprobrium of the citizens of Rome, for he never returned to the city after 326, and that he fought no more successful wars, although neither is true.
In the later 320s Constantine was in his fifties. He was approaching the age at which his father had died, still campaigning in Britain, and Zosimus, and his source Eunapius, paint a picture of a weak and foolish old man, whose powers had waned. Julian would also recall his great uncle’s deterioration, although since he was just six when Constantine died, it is hardly surprising that the Augustus, within a year or two of death, appeared aged to him. By then Constantine may indeed have felt that he had earned his leisure, or at least the pampering of life at court, to balance the years in the saddle and the tent, albeit one as well appointed as the imperial tent. But in the decade before that Constantine won his greatest victories over foreign enemies. Thus, when the pagan orator Libanius delivered in 344 or 345 a speech in praise of Constantine’s sons, Constantius and Constans, he singled out the wars against the Goths and Sarmatians that were fought between 328 and 334.
In summer 328 Constantine was campaigning against the Goths at the Danube. He won some minor skirmishes, for which he took the title Gothicus Maximus for the first time, emulating his chosen forebear Claudius Gothicus. He founded a fortress on the left (northern) bank of the Danube called Daphne, across from the established fortress at Transmarisca (see map 1). Still more impressively, Constantine built the first stone bridge across the Danube to the Gothic shore (the so-called ripa Gothica), from Oescus to Sucidava, which was indeed the longest stone bridge ever built by the Romans. The intention was to open the way into Gothic territory, to effect their submission, and milestones lined the route into barbarian lands as far as Romula. Constantine then proceeded to Trier, where three laws were issued that have been preserved in the Theodosian Code, and gold coins were struck at the local mint, suggesting his presence in September and December 328 and in early 329. He may have campaigned in familiar territory, along the Rhine, in October 328. By 9 March 329 he was back at Sirmium again issuing laws, before heading south along the rivers Sava and Velika Morava to Naissus, his birthplace, where his presence is recorded on 13 May. Two weeks later he was at his sometime capital Sardica, where he was based for some months. On 3 August, and again on 25 October, he was at Heraclea in Thrace, where a mint continued to produce a small supply of gold and silver coins. However, he wintered in Sardica, departing some time after 5 February 330, bound for Constantinople and its formal dedication on 11 May. At some point in this ill-documented tour, the emperor was taken by surprise when ‘the Thaiphali, a Scythian people [in fact Goths], attacked him with five hundred horse’, and according to Zosimus (Eunapius), ‘not only did he not oppose them, but when he had lost most of his army and saw them plundering as far as his fortified camp, he was glad to save himself with flight’. The people of this region generally known as Goths were in fact a number of smaller groupings, among them the Thaiphali, who appear to have been subordinate to the Tervingi. It may have been the depredations of the Tervingi that forced the Thaiphali to move south across the Danube and to violate Roman territory.
Constantine shuttled between Constantinople and its Bithynian hinterland in 330 and 331, but in April 332 his attention was once again drawn north. The ruler of the Gothic Tervingi had sought to expand his territory once again, now at the expense of his Sarmatian neighbours further to the west. The Sarmatians appealed to Constantine, who marched north to Marcianopolis (modern Devnya in Bulgaria), the provincial capital of Moesia Secunda, and a short way inland from the Black Sea port of Odessos (Varna). He appears to have dwelt there while his eldest son Constantine Caesar was summoned from Gaul, to lead the army against the Goths. No reliable information on the campaign has survived, but it was clearly a mighty victory for the Romans. Rumours circulated that 100,000 Goths were driven into a freezing wilderness to die of hunger and cold. The emperor took the title Gothicus Maximus II, for this was his second victory over the Goths. Gold medallions showed the emperor as DEBELLATOR GENTIUM BARBARUM, ‘conqueror of the barbarian peoples’, dragging by the hair a captive identified as GOTHIA. Copious copper coins were struck for distribution to the victorious troops, declaring GLORIA EXERCITUS, ‘the glory of the army’.
A peace treaty was concluded, and guaranteed by the departure of the son of the ruler of the Tervingi, Ariaric. He was well treated, of course, and at some point a statue of him was erected behind the senate house, to remind all of the emperor’s great victory. In the course of the wars Constantine had strung along the Danube many small but powerful fortresses, called quadriburgia after their four turreted corners and celebrated in his many coin issues featuring camp gates. However, as a consequence of the treaty of 332, the whole length of the frontier between Romans and Goths was open to trade. Indeed, there was now a broad frontier zone where Roman coins and barbarian imitations circulated freely to facilitate exchange; they were pumped into the region to pay the troops who manned the fortresses. Many thousands of the copper coins were dropped and have been found by chance or in excavations within the lands bordering the Danube. Gold and silver coins were not frequently dropped, or at least were not left where they were dropped unless for an extremely good reason (death or something like it). However, some small hoards have been found, most likely attesting to gifts and tribute payments that Constantine’s heirs continued to send north, intended to ensure the loyalty of the Tervingi but also to reward the families of those who now served in the Roman army. Moreover, in 336 a bishop was consecrated for the Goths, a certain Ulfilas, who was invested with his office at Constantine’s command by Eusebius, metropolitan bishop of Nicomedia, a man of whom we shall learn far more in the following chapters. The peace with the Goths lasted thirty years.
‘When peace with the Goths had thus been secured,’ the Origo Constantini records, ‘Constantine turned against the Sarmatians, who were showing themselves to be of doubtful loyalty.’ In fact, a huge wave of them was pushed across the Danube by further fluctuations to the north. Constantine returned to the Danube to settle affairs, and is recorded at Singidunum (modern Belgrade, in Serbia) on 5 July 334 and for the last time at his birthplace, Naissus, on 25 August. At that time, gold coins were struck at Siscia for the first time in seven or eight years, bearing the legend VICTORIA CONSTANTINI AUG. The Augustus was campaigning in that region once again, and was for the last time victorious. The Origo Constantini rather improbably suggests that he rounded up and resettled 300,000 Sarmatians within the empire, to cultivate empty fields and to contribute troops thereafter to the army. The emperor took the title Sarmaticus Maximus II. In addition, coins were minted throughout the empire declaring the emperor VICTOR OMNIUM GENTIUM, ‘Victor over all peoples’. The last gold coin issued by Constantine at Trier, where he had established his military reputation, bore that legend.
An imperial palace remained on the Danube through the fourth century, at Sirmium. Recent excavations have turned up a fourth-century head of the Fortune of Sirmium, a parallel for Anthousa, the patron goddess of Constantine’s Constantinople. Only later would Mary, the God-bearer (Theotokos) and Virgin (Parthenos), usurp Anthousa in her principal function as the good fortune and defender of the city, defending the defenders of the Christian people. Contemporary with the head, a fragment of a large oval sardonyx cameo (fig. 54), now to be found in the National Museum in Belgrade, appears to capture the imperial victories won over several years in the lands bordering the Danube, against both Goths and Sarmatians. A rider, certainly a general, surely an emperor, perhaps even Constantine himself, sits astride a rearing white horse, his left hand grasping the reins, his right holding a spear above his head, aimed at a figure now lost. The eyes of the rider point in the same direction but appear to be inclined upwards, perhaps to the divinity ensuring his victory. Remarkably, the eyes of his horse also appear to look heavenwards. The rider wears a cuirass, but one can pick out the pleats of the military tunic that protrude from it to cover his upper thighs and upper arms, and a military belt (cingulum) around his waist from which dangle two studded leather straps. His paludamentum, the cape that distinguishes him as a commander, is tossed over his left shoulder. It flies out behind him, indicating motion, and the natural colour of the sardonyx, blood-red, indicates the crimson of an emperor. His mid-calf-length boots, cothurni, are those of a general, and the elaborate lacing can be seen. The broken, twisted body of a barbarian lies beneath the horse’s rear legs, and another between the front legs, although the upper torso of the second barbarian is now lost. Beneath the horse’s tail, the hands of a barbarian, shirtless, muscular and bearded, are bound behind his back by a Roman legionary, who is identified by his uniform and helmet. The rider, however, wears no helmet; his head is adorned only with thick tousled hair and a ribbon. Like the central figure of the Ludovisi Sarcophagus, he needs no such protection, for he is divinely guarded, and his awareness of that fact is manifested in the look of hieratic calm on his face.
Christian soldiers?
What of the soldiers of Constantine Victor? Were they now to share the emperor’s faith even as they marched under his banner? Were they to fight as Christians against pagan barbarians? There is no evidence that Constantine interfered with private worship within the army, nor that he mandated private devotion to his chosen god. Rather, he inserted due reverence to his patron god within the first category of worship we identified earlier (p. 14), and even then avoided insulting his followers by obliging them to utter the name of that god. Troops were ordered to pray to the greatest god who favoured their commander but did so in neutral terms. This is clear from the words of a prayer preserved by Eusebius (VC IV.20):
You alone we know as god,
You are the king we acknowledge,
You are the help we summon.
By you we have won victories,
Through you we have overcome our enemies.
To you we render thanks for good things past,
You also we hope for as giver of those to come.
To you we all come to supplicate for our emperor
Constantine and his god-beloved sons:
That he may be kept safe and victorious for us in long, long life, we plead.
Nor was the second category of worship, which built unit cohesion, overturned. There is no indication that in camp or on campaign the army abandoned any of its regular battle standards, although Eusebius notes that when they were performing drills for the emperor, ‘he had the sign of the cross marked on their shields, and had the army led on parade not by any of the golden images, as had been their past practice, but by the saving trophy alone’ (VC IV.21). This is a reference to the labarum, the perfect composite battle standard and a focus for veneration of a new god of victory, but it took its place alongside the eagles (aquilae) and flag standards (vexilla) of an earlier age.
While wielding no stick to enforce conversion, Constantine did offer his troops carrots. Eusebius relates (VC IV.18-19) that Constantine ‘taught all the military to revere’ Sunday, the Christian Sabbath, which was also the ‘Day of the Sun’. And ‘to those who shared the divinely given faith he allowed free time to attend unhindered the church of God, on the assumption that with all impediment removed they would join in the prayers.’ As well as the offer – for the first time one must emphasize – of a day off once a week, there were numerous additional incentives to convert to Christianity that required no legislation. Patronage operated as well as ever it had in the Roman hierarchy, and Constantine promoted Christians to positions of command. It made sense to those aspiring to high rank to emulate the emperor, and this had a trickle-down effect. The example of senior officers had always inspired, or indeed compelled, junior ranks to enrol in specific cultic groups, for example the mysteries of Mithras. If one can identify a clearer dynamic for the rapid adoption of Christianity by officers in Constantine’s army than patronage and ‘peer pressure’, it was the regular ‘combination of browbeating and cajolery’ that Peter Brown has identified as the motor for Christianization of the Roman aristocracy. Among the rank and file many would seek the approval of officers through emulation, and none would wish to stand out as a dissenter. Within units, the natural arena for the ‘recurrent obbligato of ceremonious bullying’, an ethos would rapidly have been established that rendered devotion to the god of the Christians integral to devotion to the common good.
So much might be expected even if worshipping the god in question were of questionable utility. But through Constantine’s success, the god of the Christians had clearly emerged as a god of victory. Who, therefore, would wish to worship a lesser god, whose patronage might be inadequate to protect the devotee from the wrath of the neglected Christian deity? Even if one continued to worship Jupiter Dolichenus or Sol Invictus, surely it could not hurt also to venerate the latest manifestation of the greatest god? Such calculations were at the root of many early ‘conversions’ within the army, particularly since the brand of Christianity that Constantine espoused did not preclude participation in regular public rituals. Constantine notoriously remained pontifex maximus, head of the Roman colleges of priests, throughout his life, although by 315 he had refused to participate in sacrifices. Eusebius claims that Constantine issued legislation banning sacrifice altogether, but it is far more likely that he banned sacrifices associated with the imperial cult, which was permitted to continue with Constantine’s Flavian dynasty (gens Flavia) as its new focus. Constantine continued to receive traditional acclamations from his troops, who invoked more than one divinity on his behalf. Nor was military discipline to be affected by notions of Christian charity. Punishment meted out for transgressions by officers, Christians or not, remained severe, for example death for granting leave to soldiers who were then absent during an attack, or being burnt alive for allowing barbarians to plunder Romans or share in the spoils of victory. Imperial Christianity was not a religion of peace and forgiveness.
The emperor’s ability to ensure that his troops worshipped his chosen deity was greatly enhanced by radical changes in the structure of the army. By 325, according to an entry preserved in the Theodosian Code (CTh 7.20.4), a distinction had been drawn between the lesser frontier army (ripenses) and the field army (comitatenses). The first of the Tetrarchs, Diocletian, had certainly led a retinue or comitatus, which scholars have identified both as a central reserve army and as a personal bodyguard. All agree, however, that Constantine’s mobile field army, the comitatenses, which was formed around the expeditionary force he had led into Italy in 312, was substantially larger and more stable than any comitatus Diocletian had fielded. It was to be distinguished from Constantine’s personal bodyguard, the scholae palatini, which was created in the aftermath of the Battle of the Milvian Bridge, when the Praetorian Guard that had fought for Maxentius was first routed, then dissolved. The comitatenses were divided into infantry and cavalry units, the former under the command of a Master of the Foot (magister peditum), the latter under a Master of the Horse (magister equitum). At Chrysopolis the force numbered up to 120,000 infantry and 10,000 cavalry. These rather exact, and probably exaggerated, figures are supplied by Zosimus. However many men there were, all had reason to accept Constantine’s god of victory as their own. The whole force cohered around the emperor, its rituals were those that he prescribed, and its beliefs, when overtly expressed, were those that he espoused.
This process was surely helped by the fact that, when not on campaign, these troops were no longer stationed in permanent castra (camps), where they might observe the regular ceremonies and rigours of camp life. Instead, when the campaigning season was done and the emperor retired to one of his courts, the soldiers of the comitatenses were billeted nearby within a town or its vicinity, while the barracks for the bodyguard (scholae) were within the palace complex at Constantinople (map 8). The communal prayer that Constantine had his troops intone took place at the parade grounds outside the walls of Constantinople, where they would assemble for that reason on Sunday, and on other days to drill. Otherwise they might spend their time, notably their evenings, in the city. Legislation in the Theodosian Code, the earliest of which dates from 340, suggests that trouble arose frequently, not least extortion and abuse of those obliged to house and feed soldiers. Evidently, billeting eroded discipline and other factors which were reinforced and renewed constantly by the rhythms and rituals of the camps. Yet it will also have removed those barriers to new practices and observations that the camp system would have erected, and thus may have allowed for the more rapid expansion of Christian worship, notably in Constantinople’s growing number of churches.
Imperial Christianity may have taken longer to permeate the frontier legions, which had little direct contact with the emperor or his entourage. However, they too were no longer concentrated in large camps from which they would march out on campaign. Instead, and in keeping with the empire’s more defensive stance, legions were broken up into smaller units with uncertain names. These units were not the legionary cohorts of an earlier age, consisting of centuries and maniples, which all seem to have disappeared. And if legionary cohorts once possessed their own standards beyond those of the legion, they too were gone. Diverse groups might then be united into vexillations, scratch units put together for specific campaigns. The basic structure of the army in its high imperial phase thus gave way to ad hoc formulations. The ethos of a unitary legion, its essential esprit de corps, could hardly survive such a fate, and no longer would the legionary signa, least of all the eagles, play a role in the daily ceremony of a frontier soldier. In their place one might expect to find the faith of the emperor making ground.
Christianization was a protracted process and one might cite many examples which attest to the continued vitality of non-Christian cults. The worship of Mithras had lost much of its vigour by the later third century, but a small Mithraeum outside Prutting near the river Inn continued in use until the end of the fourth century. New frontier fortresses built by Constantine and his successors contained no obvious spaces for Christian worship. For example, Deutz (Divitia) opposite Cologne has no Christian chapel, even though it was built between 312 and 315 by the Twenty-second Legion C[onstantiniana] V[ictrix], a legion formerly known as Primigenia after the goddess Fortuna. This need not surprise us, as private devotion was always conducted beyond the walls of the camp. Yet the spread of Christianity among the ripenses can be detected in the archaeological record. Some frontier fortresses were modified before c.400 to facilitate Christian worship and, notably, the baptism of soldiers. The British outpost of Richborough (Rutupiae) in Kent, the last base of the Second Legion Augusta, included a chapel with a baptismal font. Three forts on the Rhine frontier, at Boppard, Kaiseraugst and Zurzach, all incorporated small chapels with fonts. On the middle Danube several sites, including Saldum and Zanes, may have been given rectangular chapel towers. Such construction within the walls of the camp was a marked change from earlier practice. Before such permanent installations were constructed, baptism would have been carried out in portable lead tanks, decorated with suitable scenes. Twenty-one of these have survived from the frontier province of Britannia, nine of which are marked with the chi-rho. Two fine examples found at Walesby in Lincolnshire and Flawborough in Nottinghamshire feature the chi-rho among other Christian iconography. The former is decorated near its rim with pictures of catechumens, candidates for baptism, above a simple six-pointed star (fig. 55); the latter has the invocation VTERE FELIX (‘use happy’, or better, ‘good luck’) next to orantes, figures holding their hands to the sky in prayer.
If these few archaeological observations tell us very little with certainty, they support the notion that the introduction of Christianity along the frontiers was slow, but that the process of Christian baptism took place with increasing regularity in military districts and army camps through the fourth century. Reasons for this might be found in the changing make-up of the later Roman army, notably in the recruitment of large numbers of barbarians. The names of several new units of auxiliaries raised by Constantine are known from the Notitia Dignitatum, dating from the late fourth century. Although recently scholars have emphasized the rhetorical qualities of this text, undermining its use as a means to reconstruct administrative and military realities for the western empire, the clues it provides are supported by allusions in earlier sources. It is clear that certain units were recruited in eastern Gaul and Germany, as they bear local tribal names like Batavi, Celtae, Heruli, Salii and Tubantes. Although the exact areas of recruitment cannot be ascertained, a few sources help. Socrates Scholasticus, writing of Constantine’s accession, claimed that ‘it was then no easy matter to dwell … in Britain, or in the neighbouring countries, in which it is universally admitted Constantine embraced the religion of the Christians, before his war with Maxentius, and prior to his return to Rome and Italy’. He meant that there were few Christians in those regions. However, as Zosimus later noted, Britons made up the bulk of Constantine’s field army before he recruited Germans and Gauls. In a panegyric in honour of Constantius, which the future emperor Julian delivered in 355, he refers to the usurper Magnentius’ use of troops raised by earlier emperors, notably ‘Celts and Galatians [Gauls] who had seemed invincible even to our ancestors … [who] had been enrolled in the ranks of our armies and furnished levies that won a brilliant reputation, being enlisted by your ancestors, and later by your father [Constantine]’. This was the same army ‘that had always proved itself invincible, and … conquered a miserable old man [Maxentius]’. The Cornuti and Bracchiati have earned special attention from scholars, because of their eponymous horned helmets and armbands and because they seem to have played a decisive role in Constantine’s Italian campaign of 312. The Cornuti are clearly depicted on the Arch of Constantine wearing their horned helmets and carrying shields depicting their emblem, two confronted goats’ heads. While there is no reason to assert, as have some scholars, that the Roman army was barbarized in the fourth century, still there were clearly far greater numbers being recruited from among Germanic peoples settled both within and beyond the empire’s borders.
Here, then, is a fine reason for the promotion of Christianity among recruits, beyond Constantine’s desire to preserve the support of the greatest god for his endeavours. Christianity provided a coherent moral framework during times of peace, and in times of war it built morale in an increasingly fragmented force where ethnic units might otherwise fight or flee separately. Men would always fight more aggressively for comrades than for an idea, but Christianity as a common faith was a better means to bind men together than the diluted notion of Rome, the grandeur of which most soldiers would never see and whose patron gods could no longer be held to stay an enemy’s hand or to deflect his sword. Men would fight to the death with greater confidence if they believed that they were watched over by the emperor’s god of victory. A century after Constantine, Prosper of Aquitaine could note with conviction that the Roman army took in barbarians and sent home Christians.
The Greatest Victor
In his last years as emperor, as in his earliest, Constantine placed his victories in war above all other achievements. His official imperial titles reflected this, employing both the praenomen imperatoris and the additional phrase Maximus Victor ac Triumfator, ‘greatest victor and winner of triumphs’. These titles were followed by four campaign-specific surnames (cognomina): Germanicus, Sarmaticus, Gothicus and Dacicus, ‘conqueror of the Germans, Sarmatians, Goths and Dacians’. A letter despatched by Constantine to consuls, praetors, tribunes and senators in February 337 presents his imperial titulature in full: Imperator Caesar Flavius Constantinus Pius Felix Victor ac Triumfator Pontifex Maximus Germanicus Maximus IIII Sarmaticus Maximus II Gothicus Maximus II Dacicus Maximus Tribunicia Potestate XXXIII Consul VIII Imperator XXXII Pater Patriae Proconsul. As he approached death, Constantine wished to be addressed by the list of barbarian peoples he had defeated in battle, and where they had lost more than once to him, this too was emphasized. He had only lately won his second victories over the Goths and Sarmatians.
Constantine placed emphasis only on those victories he had won personally, reflecting the divine favour that had attended his campaigns and no others. He did not even claim those victories won in his name by his own sons when he did not accompany them. Thus he reversed a trend that had been established a century and a half earlier in the joint reign of Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus (AD 161-9), who had first taken cognomina to celebrate each other’s victories. Marcus Aurelius was the first emperor to hold five cognomina, although he never took part in a battle, and for the first time maximus, ‘the greatest’, appeared beside the name of the conquered people. But even as the rhetoric of the singular sovereign and victor reached its crescendo, Constantine devolved power to seasoned administrators, and ultimately divided the empire in a fashion that recalled the Tetrarchy.