Constantine’s death – Apotheosis – Constantine as Christ – The succession – Constantius Victor – Christian victory
In January 328 Constantine renamed Drepanum in Bithynia, the city of his mother’s birth, Helenopolis, ‘city of Helena’. The remains of her favourite martyr, Lucian of Antioch, were transferred there and installed in a martyrium for pilgrims to visit. Lucian had been killed during Constantine’s youthful residency at Nicomedia, and he had a second legacy as the teacher of a young man named Arius. Setting out from Constantinople in spring of 337, Constantine put in at Helenopolis. He was feeling ill, but determined to travel on to Nicomedia with his entourage and full military retinue. He stopped at an imperial villa just outside Nicomedia, which appears rather inelegantly to have been called ‘the Chaff-House’ (Achyron). This allowed his troops to encamp nearby, and saved him from the rigours of a formal arrival in the city. Still, he was visited by the local notables, including Eusebius, the bishop of Nicomedia, and other local bishops and priests. Such a visit was required when the emperor was nearby. Exceptionally, however, Constantine informed the assembled clerics that he intended to receive baptism. Eusebius of Caesarea provides the words of a speech he cannot have heard from the emperor’s lips (VC IV.62):
This is the moment I have long hoped for, as I thirsted and yearned to win salvation in God. It is our time to enjoy the seal that brings immortality, time to enjoy the sealing that gives salvation, which I once intended to receive at the streams of the River Jordan, where our Saviour is reported also to have received the bath as an example to us. But God who knows what is good for us judges us worthy of these things here and now.
Constantine’s death
In the early fourth century baptism was not performed on children. For a normal catechumen – one who wished to become a member of the Christian Church – the sacrament of baptism was the culmination of a course of instruction lasting up to three years. Origen, we may recall, was an instructor of catechumens, and he and others employed the prescriptions of the church orders to determine who might and who might not receive baptism. In several versions of the Apostolic Tradition, those who held public office, administered justice or were officers in the army were – like gladiators and prostitutes – expressly forbidden from receiving baptism, since their professions involved them in activities that were impermissible for Christians. Constantine, as commander-in-chief of the army, the empire’s highest justice and its chief priest (pontifex maximus), was disqualified from baptism on many counts, at least until he confessed his sins and promised to live according to Christian precepts. Confession to a priest was not, as it would later become, a regular feature of the life of a Catholic Christian, associated with penitential acts to atone for sins. Rather, it was a sacrament performed once in a lifetime, and since it could not be repeated, it always signalled death, at least of a former self. It would become repeatable within half a century of Constantine’s death, and then it also became standard to offer confession in order to take monastic vows. But still confession was not undertaken lightly or regularly. Constantine confessed because he anticipated death, but according to Eusebius, he hedged so far as he was able, announcing: ‘If the Lord of life and death should wish [him] to live again’, he would do so according to new rules ‘which befit God’. In any event, he made plain to the bishops that he had already given his confession, at the martyrium of Lucian, and therefore required only that they perform for him the necessary rites in the imperial villa.
Intensive preparation during Lent was afforded to those who would be received into the Church, and the initiation ceremony took place at the end of the Easter vigil on Holy Saturday. In 337 Holy Saturday fell on 2 April, and it had passed before Constantine left Constantinople. But the emperor was no ordinary catechumen, and his progression was expedited. The awesome mysteries that attended those admitted into the Christian cult were performed by Eusebius of Nicomedia: exorcism, the triple immersion in water, the laying-on of hands. Reborn, the emperor cast aside his purple and crimson garments, the colour of power but also of blood, and henceforth wore only pure white robes. He was reborn so that he might die and live forever. ‘When the tribunes and senior officers of the armies filed in and lamented, bewailing their own imminent bereavement and wishing him longer life, he answered them too by saying he enjoyed true life now, and only he knew the good things he had received.’ It is at this point in Eusebius’ narrative, the only contemporary account of Constantine’s final journey, that we realize that the emperor is on campaign, bound for Persia. Eusebius and those who followed him obscured this fact, to dwell on the culmination of Constantine’s spiritual journey. Constantine died on 22 May 337.
As Constantine attended to these final matters, word of his illness was sent to Antioch. The news was sent to Constantius, the second son who now resided there, but also to Flavius Ablabius, who was Constantine’s trusted adviser and most powerful subordinate. Praetorian Prefect since 329, Ablabius had run Constantine’s government from Constantinople for most of the period since. In 336 he had been despatched with Constantius to Antioch, not as a demotion but rather to oversee Constantine’s most important undertaking, the preparations for war with Persia. It is clear from his subsequent actions that Constantius bridled at Ablabius’ direction, but so long as his father was alive, he had no independence of action. Constantius and Ablabius received news of the emperor’s illness and departed forthwith, although neither of the other sons had yet been informed. Constantine II received news of his father’s death at Trier shortly before 17 June. One must imagine Constans at Milan or Aquileia was informed a few days earlier than that, as a consequence of the workings of the cursus publicus, the imperial message service.
Constantine died before the news of his illness could have reached Antioch. By the cursus publicus, messages were transferred through stations eight to ten miles apart, at each of which up to forty fresh horses were kept by grooms. Every third station was more substantial, an inn (mansio) providing overnight accommodation not only for the horses’ grooms and the couriers but also for other travellers. A courier would regularly travel for up to ten hours a day, averaging five or six Roman miles per hour. It was not Roman practice to employ relays, so there were no spare couriers waiting at stations to take over when a messenger tired. A single courier would carry each message to its destination, and he would travel in a carriage, not on horseback. Consequently, even if one travelled at full speed taking new horses at every station, for as long as there was daylight and by moonlight where possible, an urgent message would travel at most seventy to eighty Roman miles per day.*
According to the Antonine Itinerary, a document that lists two hundred and twenty-five routes along Roman roads and their stages across the empire, the distance from Nicomedia to Antioch was 747 Roman miles, but it was a hard route in places. The road passed first through Nicaea and Iuliopolis along the valley of the Sangarius river as far as Ancyra (modern Ankara). From there it headed south through Archelais and Tyana, and then through the Cilician gates, a pass in the high Taurus mountains, to reach Tarsus. South of Tarsus the road passed beside the plain of the Issus and across the Amanus mountains to Antioch. A pilgrim from Bordeaux, who set out for the Holy Land in 333, stopped at many stages along the route, counting the miles between them: from Nicomedia to Ancyra, 258 miles; from Ancyra to Tarsus, 343 miles; from Tarsus to Antioch, 141 miles; giving a total of 742 miles.
We cannot know for sure when news of Constantine’s illness was sent out from Nicomedia, although Malalas in the sixth century states that the emperor died after six days. There was a new moon over Nicomedia on 16 May 337, so conditions for night travel were at their poorest. However, there would have been around fourteen and a half hours of daylight, so a courier might have achieved around eighty miles each day if the weather was good and the journey without mishaps. The journey between Nicomedia and Antioch, which was approximately 750 Roman miles and crossed several mountain ranges, would normally have taken fifteen days, but might be covered in a little under ten by a courier travelling in optimum conditions.
Armies travelled far more slowly, with infantry covering three miles per hour on good roads, so at most between twenty and twenty-five Roman miles per day. An aged emperor who was heading to war but could no longer ride comfortably for long distances would have been carried in a litter by slaves. He would not have been drawn in a carriage by horses, for that would have had no springs and its wooden wheels wrapped in iron would have conveyed every bump in the road into his tired bones. Add to this the mighty baggage train, and one must anticipate that Constantine’s cortege was not expected in Antioch until at least five weeks after his departure from Constantinople, hence towards the middle of June. The news of his illness would have reached Antioch far sooner than that, on around 26 May. Still, Constantius’ officers and retinue would already have been assembled, and the imperial tent and baggage train were perhaps compiled for the journey into Mesopotamia. If Ablabius and Constantius had set off immediately and on horseback with only a skeleton staff and essentials, they might have reached Nicomedia in a little over two weeks. If we estimate that the message took ten days to arrive in Antioch and that Ablabius and Constantius left within two days and travelled for sixteen, they would have arrived four weeks after the news of Constantine’s illness was sent, and three weeks after his death. The tale of Constantius’ journey was never rewritten to echo Constantine’s own mad, successful, fictional dash to his father’s deathbed. The closest one finds is a panegyrical treatment by Libanius (Oration 59):
For on the one side his father’s funeral drew his attention and on the other the din of the Persian assault. He was obliged either to meet the enemy and neglect the funeral rites or to observe the rites and lay the empire open to the enemy. What did he do? He did not consider advantage more highly than rites, but rather both duties were successfully combined and the secondary purpose of the journey was more honourable than any deed. For he himself hastened energetically to the burial, while fear held the Persians back in their own land. Whether they received their fright from heaven and were restrained or whether it was through not knowing anything of his withdrawal but thinking they would encounter the emperor’s right hand, either explanation is equally sufficient for a eulogy.
Apotheosis
In Nicomedia matters were controlled entirely by the army until the arrival of Ablabius and Constantius, and perhaps even afterwards. It must be remembered that by the 330s the office of Praetorian Prefect was entirely a civilian post, and therefore that Ablabius’ interests and those of Constantine’s generals cannot be considered as identical. There was another Praetorian Prefect with a hand in the game, Evagrius, who was as senior as Ablabius and had substituted for him in Constantinople. Christian writers would later introduce the notion that Constantine turned to the division of the empire only in his last days and that he set out his wishes in a last will and testament that he entrusted to an unnamed presbyter, according to Socrates Scholasticus, or to Eusebius of Nicomedia, according to Philostorgius. But the Praetorian Prefects and palatine mandarins, not the bishops, administered affairs of state, and in the current climate their actions were closely monitored by the generals. Meanwhile, the Augustus would continue to rule even in death. Constantine’s body was stripped of its white robes and dressed once again in purple and gold. His corpse was transported in a gilded coffin to Constantinople, and there it lay in state in the imperial palace, wearing a diadem, to receive clients who came, as in life, every morning to pay their respects to the most powerful patron in the Roman world. As Eusebius notes, ‘this continued for a long time, the military having decided that the remains should stay there and be watched until his sons should arrive and pay respects to their father by personally attending to the rites.’ Indeed, laws continued to be issued in Constantine’s name until August 337, three months after his death.
Clues in sources concerning earlier emperors’ lying-in-state suggest that the emperor’s body was not kept in public view for very long, but rather that a waxwork figure was made. So it had been for Pertinax, whose effigy, according to Cassius Dio, was attended by a boy who swished peacock feathers, which were symbols of immortality but also kept flies off the model ‘as if it were really a person sleeping’. The effigy had a further important role to play. Another third-century historian not unfamiliar to us, Herodian (IV.2), described the funeral of Pertinax’s successor, Septimius Severus, in 211. He wrote in general terms:
It is normal practice to deify emperors who die leaving behind children to succeed them. The name given to this ceremony is apotheosis … After a costly funeral, the body of the dead emperor is buried in the normal human fashion. But then a wax model is fashioned in the exact likeness of the corpse and placed on a large high couch of ivory draped in coverings embroidered with gold. This wax figure lies on the couch like a sick man, pale and wan.
Various charades and ceremonies take place for a week, as a doctor visits daily to announce that the patient is getting worse. Eventually, the emperor is pronounced dead and carried out still on the ivory couch, which is placed on a pyre constructed in the form of a lighthouse, in four storeys. The couch is placed on the second storey, while the first and third are filled with piles of aromatics. The fourth storey houses a caged eagle which is released when the pyre is set alight. ‘The eagle flies forth, soaring with the flames into the sky; the Romans believe that this eagle carries the soul of the emperor from the earth up to heaven. Thereafter the emperor is worshipped with the rest of the gods.’
Eusebius provides the only account of Constantine’s funeral, and he does his very best to make it appear Christian. However, he provides very clear clues that a ceremony of apotheosis was performed, protesting: ‘He is not like the Egyptian bird, which they say has a unique nature, and dies among aromatic herbs, making itself its own sacrifice, then revives from the ash and, as it flies up, turns into what it was before.’ Neither phoenix nor eagle, Constantine’s soul was borne to heaven by other means. ‘At the same time coins were struck portraying the blessed one on the obverse in the form of one with his head veiled, on the reverse like a charioteer on a quadriga, being taken up by a right hand stretched out to him from above.’ The quadriga, long associated with the worship of Mithras and with Sol Invictus, was an acceptable metaphor for the emperor’s translation to heaven, beckoned by the Hand of God and rising like Elijah in his chariot. Many of these coins have survived (fig. 57).
The bishops would have had no control over how the army honoured its dead Augustus, so Eusebius explained away the rites, witnessed by thousands, which might have troubled Christians. However, he rejoiced in the fact that Constantine had already received a Christian burial, observing that the ceremony was performed only once Constantius and the military officers had withdrawn. It is not striking that Constantius did not participate in the Christian rites, for he was not yet baptized. Moreover, emperors were discouraged from contact with the dead. Constantine ‘was accorded the place he earnestly desired alongside the monument to the apostles’. That is, he was buried in a mausoleum he had prepared for himself in Constantinople, and of which Eusebius had earlier provided a description, presumably from personal experience (VC IV.58):
He built up the shrine to an unimaginable height, and made it glint with stones of every kind, facing it from the ground to the roof. He divided the ceiling into delicate coffers and covered them with gold. Above this on the roof he provided copper instead of tiles to protect the building securely against rain. Round this too glittered much gold, so that by reflecting back the rays of the sun it sent dazzling light to those who gazed from afar … round it was a huge uncovered courtyard, open to the fresh air, surrounded by porticoes on four sides, which encompassed the court as well as the shrine itself.
The techniques do not sound unfamiliar, from Eusebius’ earlier accounts of buildings in Jerusalem. However, and despite hints that one should draw such a conclusion, this was not a church, but rather a large circular mausoleum of the type Galerius had built for himself in Salonica and Maxentius for his family just outside Rome. Indeed, Constantine had built another for himself in Rome.
Constantine as Christ
When news of Constantine’s death reached Rome, there were riots. One might expect such a thing during an interregnum, but the citizens rioted not because the force of law was now absent – the seventeen-year-old Caesar Constans was, after all, still in Milan – but rather because of disappointed expectations. They had expected to receive the emperor’s body and have it rest in the imperial city. That this did not happen suggested the waning of the city’s favoured status. Constantine had never returned to Rome after Fausta’s death, although after his victory at the Milvian Bridge he had announced his intention to be buried there and had constructed a mausoleum for himself on an imperial estate some five miles south-east of the city along the Via Labicana (today’s Via Casilina). This was formerly the site of the cemetery of the Praetorian Guard, but it also housed a catacomb for Christian burials, including the tombs of some fifty martyrs. A basilica dedicated to the martyrs Marcellinus the deacon and Peter the exorcist (not the apostle) had been built there, and this abutted the circular mausoleum. The interior of the mausoleum was covered in marble and porphyry, and in the mortar of this revetment was discovered, during excavations, a coin of Constantine dated between 324 and 326.
In 326 Constantine had ceded the Sessorian Palace, his Roman base, to his mother Helena as he left Rome for the last time. Two years later, at her death, Helena was interred in Constantine’s mausoleum, now known as Tor Pignattara after the clay pots that are visible in its structure. Her body was placed in a porphyry sarcophagus that Constantine had ordered carved, surely to house his own mortal remains (fig. 58). This sarcophagus, moved to the Lateran in the twelfth century, is now in the Vatican Museums. It is decorated on all sides with scenes of battle, not at all fitting for Helena, but the splendour of the piece, in imperial purple stone mined only in one part of Egypt, was paramount. Porphyry had been used frequently in imperial sculpture, not least during the Tetrarchy, but Constantine’s reign signalled the beginning of an era when it became de rigueur for the sarcophagi of members of the imperial family to be sculpted in the purple marble.
Helena had died aged around eighty, and her passing was marked by the abrupt end in spring 329 of the series of coins her son struck in her honour, as Helena Augusta. Eusebius is peculiarly obscure and obfuscatory when reporting her demise, claiming quite falsely that she had converted to Christianity only at her son’s urging (VC III.46-7). It was Constantine’s policy to obfuscate in this regard since, as we have seen, he wished to prevent criticism of his earlier failure to defend Christians from persecution. Eusebius is similarly conniving in his suggestion that Constantine was present at Helena’s death, but he does not indicate where this took place. The scene of filial devotion may have been invented, and there is no suggestion that Constantine accompanied Helena’s body as ‘she was carried with a great guard of honour to the imperial city, and there laid in the imperial tombs’. The imperial city was then still Rome, although later authors were confused and believed Helena was interred in Constantinople.
That Constantine still intended to be buried in Rome itself until quite late in his life is suggested also by Eusebius’ acknowledgement that his mausoleum in Constantinople was conceived not so very long before his death. It was not part of the original plan for the city or the palace complex (see maps 7 and 8). Indeed, ‘imperial houses, baths and lamp-stores’ were added to the new mausoleum complex, which sat some distance apart from the palace, ‘suitably furnished for the guards of that place’. In Constantinople, apart from his imperial forebears, Constantine dwelt in death not with the gods of the Roman pantheon, but rather with Christ’s apostles. The design of Constantine’s tomb echoed the tomb of Christ at the Holy Sepulchre complex, completed just two years earlier. ‘He erected twelve coffins, like sacred statues, in honour and remembrance of the apostolic choir, and placed in the middle of them his own sarcophagus, on either side of which stood six apostles.’
Later authors would suggest that Constantine was isoapostolos, ‘equal to the apostles’. But this was a conception of the fifth century. It was clear to Eusebius in the fourth that Constantine considered himself not as follower, but leader: he had positioned his sarcophagus in the place of Christ. As Christ ruled in heaven and would return to rule on earth, so Constantine, alone of emperors, continued to rule on earth from heaven. Because ‘divine rites and mystic liturgies’ were performed over his tomb, he was ‘brought back to life to manage the whole administration, and Victor Maximus Augustus by his very name commands the government of Rome’. Constantine was thwarted in his desire to be baptized in the Jordan, but in life he had attained a Christ-like majesty, as Eusebius opined at some length. In his Tricennial Oration, delivered to the emperor only shortly before his death, Constantine was consistently Christ’s ‘friend’ and emulator, indeed almost his second coming. Such an idea might be expressed to the emperor while he lived, but it could not be sustained in death. Constantine’s son and longest-lived successor, Constantius II, rebuilt the Holy Apostles to put his father in his place, as an adjunct to Christ, his humble door-keeper, in direct opposition to Constantine’s original conception.
The succession
Constantine died on Pentecost, on the fiftieth day after Easter Sunday counting inclusively as Romans did, and Greeks still do. No day would have appeared more propitious to Eusebius, for on that day the Holy Spirit had descended unto the apostles, in whose company Constantine now moved. According to Aurelius Victor and Eutropius, the usual comet had foretold his death and heralded his apotheosis. But back on earth it was a dangerous day, since an interregnum threatened anarchy and usurpation. His officers, not the bishops, were closest to Constantine in death as in life, and they arranged affairs appropriately. They did nothing, suppressing news of the death until Constantius had arrived, and even then controlling the situation so as to quell the threat of usurpation until after the funeral and ceremony of apotheosis. The names of Constantine’s generals on his campaign staff are not known, but it is surely significant that in the following year, 338, both consuls were generals whose names suggest humble origins, and that they owed their promotions entirely to Constantine: Flavius Ursus and Flavius Polemius.
As Constantine’s body lay in state, his generals also acted to secure the succession of his sons alone. Rumours were circulating that Constantine’s brothers had poisoned him. This information is highly suggestive, revealing that one or both of his younger half-brothers, Flavius Dalmatius and Julius Constantius, were with Constantine when he left Constantinople to make war on Persia. We cannot know whether the rumours were true or were concocted to justify the murders that ensued. The half-brothers were killed, as was Caesar Hannibalianus, younger son of Flavius Dalmatius, who was married to Constantine’s youngest daughter Constantina, and certainly in Constantine’s retinue (see stemma 2). A successful campaign would have installed him in the office which he had held in name only for a year or two: ‘King of Kings’ over the various Caucasian lands east of the Black Sea. Flavius Dalmatius’ older son and namesake was murdered probably at Naissus, along with his Praetorian Prefect Valerius Maximus, in August 337. Flavius Dalmatius’ appointment as Caesar in 335 had been unpopular with the army, so it would not have been difficult to recruit his killers. Also murdered was an unnamed son of Julius Constantius, the oldest of three. The only members of Constantius Chlorus’ second family, with Theodora, to survive the blood-bath were boys considered too young to kill. All would later rise up. Nepotianus, son of Constantine’s half-sister Eutropia, made a bid for the throne in 350, ruling the city of Rome for twenty-eight days before he was murdered. Gallus, the older of the two younger sons of Julius Constantius, would be elevated to the rank of Caesar in 351, only to be murdered in 354 for challenging Constantius. Julian, Gallus’ younger half-brother, would become both Caesar and Augustus, and is remembered by history as ‘the Apostate’, Rome’s last pagan emperor who died seeking to emulate Alexander and to surpass Constantine, by the conquest of Persia.
Writing in praise of Constantius II some years after the murders but before his own elevation to Augustus, Julian would suggest that his cousin had been ‘forced by circumstances and reluctantly failed to prevent others doing wrong’. In its context this is as damning a statement as Julian’s later and fuller revelation:
Six of my cousins and his, and my father who was his own uncle, and also another uncle of both of us on the father’s side, and my eldest brother he put to death without trial … they kept telling us that Constantius acted thus partly because he was deceived and partly because he yielded to the violence and tumult of an undisciplined and mutinous army.
Clearly, matters were beyond the control of the twenty-year-old Caesar Constantius, although he stood to benefit most of all from the carnage. He left Constantinople to meet his brothers at Viminacium (modern Kostolac in Serbia), which was within that region formerly assigned to Flavius Dalmatius. There, in September 337, they each took the title Augustus and agreed upon their portions of the empire. This was confirmed by acclamation of the army and subsequently by the senate on 9 September 337. Constantine II returned to Trier with no more land than before, whereas Constans and Constantius II shared the Balkan territories of their dead cousin, which abutted their assigned lands. Constans received Moesiae, Constantius Thracia. Consequently, the division of empire was thus: Constantius II Augustus ruled all the eastern dioceses, being Thracia, Asiana, Pontica and Oriens, including the imperial capitals Constantinople and Antioch; Constans I Augustus ruled Italy, Africa, Pannoniae and Moesiae, including the cities of Rome, Milan and Carthage, and also Naissus and Sirmium; Constantine II Augustus, from Trier, ruled Gallicae, Viennensis, Hispaniae and Britanniae; and since Constans was still only seventeen, Constantine II served as his brother’s guardian. Ominously, he considered Constans’ lands also as subject to his guardianship.
Constantine returned to Trier, whence in 338 he launched a campaign against the Germans across the Rhine. Constans took as his new residence his father’s birthplace, Naissus, to consolidate his hold on his new territories. Constantius rode east, ‘followed by another march under arms’, so that ‘he stood upon the borders of Persia eager to stain his right hand with blood’. He was less disappointed than Libanius suggests to find the Persians had withdrawn for the winter and that he could return to his new capital on the Bosphorus. As each Augustus consolidated his regime, those who had advised their father in his last years were eliminated. Flavius Optatus, consul of 334 and the first man to hold the elevated rank of patrician after its reintroduction, is revealed by Zosimus to have been murdered. Likewise, the eminent orator Aemilius Magnus Arborius was killed, as Ausonius would later recount. Others simply disappear from the historical and epigraphical record: Evagrius, who was a Praetorian Prefect first in 326 and held that position again in Constantinople when Ablabius was sent to Antioch; Pacatianus, Constans’ Praetorian Prefect; Valerius Felix, Praetorian Prefect of Africa. The eradication of Valerius Maximus, Flavius Dalmatius’ Praetorian Prefect, is revealed by an inscription from Tunisia, which dates from between the death of Constantine and the acclamation of his sons as Augusti. The Praetorian Prefects are listed in order of their promotion as follows: L. Pap. Pacatianus, Fl. Ablabius, [space for a scored-out name], C. Annius Tiberianus, Nestorius Timonianus. The name of Valerius Maximus has been chiselled out, an element of the damnatio memoriae. The demise of Flavius Ablabius is recounted more fully.
In Constantinople, but briefly, Constantius encouraged Flavius Ablabius to retire to his estates in Bithynia. Within a few months, however, Ablabius received a party of visitors bearing a letter from Constantius. This he must have expected, at least if he saw in the son the father’s ruthlessness and hunger for power. The tale is related by Eunapius, in his Life of the Sophists, who tells how ‘those who delivered the letter into his hands prostrated themselves before him, as Romans are accustomed to prostrate themselves before the emperor’:
He received the document with great arrogance, and, freed from all apprehension, he demanded the imperial purple from those who had come, while his expression became more stern, and he inspired terror in the spectators. They replied that their task had only been to bring the letter, but that those who had been entrusted with another mission were at the door. Thereupon he insolently summoned them within, and was inflated with pride. But those who were then admitted were more in number and all carried swords, and instead of the purple robe they brought him ‘purple death’, and hacked him to pieces like some animal cut up at a public feast. Thus did the shade of Sopater avenge itself on Ablabius ‘the fortunate’.
Perhaps Ablabius was arrogant when faced with the young emperor’s lackeys, and surely imperious as he faced death at the command of the twenty-year-old. This was the vengeance not of Sopater but of Constantius and his new keepers.
It is at this juncture that Eusebius’ testimony ends. He is as silent on the purge of 337 as he was about the deaths of Crispus and Fausta. Instead, he praises only the three sons of Constantine, rewriting the beginning of his Life of Constantine to honour the ‘new lamps filling the whole earth with radiance … If previously they still shared the honour of Caesars, now they have been declared Imperatores Augusti, singled out with their father’s honours.’ The only hint of what had so recently taken place is the suggestion that certain of those close to the father had only pretended to be Christians and were no longer at court. Eusebius died in 339, not knowing how far the sons would continue their father’s policies, nor whether the division of empire would spark a further round of civil wars.
Tensions soon emerged between Constans and his older brother Constantine II, fomented by officials on both sides seeking to advance their own interests. On 8 January 339, Constantine addressed an edict (CTh 12.1.27) to the proconsul of Africa, a subordinate of Constans. In the following year, Constantine set off with his army, ostensibly to lend aid to Constantius in the east. As he entered Constans’ territory, it was alleged that he was seeking to establish control of Italy and Africa. We cannot know whether this is true, or a fabrication to justify what happened next. As he approached Aquileia, Constantine’s troops were caught in an ambush by a force despatched by Constans. Enjoying none of his father’s good fortune, Constantine II was killed and his body cast into the river Alsa. He was shown by this fate to be not a true emperor but a tyrant like Maxentius, cast into the Tiber. His name would be scratched from inscriptions by his brother, his memory damned as surely as his father’s unfortunate rivals.
And so, from 340, Constantius and Constans ruled as Augusti in a new Dyarchy, each holding one half of the empire. Constantius did not seek to challenge Constans, nor did he reproach him for their brother’s murder. Instead, he devoted himself to the war with Persia, spending the better part of the following decade in a regular routine: winter in Antioch, summer campaigning. He made only a few brief trips to Constantinople. Constans travelled more extensively through his western provinces, in 342 alone visiting his residences in Naissus, Sirmium, Trier, Aquileia and Milan, and in 343 crossing briefly and for the only time into Britain to suppress a potential revolt. Although he made war successfully on the traditional enemies, he acquired a reputation for living decadently and failing properly to reward the army. Indeed, prurient authors would accuse him of debauchery and pederasty, and would suggest that this earned him the disfavour of his men and of God. According to Aurelius Victor, ‘he was detestable because of the depravity of his subordinates and passionate in his greed and his contempt for the soldiers’. Consequently, in 350:
In the tenth year after his triumph [over Constantine II in 340] he was overthrown by the criminal actions of Magnentius, although he had certainly suppressed the uprisings of foreign tribes. Because he had treated too attentively the hostages taken from them, rather attractive boys whom he had sought out and paid for, it was justifiably believed that he burned with a passion of this kind. But would that these vices had continued! Everything was devastated by the awful savage character of Magnentius, as is natural with a barbarian …
Magnentius was a Gaul, born at Amiens to a Frankish mother by a British father.* He was not a Christian. He had risen through the ranks from common soldier to general, and this suggests that he had served for long years under Constantine himself, certainly in 324 although not as early as 312. On 18 January 350 at Autun, Magnentius was acclaimed by his troops led by Marcellinus, commander of Constans’ bodyguard. Constans was murdered shortly afterwards as he fled south, at a fortress called Helena in the foothills of the Pyrenees.
The loyalty of Gaul, Spain and Britain seems to have been Magnentius’ immediately, but he had to win over Italy and Africa. One of the few survivors of the 337 purge, Nepotianus, the son of Constantine’s half-brother, was able to seize control of Rome for a month in June 350 but could not resist Magnentius’ general Marcellinus. The usurper’s army proceeded south, securing Africa very swiftly. More problematic was Pannonia, where Vetranio, Constans’ Master of the Foot (magister peditum), was proclaimed emperor. It would appear that this was done at the behest of Constantina, Constans’ sister, then resident in Rome, who took it upon herself to act in the interests of the Flavians. Vetranio swiftly advanced his claim to represent the family of Constantine, and began issuing coins in his own name and that of Constantius, declaring them both to be Augusti. This contradicts contemporary written sources, which suggest he was granted only the rank of Caesar. Some of Vetranio’s coins bear the legend HOC SIGNO VICTOR ERIS, ‘by this sign you shall become Victor’ (fig. 59). Vetranio was from Upper Moesia, not far from Constantine’s birthplace, and he was sufficiently old that he might have fought for Constantine in the 310s. Perhaps his coins are intended to suggest that he too witnessed the famous vision in 310, or 312. It is certain that he wished thereby to associate himself with the victorious legacy of Constantine. Magnentius also issued coins, at first in his own name and that of Constantius, whom he claimed as a fellow Augustus, and later also for Vetranio. The numismatic record suggests a more complicated and nuanced picture than is painted by the historians.
Vetranio’s elevation was initially supported by the only remaining son of Constantine, Constantius, who was tied down in the east by a Persian assault on Nisibis. It appears he sent a diadem to the general before he was able to head west in person, in winter 350. He did so in haste to engineer the general’s abdication, which he achieved at Naissus on Christmas Day 350, offering Vetranio a generous annual stipend and lands to which he might immediately retire. In his place, shortly afterwards, Constantius elevated to the rank of Caesar his cousin Gallus, another of the youths to survive in 337, whom he imagined he might control more easily. Gallus had limited military experience and did not enjoy the support of the army, so it was considered safe to send him east, to maintain an imperial presence in Antioch. Constantius, meanwhile, remained at Sirmium on the Sava–Danube frontier, which served as a base for his campaign against Magnentius the following summer. The two armies met at Mursa, a fortress a short distance north-west of Sirmium, on 28 September 351. Accounts of the Battle of Mursa contradict each other, although all suggest that there was carnage on both sides. According to an account preserved only far later, in the twelfth-century history by Zonaras, Magnentius lost two-thirds of his men and Constantius four of every ten men, and those from a much larger force. Julian, on the other hand, would claim a decisive victory for Constantius and the heavy cavalry of the eastern regiments. Zosimus, following Eunapius, provides a full description:
Magnentius closed in on Mursa and set fire to its gates, thinking that if the iron-bound wood yielded to fire, he would open up the way into the city for his army. But this did not come to pass, as men on the walls extinguished the fire with lots of water. So, when he heard of Constantius’ approach, Magnentius devised the following scheme: there was a stadium outside the city, originally designed for gladiatorial contests, which was overgrown with woods. Here he concealed four companies of Gauls and ordered them, when Constantius approached … to attack him unawares, so as to surround and annihilate his men.
The ruse failed, and ‘it was he who was defeated in the ambush’. So, the armies met in battle on the plain outside Mursa, and ‘great numbers fell on both sides’ before Constantius’ men gained the upper hand. Well after dark, ‘Magnentius’ army was utterly routed, with immense slaughter of men, horses and other animals’.
Constantius attributed his victory to God and announced that it had been foretold in a dream that he would avenge the murder of his brother. A far more impressive portent would soon become known to him.
Constantius Victor
Fourteen years after his death, Constantine’s vision of the cross was once again brought before the public’s gaze and imbued with still greater meaning, still within the context of imperial victory. On 7 May 351, according to a letter he sent to Constantius II, Cyril of Jerusalem, having recently taken up his bishopric, witnessed the appearance of a cross of light above Jerusalem. This second apparition has received but a fraction of the attention lavished on Constantine’s vision, and all modern commentators appear content to regard it as a solar halo, despite its appearance in the morning. In his letter Cyril describes the appearance ‘during the holy days of Pentecost, on the Nones of May, at around the third hour of the day [nine o’clock on the morning], of an immense cross formed from light, in the sky, which stretched above the holy Golgotha as far as the holy Mount of Olives’. It was visible to all in the city for several hours, brighter than the sun, and hordes flocked into the churches, young and old, men and women, locals and foreigners, Christians and others, intoning ‘as if from one mouth the name of Jesus Christ, their Lord’. Cyril offers the vision to Constantius as a greater gift than the earthly crowns with which others had honoured him, and as concrete proof of divine favour for his rule, so that he might confront his ‘enemies with greater courage’. The cross is a ‘trophy of victory’, specifically of Christ’s victory over death, but also a sign that Constantius has God as his ally, and that he might ‘bear the trophy of the cross, the boast of boasts, carrying forward the sign shown to us in the skies, of which heaven has made an even greater boast by displaying its form to human beings’.
Given the similarity in the language he employs to that of Eusebius, writing a little more than a decade earlier in the same part of the world, it is striking that Cyril did not compare the ‘immense cross formed from light’ to that which Constantine and his troops were now believed to have witnessed four decades earlier. The most obvious reason for his omission was that Constantius had not witnessed the vision in person. Therefore, it allowed Cyril to offer himself as interpreter, and to promote his own interests and those of his see, Jerusalem. J. W. Drijvers has shown that Cyril’s letter must be understood as the first of a series of measures to establish the True Cross as a central motif in Jerusalem’s emergence as the holiest site in Christendom. Cyril was at that time in conflict with Acacius, the Arian metropolitan of Caesarea, whose interests were well represented at Constantius’ court, and he surely saw the apparition as a means to raise Jerusalem’s profile. Moreover, since Eusebius had preceded his pupil Acacius in the see of Caesarea, one might understand Cyril’s desire to suppress information on Constantine’s vision, which Eusebius had so assiduously refined and disseminated from his base in Palestine. As interpreter of the apparition, therefore, Cyril kept Jerusalem to the fore, praising Constantius’ piety as surpassing that of his most God-beloved father of blessed memory, by whose prayers the soterial wood of the True Cross had been found in Jerusalem and the Holy Places revealed. Whereas Constantine was blessed with revelations from Jerusalem’s earth, his yet more pious son received his revelation from the heavens above the city, thus fulfilling the evangelist’s prophecy (Matthew 24:30) that ‘the sign of the Son of Man will appear in the sky’.
Constantius embraced the vision of the cross as his own, and at the Battle of Mursa the truth of Cyril’s claims was demonstrated, when Constantius defeated Magnentius. Constantius celebrated this victory only belatedly, with a triumphal adventus into Rome in 357. The significance of the delay is surely that he wished to emulate his father, who had celebrated his victory over Maxentius in Rome. Naturally, panegyrists drew parallels between the two episodes, including Themistius (Oration 3.44b), who delivered an oration in Rome representing the senate of the city of Constantinople. But it is an historian who presents the fullest account of Constantius’ Roman adventus of 357: Ammianus Marcellinus (XVI.10). In a passage that draws on Xenophon’s description of the Persian ruler Cyrus, Ammianus describes Constantius’ deportment as he entered Rome on a ‘golden carriage in the resplendent blaze of shimmering precious stones’ between ‘twin lines of infantrymen with shields and crests gleaming with glittering rays, clad in shining mail’.
Accordingly, being saluted as Augustus with favouring shouts, while hills and shores thundered out the roar, [Constantius] never stirred but showed himself as calm and imperturbable as he was commonly seen in his provinces. For he both stooped when passing through lofty gates (although he was very short), and as if his neck were in a vice he kept the gaze of his eyes straight ahead, and turned his face neither to the right nor the left, but (as if he were a lay figure) neither did he nod when the wheel jolted, nor was he ever seen to spit, or to wipe or rub his face or nose, or to move his hands about.
Sabine MacCormack likened the image the emperor sought to project to an icon, set apart from and unmoved by the furore around him. And one can indeed appreciate this comparison when observing Constantius’ portrait on a largitio bowl, now at the Hermitage (fig. 60). Although Hellenistic models might be cited, Constantius had adopted the style of his father in his later years, placing himself between his subjects and the summus deus, the god of the Christians.
Ammianus, a pagan, was silent about the incorporation of any explicitly Christian elements into the celebrations. While he disapproves of Constantius’ attempt to secure a triumph for victory in a civil war, he gives no indication that the emperor attributed this victory to the god of the Christians. This silence has led some to suggest that Constantius was seeking to appease the still largely pagan Roman senate; a proposition that may be dispensed with on the grounds that it was on this occasion that he ordered the removal from the senate house of the pagan altar to Victory that had been installed by Augustus. * Moreover, there may be evidence that, far from setting aside his Christianity, Constantius paraded it before the senate, earning the opprobrium of the pagan historian Eunapius, writing c.400, whose work has been preserved only in fragments in later works (largely by Zosimus, as we have seen many times). David Woods has identified in one of the most controversial fragments (fragment 68, preserved as Excerpta de sententiis 72) an account of the same victory procession in Rome, where ‘a Persian, an eparch in Rome … reduced the success of the Romans to mockery and laughter’. He did this by ‘assembling many small [painted] panels in the middle of the hippodrome’ which revealed to those there assembled that the victory was not due to ‘the bravery of the emperor or the strength of the soldiers, or anything that was a proper battle’:
Instead [on one of the painted panels] a hand extended as if from the clouds, and by the hand was written ‘The Hand of God driving off the barbarians’. (It is shameful but necessary to write this down.) And on the other side [was written], ‘The barbarians fleeing God’, and other things even more odious and stupid than these, the nonsense of drunken painters.
Of course drunken painters were not responsible for the display, but the emperor’s image-makers, who would have ordered the ‘Persian’ and his troops to march through the streets to the hippodrome bearing these images painted on both sides of placards, as was a regular feature of triumphal celebrations. Woods has identified the ‘Persian’ as the elder Hormisdas, brother of Shapur II of Persia, who defected to Rome in c.324, and who is credited with a clever quip in Ammianus’ account of Constantius’ Roman visit (XVI.10.16). Woods’s argument is ingenious, and thus his conclusions may be questioned. However, I find them most convincing, and the sentiment behind the display, which Eunapius found so repugnant, to be emblematic of Constantius’ understanding of his victory over Magnentius. Constantius had seen that coins struck to mark his father’s apotheosis in 337 featured the ‘Hand of God’ (fig. 57). His own right of succession had now been demonstrated conclusively by the reappearance of that helping hand, in the same form as it had appeared to Constantine: a cross of light in the sky guaranteeing his victory. Moreover, his army was responsible for reminding the citizens of Rome that Constantius had inherited his father’s divine support, as demonstrated at Jerusalem in May 351 and at Mursa the following September. In victory the emperor himself sat motionless and expressionless above the mêlée, an object of veneration second only to the god he worshipped. He was truly the son and heir of Victor Constantine.
Christian victory
By the end of the 350s Constantius had consolidated his hold on power through the elimination of several rivals. In 354 he commanded the murder of Gallus Caesar, whom he had raised in March 351. Gallus died at Pola, the same Istrian town in which Crispus had been poisoned in 326. In his place, the following November, Constantius raised Gallus’ half-brother Julian, known to history as ‘the Apostate’, the last pagan Roman emperor. Julian obliged Constantius to recognize him as Augustus in 360, but the two men were on course for war when Constantius died, in November 361. The brief pagan interlude of Julian’s reign served only to sharpen the Christian triumphalism that attended his death in Persia, falling like Valerian in war against the Persian infidel because he had scorned the one true god. What then was a Christian to make of the devastating defeat of the Roman army at the Battle of Adrianople in August 378, where the devout Christian emperor of the east, Valens, fell with two-thirds of his men, slaughtered by the Goths? That was simple, for, as St Ambrose observed, Valens was an Arian, whereas Gratian, emperor of the west, was assured of victory by virtue of his orthodoxy.
It fell to Theodosius (379–95), chosen to replace Valens, to institute orthodox Christianity as the religion of the Roman state, and to insist that all worship his god as their own. But still victory was his alone when Theodosius took the field against the last pagan pretender, Eugenius. According to Rufinus of Aquileia (XI.33), ‘he prepared for war by arming himself not so much with weapons as with prayers and fasts, guarded not so much by the nightwatch but by nightly prayer vigils’. As matters went against the emperor at the Battle of Cold River, he lay prostrate and prayed, shouting that his campaign had been undertaken for Christ in order to exact just retribution ‘lest the Gentiles ask, Where is their God?’ (Psalms 113:30). Consequently, a wind blew up of such strength and direction that it whipped the arrows unleashed by Eugenius’ archers back against them. So inspired were Theodosius’ officers that one of outstanding piety, a certain Bacurius, fought through Eugenius’ bodyguard to kill him. Orosius (390–418), writing only shortly afterwards, placed emphasis still more singularly on Theodosius, who was now deserted by his men, but prostrated himself on the battlefield and maintained a vigil throughout the night, leaving ‘pools of tears which he had paid as the price for heavenly assistance’. The following morning, he rose and threw himself into the thick of battle, certain of victory even if nobody else should follow him, and assisted by the whirlwind, the result was ‘determined from heaven between the party which without the help of men placed his faith humbly in God alone, and the party that most arrogantly trusted in its own strength and in idols’.
Rufinus’ account of the public liturgical events that Theodosius had staged before he left Constantinople shows how far matters had proceeded since Constantine had allowed his troops a day of rest on Sundays and encouraged them to march under his labarum. Such ceremonies would grow ever more central to military preparations as the late Roman world gave way to the Byzantine. In the camps the ritual life of the army was transformed. The mobile tent in the centre of the marching camp, once known as the aedes, the temple and treasury where the standards were stored and venerated, became a chapel. It was here that the units prayed together on holy days, but also ‘on the actual day of battle before anyone goes out the gate’, as is prescribed in Maurice’s Strategikon of the later sixth century. Maurice further required that the standards be blessed a day or two before battle; that the Trisagion – ‘Holy God, Holy Mighty One, Holy Immortal One, have mercy on us’ – be sung by each unit early in the morning and late at night, before and after all duties; and that, as each unit marched out of camp, it should cry in unison ‘God is with us’ thrice. Military services would become increasingly complex, as later military manuals reveal.
One can also discern a shift from the traditional theology of victory, centred on the ‘manly aggressiveness’ (virtus) of the commander, to a theology that rewarded personal piety. The new theology, moreover, accommodated the purity of each individual soldier and his correct faith. This is clearly reflected in the adaptation of the sacramentum, the military oath which had caused consternation among third-century Christian commentators, but, as preserved by Vegetius (II.5.3), was now sworn: ‘By God, Christ, and the Holy Spirit, and by the majesty of the emperor, which second to God is to be loved and worshipped by the human race.’ No longer was the numen (divine quality) of the emperor worshipped, but rather one swore loyalty to his ‘majesty’, divinely given and guided.
In the reign of Justinian we see how Christian liturgical celebrations had replaced key holidays recorded in the third-century feriale (religious calendar). According to Corippus, in a panegyric celebrating John Troglyta’s victories in North Africa, the enemy determined to attack on a holy day, perhaps simply a Sunday, when ‘The Roman soldiers, occupied with their customary rites, will fear no battle’. But the general John and his second Ricinarius anticipated the attack, and like Theodosius at Cold River, spent the night before in prayer and the spilling of tears. As the sun rose, so their Christian soldiers trooped out with their standards to a tent in the centre of the camp, a mobile chapel, where a priest draped the altar and conducted the regular service. The congregants wept and together wailed: ‘Forgive our sins and the sins of our fathers, we beseech You, Christ.’ John, the general, was with them on his knees, more tears ‘pouring from his eyes like a river’ as he intoned a long prayer for victory. Once the priest had performed the Eucharist, it was shown that ‘the gifts were acceptable to the Lord of heaven, and at once sanctified and cleansed’ the army. Victory was assured, and those who would die did so purified by their tears and the sanctified elements. This, then, was the legacy of Constantine, the Christian Victor.