The narrative accounts of Constantine’s reign come from very short Latin histories written some time after his death by people with little interest in religious issues so that they passed over his conversion in silence; from the pens of Christians, both contemporary and later; and from works dependent upon a history written at the end of the fourth century by a man called Eunapius.1
Eunapius was a committed pagan who thought that through his conversion to Christianity Constantine had set the empire on the path to destruction. Eunapius’ history is largely known via quotations in later authors—especially the sixth-century pagan Zosimus, who shared his views of the Christian Church, and Christian authors of the fifth century who were at pains to denounce his words, especially his eccentric account of Constantine’s conversion. Indeed, it is the desire to denounce Eunapius’ account that seems to have lent far greater importance to what he had to say—depending as it does upon an alleged scandal involving Constantine’s eldest son and his wife—than it actually merits.2 The one exception to the general handling of the story of Constantine’s life is a very short work entitled The Descent of the Emperor Constantine, which contains important information deriving from documents composed in Constantine’s lifetime, while Eunapius’ history (prior to the conversion) appears to have derived partly from a historian deeply interested in military operations and completely uninterested in religion. This individual’s account appears to have ended around AD 324 when Constantine finally achieved the reunification of the empire; its sundry divisions in the course of his life detained us earlier in the book and was of considerable importance for understanding his career.3
From the Christian perspective, the primary narratives for Constantine’s life include a short book by a North African Christian, Caecilius Lactantius, and three works by Bishop Eusebius of Caesarea, the last of which, The Life of Constantine, was completed after the ruler’s death.
Lactantius lived from the 260s into the 320s and at various points in his life was quite close to Constantine, his influence on the emperor’s thought being especially strong in the early 320s when he was employed as the tutor to Constantine’s eldest son Crispus. For the period of Constantine’s youth and reign down to 313, Lactantius’ Concerning the Deaths of the Persecutors, probably completed toward the end of that year, offers a vigorous, and violently prejudiced, account. His principal villain was Galerius, who he sees as the dominant personality in Diocletian’s later years on the throne and the driving force behind the great persecution. Despite (and, in part because of) his outright partisanship, Lactantius’ work is of immense value not so much for the factual information that he provides—some of what he believed to be true seems not to have been, and he often appears ignorant of things that would have been germane to his cause—but rather because it reflects the public discourse of the era. So much of what we have from this period comes in the form of speeches of praise for the emperors—especially nine panegyrics surviving in Latin; on the other hand, Lactantius’ stance as the author of what often seems to be an anti-panegyric in which the language of the regime is turned on its head offers insight into what ordinary people might have been thinking. It is unlikely that Lactantius was the only person who enjoyed scenes like his description of Galerius dying from an intestinal disorder, his decaying body stuffed with foul-smelling worms and polluting the air for miles around.
Another important point is that of perspective. Although Lactantius was North African and would later become prominent at Constantine’s court, he was neither in North Africa nor at court when he wrote his book. It appears that he was living in or around the city of Nicomedia where he was professor of Latin at least until 303; also living there was the man to whom he dedicates the work, a Christian named Donatus, who had been imprisoned and tortured during the persecutions of the Christian Church. Another crucial aspect of Concerning the Deaths of the Persecutors is that the theme is precisely what the title proclaims: it is about the deaths of emperors who persecuted the Christians, and not, strictly speaking, about Constantine.4
The other Christian who wrote ostensibly historical work in the time of Constantine—Eusebius, bishop of Caesarea—was a man of enormous energy and vast output ranging from exegesis of Scripture to three works of history. The first of these, simply entitled The Martyrs of Palestine, details the course of the persecutions begun in 303 in his home district. The second was his immensely influential History of the Church, a book that defined the subject for future generations. The version that has survived is the third edition. The first edition concluded with a vision of the peaceful coexistence of the Christian and pagan communities at the end of the third century. The second version, inspired by the traumatic events of Diocletian’s persecutions, ends with the victories of Constantine and Licinius in 312 and 313, which Eusebius sees as acts of divine vengeance upon persecutors, especially Maximinus Daia, an avid foe of the Christians who ruled the eastern provinces under Galerius after 305. Our draft of the history was compiled after Constantine defeated Licinius in 324. Eusebius’s third work was the four-volume Life of Constantine, arguably written as a sort of appendix to the History of the Church.5 He also wrote a panegyric to celebrate the thirtieth year as emperor, which he may have delivered to Constantine in person.
Eusebius’ Constantine was a committed Christian from the moment he saw the vision of the cross in the sky (a vision for which Eusebius is our primary source); he was a new Moses leading his people forth from the horrors of persecution to triumph, crushing the grotesque tyrants who had abused the faithful. In victory he devoted himself to promoting Christian values and eradicating pagan worship.
Clear and powerful in its message, The Life of Constantine is a deeply problematic book. Although he quotes a great number of documents—and we can now be sure, thanks to a papyrus first published in 1954, that these documents are authentic—there are times when he quotes out of context or misunderstands what he is citing.6 That, however, is not a particularly significant problem and the same point could be made about virtually any historian of the ancient world. Nor is the biggest problem Eusebius’ failure to mention important people—for instance, Constantine’s wives and his eldest son—or projects, or even that Eusebius is capable of misrepresenting something as important as Constantine’s plans for the succession.7 The fundamental problem with Eusebius’ history is that his picture of Constantine’s struggle against paganism is wrong and that his understanding of Constantine’s conversion is based on a fantasy.
Much of what both Lactantius and Eusebius have to say about the time in which they lived tends to reflect the verbose official discourse of the period, by far the best evidence for which is provided by the nine surviving Latin panegyrics.8 Of these, two were delivered to Constantius I and two to Maximian—one on Maximian’s birthday in 291, the other in 288 to commemorate his accession three years earlier. Four were delivered to Constantine in person, and one to the Senate at Rome in 321 as if Constantine were present (he was in fact in the Balkans at the time). The speeches delivered at court before the emperors tend, not surprisingly, to reflect the “official message” that the rulers wished people to receive about them, especially those regarding Constantine which are highly revealing as to his state of mind early in his career. Those delivered by people speaking on behalf of provincial communities reflect the projected image of the emperor as it was received in well-informed local society—one did not want to insult the emperor while thanking him for his beneficence. It is unfortunate that the panegyrics, whose narrative style reflects the contemporary mode and which appears to have influenced the surviving narratives of Constantine’s wars, are spread unevenly across the reign (and that there are not more of them). On the other hand, the speeches also reflect the locus of power: after 312, Constantine was rarely in Gaul, where the collection was assembled, or in Rome, and after 326 he would never again be west of the Adriatic.
Luckily we are able to follow Constantine’s wanderings via the record preserved in the Theodosian Code. The emperor Theodosius II (reigned AD 408 to 451) commissioned the Code in 429; it was finished in 437 and promulgated at a meeting of the Roman Senate on 25 December 438.9 Although some sections of it are now lost, what we have consists of some 2,500 individual decisions on matters of law issued between 313 and 437 and divided into hundreds of tituli or topics. More than 350 of these constitutions date to the time of Constantine. In addition there are nearly sixty more extracts preserved in the sixth-century Codex Justinianus (the project of the emperor Justinian, compiled between AD 529 and 534).
The texts as they have come down to us in the two Codes are edited versions of the original texts. Although the editing in the Codex Justinianus sometimes misrepresents the original texts quite substantially, we are more fortunate with the Theodosian Code. The survival of the original version of a ruling on gift-giving in another collection of Latin legal texts shows that while the Code’s editors pared down the rhetoric of the original—sometimes rendering their own versions somewhat opaque—they did not significantly alter the meaning.10 Although most of the texts included in the Code were imperial rescripts—responses to inquiries—they are largely not “private rescripts,” or responses to inquiries by potential litigants.11 Rather, the rescripts are responding to questions from senior officials, while other documents are in the form of edicts or general instructions from the emperor. These texts connect us directly with the inner circles of Constantine’s government.
Although it is unlikely that he would have drafted many, or perhaps any, of the surviving texts, it is also highly unlikely that someone would have written instructions to the most senior officials of his government—the praetorian prefects, or the prefects of Rome—without Constantine knowing what was said. The secretaries who composed these documents were employed to speak for the emperor, so their work, at least in the case of documents addressed to senior officials, was bound to represent views compatible with the emperor’s own.12
But, invaluable as documents contained in the Theodosian Code are as an insight into Constantine’s administrative style, they must represent only a very small proportion of the total number that once existed. The editors of the Theodosian Code were not trying to provide a summary of Constantine’s administrative history, useful as that would be to the twenty-first-century reader; rather, they were seeking texts relevant to the topics for which they needed precedents. Since we have no idea what the original sample size would have been or what issues interested Constantine’s officials as opposed to the later editors, we cannot hope to use the surviving extracts to reconstruct imperial “policy.” What we can do is reconstruct a credible list of imperial concerns and ways of dealing with them. Read in this manner, the Code may not tell us everything we might want to know, but it can tell us something about the way Constantine wanted to be seen and the way his mind worked when confronted with the details of administration.
In addition to sources that have survived via manuscript traditions, important information, often crucial and otherwise unknowable, is to be found in inscriptions and papyri—the material made from the papyrus plant that served as the writing medium in many parts of the empire—as well as in the record of coins, buildings, and the other arts. Mosaics, for instance, can show how Romans might have visualized hunts or gladiatorial fights, a meeting with an emperor, or two people making love. A monument such as the Arch of Constantine in Rome is not simply a victory monument: it is a statement of imperial values, as is the Arch of Galerius (once part of the entrance to his palace at Thessalonica). Similarly, the palace of Diocletian at Split offers us a glimpse of that emperor’s ideal world—a fort with elaborate sleeping quarters and several temples, as befitted a man who constantly stressed his devotion to the gods—while Constantine’s buildings show us a great deal about the way he thought he might share his private interests with his subjects.
Inscriptions containing imperial letters and orders—ranging from the numerous copies of Diocletian’s effort to fix wages and prices throughout the empire to the permission issued in Constantine’s name during the last year of his life for an Italian city to erect a temple in his honor (provided that the good people of that city did not engage in sacrifice)—all show us the government in action. Where our literary sources are absent or woefully incomplete, masses of humble records such as tombstones and census returns on papyri help us understand the empire’s demographics or the ways in which a child might be raised. Such texts bring us out of the world of the governing class and into that of the average person (if there is such a being). And it is in the papyri that we can pick up something of the dialogue between local officials and the higher reaches of government, and that we sense the limits of the government’s power.13
My point in this book has been to tell Constantine’s story through the sources as they were written rather than reading backward from the end of his life. In writing about Constantine I have preferred to stress the kinds of evidence that I feel come closer to him than others. The panegyrics (or some of them) and the Theodosian Code show us the mind of Constantine at work as well as something of his personality in ways that other texts—Eusebius’ Life, for instance—do not.14 This is not to deny the great importance of a work like Eusebius’ in shaping later understanding of Constantine, but the Life tells a different story.