Then with a pose of genial wantonness she adopted the charming pose of Venus treading the ocean waves. She even for a moment covered her hairless parts with her rosy little hand, a deliberate gesture rather than a modest concealment. “Engage,” she said, “and do so bravely. I shall not yield before you, nor turn my back on you. Direct your aim frontally, if you are a man, and at close quarters. Let your onslaught be fierce; kill before you die. Our battle this day allows no respite.” As she spoke she mounted the bed, and eased herself slowly down on top of me. She bounced up and down repeatedly, manoeuvring her back in supple movements, and gorged me with the delights of this rhythmical intercourse. Eventually our spirits palled as our bodies lost their zest; we collapsed simultaneously in a state of exhaustion as we breathlessly embraced each other. Engaged in these and similar grapplings we remained awake almost until dawn. From time to time we refreshed our weary bodies with wine, which fired our sexual urges and renewed our pleasure.
IN THIS SCENE and others like it, Apuleius explores the theme of passion in his magnificent novel, known variously as the Metamorphoses or The Golden Ass, a tale of magic, lust, adventure, fractured relationships, class antagonism, and finally divine revelation. As one of the great works of the previous century, it is probable that Constantine knew it, or some other version of the tale of Lucius, a young man whose curiosity led him into a relationship (glimpsed above) with the maid of a witch in whose house he was staying. This maid accidentally (or so he believes) changes him into an ass. Then follow many picaresque adventures. Finally, in an amphitheater where he is scheduled to have sex with a woman condemned to death for murder, by consuming roses he is transformed back into a man. Years later, when Constantine was emperor, there would be images from The Golden Ass and, it seems, a portrait of Apuleius himself painted on the ceiling of a reception room that may have been used by Fausta, who was then his wife.1
One of Apuleius’ themes is the effect of sexual passion on the judgment of a man, a feature of the seemingly endless discourse of sexuality in the ancient world: wide ranging and amply illustrated whatever the source.
For some, the ideal relationship between a man and a woman was one in which the woman was completely subordinate to her partner, and sometimes many years younger. Expectations of marriage and of sexuality varied immensely: according to medical theory, men who had sex too often risked discharging too much seed and thereby weakening their own masculine essence; others who enjoyed sex thought that they needed to control their urges, as a moral test; other men didn’t care one way or the other. Theoretical discussions of what women thought and wanted are based entirely on the male perspective running the gamut from fascination with rampant nymphomania to the desire to be persuaded that the woman of their dreams was a virgin on her wedding night. When it came to marriage, some people, the younger Pliny for instance, married girls to who were in their early teens and wrote of them more as daughters than partners. Pliny’s tastes are well known because his letters have survived, but there is good reason to think that his predilections may have struck his contemporaries as odd. Men did tend to marry women who were younger than they were, but—at least in first marriages—not a great deal younger. Outside of the aristocracy, it seems likely that most Romans in their mid-twenties sought wives in their late teens. Aristocrats married a bit younger—in their late teens—to women who were close to them in age. In this respect Constantine appears to have followed suit.2
We know very little about Minervina, the woman he would marry. We don’t know for certain where she was from though it was quite possibly Antioch. Constantine would later be called a “wife-loving adolescent,” which should mean that he married before the age of twenty. And, as a member of the court, he would have been in Syria from 299 to 301 making Antioch a not unlikely place for him to have found a wife—to which we can add that city was wealthy and well stocked with families linked to the court. Although later tradition would assert that Minervina was a prostitute, this claim is no more soundly based than the similar tradition about his mother Helena.3 Crispus, the child born of the relationship between Minervina and Constantine, was legitimate; furthermore, Constantine chose to assert Crispus’ legitimacy at the time of his second marriage in 307, at which point, if the matter had been in doubt, it would have been profoundly awkward to do so. Also for the child to be of readily asserted legitimacy, there could not have been a large status gap between mother and father.
So Minervina was probably in her late teens when she and Constantine married, and it is more likely than not that her parents were members of the imperial aristocracy. No doubt they were delighted at the union between their family and that of the distant but glorious Caesar in the west. Constantius must also have given his blessing to the union since Constantine, as a young Roman with a living father, was technically in potestate (in the power) of the head of the family, the paterfamilias. Being in potestate, Constantine was unable to marry or undertake any other significant activity without his father’s permission.
Crispus was probably born in 303. Minervina was not at court in 307, which makes it very likely that she died in or shortly after the birth of her son.4 For Minervina, as for any other young women in the ancient world and in the developing world today, where the death rate in childbirth is roughly one in sixteen, childbirth was a fearful experience—which may explain why demographic evidence from Egypt during our period suggests that life expectancy for women could be slightly lower than for men. In the case of Minervina, assuming they had married when Constantine was in his late teens, the relatively late appearance of Crispus suggests that there may have been some unsuccessful pregnancies earlier in the marriage. For upper-class women like Minervina, who should have lived in somewhat healthier conditions than most, the primary causes of death were obstetrical hemorrhage and (in the case of first pregnancies) eclampsia. It is probable, then, that Constantine’s first wife bled to death in the aftermath of their son’s birth. Crispus’ well-being was entrusted to a wet nurse, the usual practice with an upper-class baby, whether his mother lived or died.
Constantine’s marriage may have been a brilliant match for Minervina and her family, but less so for Constantine: Galerius had a daughter who was of marriageable age and the fact that she was not Constantine’ chosen bride indicates that, in Galerius’ view, Constantine was unlikely to become emperor. That this decision would have been made around 299–300 bears significantly on the way Diocletian saw his reign ending, for it must have been clear, even by 300, that abdication was a strong possibility. By this time, the palace he would occupy in his declining years—still on view at Split in Croatia—was beginning to take shape, if not already built.
Did it matter to Constantine that he now seemed most unlikely to be emperor? It seems far more likely that in these years he was more interested in Minervina, and he would have known full well what the marriage meant. With Minervina’s death his world changed; in the next few years he would take enormous risks and show the sort of immense ambition lacking at the time of his marriage—or a cannier sense of the political world. And there would always be Crispus, whom he loved, whom he would never send from court, and whom he would raise to the rank of Caesar before something went terribly and fatally wrong with their relationship some twenty years after Diocletian’s long-awaited abdication.