CONSTANTINE DIDN’T STAY LONG in Rome. He made a ceremonial entry into the city, at the end of which he did not sacrifice to Capitoline Jupiter. (This decision could be taken simply as a feature of Constantine’s ongoing rejection of the trappings of the old regime; why should he sacrifice to a god associated so closely with Diocletian?) Then he set about forging a new regime in which those who had served Maxentius would have a place. For a start, he decided to retain Anullinus as prefect of the city for the next month before replacing him with Aradius Rufinus, who would hold the office until December 313; at this point he would be replaced by Caeonius Rufius Volusianus, who would be prefect until August 315. These appointments might also be emblematic of the problems Maxentius faced before marching from Rome on October 28. But while the sixth-century historian Zosimus says that Constantine executed a few of Maxentius’ friends, it doesn’t seem that those friends came from the aristocratic Roman families that had once supported him. One other thing that Constantine did before leaving town was to order the restitution of property confiscated from the Christian Church during the persecution: Maxentius may have ended the persecution, but he had not gone as far as to do that.1
With arrangements made for the administration of Maxentius’ territory, Constantine went to meet his co-emperor Licinius at Milan, arriving there by March.2 The two men cemented their alliance with Licinius’ marriage to Constantia, Constantine’s oldest half-sister. It is tempting to imagine that Constantine introduced his prospective brother-in-law to the knowledge of the Highest God revealed on the campaign just passed, but the announcements of support by non-Galerian and Diocletianic divinities that would be a feature of Licinius’ self-representation in the next year perhaps needed no special encouragement given that Maximinus was himself a die-hard devotee of the old way of doing things.3 Constantine would most likely have pointed out to Licinius that his half-sister was now a Christian. He might also have discussed with him the possibility of drawing up a restitution edict because if Licinius defeated Maximinus, such an edict would offer a splendid way of declaring the power of the “Highest God” who would by then have guided them both to victory.
The agreement that Constantine made with Licinius in Milan was of great importance for solidifying their relationship both with each other and with the past. They could assert the role of a new god in aiding them to victory, and do so in terms that both rejected the associations with specific gods that had characterized the old regime, and asserted their own equality in the good relationship that each had with the “Highest God.” In more specific terms, they could reject the bigotry inherent in defining a good Roman as someone who was not a good Christian. It was an act that underscored very well established aspects of Maximinus’ regime: Maximinus had made persecution one of the centerpieces of his rule in the months after Galerius’ death. In so doing he had enunciated his own special relationship with the traditional gods.
The new high priest of persecution was Theotecnus; a member of the city council at Antioch in Syria, he had erected a statue of Zeus Philios (Zeus the friendly) that appears to have given oracles. It is not clear how this worked, though Eusebius’ assertion that Theotecnus “put on a display of this marvel through which he gave oracles, even to the emperor,” makes it quite possible that he had rigged the statue to do something. It was not unknown, for instance, for people to drill a hole through the back of a statue and insert a speaking pipe (a crane’s windpipe worked well) so that the statue would seem to speak. Theotecnus’ activities inspired civic officials throughout the east, who on the advice of provincial governors sent messages to Maximinus asking him to initiate a persecution. At the same time, it appears that someone in the court forged the Acts of Pilate, which contained a denunciation of the Christians. The title of this composition suggests that it resembled a particular form of Christian text, an account of a martyrdom based on a putative transcript of the encounter between a magistrate and a prospective martyr—here the conversation would be between Pilate and the Savior himself. It would quite likely have revolved around sorcery—pagans tended to suggest that Jesus was no more than a commonplace magician—and the question of Jesus’ mortality.4
Maximinus did not now issue an edict ordering persecution. Rather, his favorable responses to petitions, worded very similarly to the message of Theotecnus’ god requesting that Christians be expelled from civic territory, triggered a series of local persecutions. Three of these petitions have survived, one directly through Eusebius’ history of the church, and two on inscriptions from Asia Minor. These inscriptions along with other documents also reveal that in 312 Maximinus was still wary of provoking open war with Licinius; he recognized the claim of the two western Augusti to be consuls for the year.5
Local initiatives in persecution made 312 a very difficult year for many Christian communities. In Alexandria, Bishop Peter was arrested and executed. At Ancyra (Ankara in modern Turkey), where Theotecnus had been sent as governor, seven virgins, leaders of a deviant Christian community, were arrested and drowned. After recovering their bodies in the middle of the night, another member of that community publicly launched a verbal assault upon Theotecnus himself, which resulted in his equally public incineration. At Pedecthoe in Armenia, anonymous letters attacking the emperor’s policy led to the arrest and execution of a man named Athenogenes. Marcus Julius Eugenius, an official on the staff of Diogenes, governor of Pisidia, was tortured repeatedly but survived to become bishop of Laodicea.
There was still, though, no all-encompassing edict, and as the year drew to a close, Maximinus appears to have realized that he needed to step back. He refused to allow the people of Nicomedia to expel the Christians from their community, and by the end of the year he had issued an edict of toleration.6
Maximinus’ edict did nothing to ease his relationship with the western Augusti, and it was now clear to him that if he were to have any chance of survival he would need to strike first. In the spring of 313 he sent an army across the Hellespont. Licinius met Maximinus at Adrianople, and on the day of the battle announced to his army that he had had a dream in which a divine messenger told him to pray to the Supreme God. That morning of April 30 he wrote out the prayer, apparently received verbatim from the angel—an event scarcely unparalleled in the history of ancient visions—and had it distributed to his men. The prayer, which the soldiers were ordered to utter three times, ran thus:
Supreme God, we pray to you, Holy God, we pray to you. We commend all justice to you. We commend our safety to you. We commend our empire to you. Through you we live, through you we emerge victorious and fortunate. Highest, Holy God, hear our prayers. We lift up our arms to you. Hear us, Holy, Highest God.7
As Licinius’ troops prayed, looking to the future, Maximinus seems to have been looking to the past since the very next day would be the anniversary of his proclamation as Caesar. After the mass prayer, the two emperors met briefly to see whether they could resolve their differences. When that failed, battle was joined. Licinius won an outright victory, and Maximinus fled to the east, pausing briefly at Nicomedia to gather up his family. He planned to make a final stand at Tarsus but failed to defend the narrow passes from the Anatolian plateau into the Cilician plain. Then at the approach of Licinius’ army, he committed suicide.8
On his way east, Maximinus had issued a final edict stating that everyone knew that “we take unceasing thought for the good of our provincials, and desire to grant them such things as are best calculated to secure the advantage of all.” In the course of these calculations he had realized that while Diocletian and Galerius “our fathers” had ordered the abolition of Christian assemblies, this had coincidentally resulted in “many extortions and robberies … practiced by the officials, and that this increased as time went on to the detriment of our provincials.” He therefore ordered the persecution to stop.9 Although Maximinus isn’t stating here that it was wrong to persecute Christians for being Christians, he is saying that it was unfortunate that local officials had let things get so out of hand that they had persecuted the wrong people. It is thus in the interests of non-Christians that he orders the end of persecution and the restoration of church property (presumably on the assumption that some of it was wrongly confiscated). And it is somewhat ironic that, using the language of Diocletian and Galerius, Maximinus the devout pagan was the emperor who brought the persecution of the Christian Church to an end.
Although Maximinus’ edict obviated the need for immediate action on the part of Licinius, a statement on the place of the church plainly offered a vehicle through which the new regime could distance itself from the past. So it was that on June 13, 313, Licinius issued his own restoration edict at Nicomedia, declaring that it represented the gist of his discussions with Constantine at Milan the previous year.10 It is this document, repetitive and enormously long, that stands in the Christian tradition as the official beginning of a new era in the relationship between church and state. From the ideological viewpoint, it was precisely that, for it expresses a message of inclusion that goes far beyond the edicts of Galerius and Maximinus. While these two emperors had promised that they would no longer persecute the Christians for the good of the state as a whole, in this edict Licinius and Constantine state that the Christians are protected by the Highest God, who has aided them in their victories. All who worshipped the gods were therefore to be treated equally. It is a stunning assertion by a Roman emperor that freedom of thought is a good thing, and it remains such even though neither Licinius nor Constantine would always follow through on this point.11
We have two copies of this document, one in Latin in Lactantius’ On the Deaths of the Persecutors, which presumably tracks the original very closely, and a Greek translation in Eusebius’ History of the Church; they differ from each other in a few points of detail, but those differences are no greater than we would expect in texts of a document that was copied by many different hands as it was distributed about the empire and to which governors would add their own preambles.12 What is most significant is that the document, once wrongly known as the Edict of Milan (there was never any such thing) and attributed to Constantine, is the product of a pagan emperor who had decided that Constantine’s approach to the “Christian question” was correct. Although the “Edict of Milan” is really a letter of Licinius to the governors of the eastern provinces, it still represents a sea change in the direction of imperial policy. Christianity is no longer to be shunted aside as “un-Roman” or the practice of eccentrics. As was the case with Aurelian’s cult of the Invincible Sun, Christianity is now associated with the very substance that holds the empire together: the ideology of imperial victory.13