LICINIUS, EMPEROR OF THE EAST, projected the image of a cheery soul. His beefy portraits looked to the tradition of Diocletian and Maximian—he was of military bearing, energetic-looking, bearded (see figure 22.1).1 Constantine’s portraits are beardless, youthful, displaying the serenity that appears in the panegyrics; his style echoes that of Augustus and, way before him, Alexander the Great, whose military skill he emulated. In their physical appearance, as their subjects would have been able to witness in works of art great and small, the two men could not have been more different. Licinius represented stability, continuity with the ways of Diocletian; Constantine represented a return to the glory of days long past, inspiring a new vision of the future. Despite the continuing prominence of Constantius in Constantine’s propaganda, his self-presentation was decidedly unlike that of his father or his sainted ancestor Claudius. Beyond the world of appearances, there was less to separate the two men than might meet the eye.
Although the legislative record of Licinius would be formally abolished in December 324 after his defeat by Constantine, some of his enactments survived, absorbed into the body of legal documentation just as he and Constantine had absorbed Galerius’ Edict on False Accusations into their own practice. Indeed, Licinius himself, although ruthless in dealing with the human remainder of his predecessor Maximinus’ regime, had left intact a ruling granting immunity from capitation tax to people registered as urban citizens (as opposed to peasants who lived outside a city), which itself confirmed an earlier decision by Diocletian.2
The search for utterances from Licinius himself turns up a ruling that women who knowingly marry slaves will become slaves—they remain free if unaware of their spouse’s status, but the children take the husband’s status as slaves—a rather more sweeping statement than any Constantine issued. It may be part of a longer set of rulings that included the statement that if slaves were caught fleeing to the barbarians they should have their feet mutilated and be sent to the mines.3 Even more certainly his is a series of quotations from a text issued to the people of Bithynia on the status of people who served the court. Nicomedia, which Licinius adopted as his principal residence, was in Bithynia. These statements reflect Licinius’ attempt to sort out problems arising from the court’s presence in the area. Thus he rules that minor bureaucrats should not be admitted to court rank until they have finished their service and proved themselves honest; those workers in the mints should retain their status. People who have earned their rank and fulfilled their municipal obligations should enjoy the privileges due them, whereas those who have acquired rank through acts of venal patronage should be stripped of all privileges and sent home to perform their obligatory munera. Overall these rulings demonstrate a much closer association between the palace bureaucracy and the local governing classes than Constantine seems to have achieved. In his part of the empire, as we noted earlier, high office in the civil service was dominated by the Italian aristocracy.
FIGURE 22.1
Licinius. Source: Courtesy of the author.
Devoted as both men may have been to efficient civilian government, the most important institution to either was the army. For both men it’s hard to find out anything in our sources about military administration. All we can know on that score is that Constantine’s general staff was dominated by officers of German extraction—which virtually replicated the situation in the decades after Gallienus when recently prominent Balkan officers shared power with the senatorial nobility.4 We are better informed about the conditions under which their soldiers served. It is from this area that the longest and most indisputably Licinian document has come down to us. It is a text composed almost immediately after the death of Galerius, no doubt with the prospect of war with Maximinus clearly in view. The text that survives in two copies on bronze tablets reveals that in Licinius’ army, soldiers did very well. They received exemption for themselves and four other “heads” (capita), the basic unit for calculating taxation, both while in service and upon retirement after the full term of twenty-five years’ service; soldiers who took an honorable discharge after twenty years retained an exemption for two “heads”; soldiers who retired because they were wounded also retained the exemption for two heads. Soldiers who did not receive an honorable discharge received no benefits since people obtaining these generous grants needed to show a “habit of good life.” Military commanders were told that they needed to provide discharge papers themselves, presumably because papers with their seals were less likely to be challenged than documents that came from the unit’s clerk, and they were told that they should inscribe the emperor’s new regulations on bronze tablets in all the camps under their command.5
The change from the practice of Diocletian is quite noticeable. Under him a soldier who had served in the regular army after twenty years of service and the receipt of either a medical or honorary discharge could have received immunity from personal and civic munera. Men who received honorary discharges without having served the full time were denied exemption, as were those who served in auxiliary units.6 The vastly more generous terms of Licinius’ grant essentially removed retired soldiers and their families from the census roles and all that implied as far as taxation was concerned, wherever they might settle.7 Constantine’s soldiers were not nearly so well recompensed for their efforts. The emperor would be forced to address the issue a few years after his first victory over Licinius, when he would have troops stationed in places where Licinius’ had been and who might have learned about the terms under which their rivals had been employed.8
The document recording Constantine’s meeting with some plainly angry veterans in 320 provides us with one of the clearest available pictures of his style. Preserved through records kept by Constantine himself, it appears to follow a bout of negotiation with the troops. It begins with the emperor’s carefully stage-managed entrance:
When he entered into the headquarters and was saluted by the prefects, tribunes and the most eminent men, it was acclaimed: Constantine Augustus, Gods preserve you, your safety is our safety, we speak truly, we speak justly.
The assembled veterans acclaimed: Constantine Augustus, why have we been made veterans, if we have no privilege?
Constantine Augustus said: I ought always to augment the happiness of my fellow veterans than to diminish it.
Victorinus the veteran said: We should not be assigned to compulsory public services and burdens in any locations.
Constantine Augustus: Tell me more clearly, what are the compulsory public services that more seriously irritate you.
All the veterans acclaimed: Surely you yourself see.9
Constantine had of course seen, and the rest of the document contains a far more lucid summary of veterans’ benefits than Licinius’ chancery had been able to produce. Notable as well here is the troops’ greeting “Gods preserve you,” as he entered the room. Although he was a Christian, his veterans were not, and the notion that the forthcoming war with Licinius was to be some sort of religious crusade to protect the Christians of the east from Licinius’ persecution would presumably have been lost on the men serving in the front ranks.
It is Eusebius, in his biography of Constantine, who asserts that Licinius’ persecution of his co-religionists drove the western emperor into action. Sadly, the extent of this persecution and its date seem to be confused in Eusebius’ mind, as he places it before the war at Cibalae and elides the years between. In his History of the Church, the last version of which followed immediately upon that final conflict, he indicates that the persecution extended only to a ban on bishops assembling. In fact, the ban may have had nothing to do with Constantine, and a great deal to do with a controversy that was even then dividing the church. The bone of contention was the nature of God and his relationship with Christ—were they the same divine essence or were they similar?—a debate initiated some years past at Alexandria. Licinius’ wife Constantia remained devoutly Christian and appears to have been close to another Eusebius, the bishop of Nicomedia, who exploited his proximity to the palace in his relations with the other bishops.
The conversation that Eusebius says Licinius had with his closest intimates—about the importance of defeating Constantine so as to preserve the worship of the traditional Roman gods—does not fit very obviously into this context. Neither do certain facts. The forthcoming war was in prospect before Nazarius rose to deliver his panegyric in 321. War would have seemed imminent when, that same year, Constantine ceased to recognize the joint consulship of Licinius and his son. It had been a condition of the treaty that ended the previous war in 317 that for each year there would be only one set of consuls for the whole empire. As of the summer of 321, there were two sets. In 323 Constantine pursued a band of Gothic raiders into Licinius’ lands, implying that Licinius was responsible for an attack on his territory, and he began to assemble a powerful fleet at Piraeus.
Major naval operations had been noticeably absent from the annals of Roman warfare since the year 31 BC when the emperor Augustus defeated Mark Antony at the battle of Actium. Since then the only naval operations involving fleets had been Aurelian’s reconquest of Egypt and the war waged by Maximian and Constantius against the former commander of the Rhine frontier, Carausius, in the 280s and 290s. In the Mediterranean, the Roman naval forces were maintained essentially to patrol against pirates or to transport troops from the western and Syrian garrisons. Their pathetic state of readiness was amply demonstrated during the mid-third century by their failure to contain troublesome raiders, whether Black Sea tribesmen who ravaged the Aegean coastline in the time of Valerian and Gallienus or adventurous Franks looting the western Mediterranean during Probus’ reign. Any substantial Mediterranean fleet would be a departure from what existed, and Constantine’s preparations at Piraeus indicated that he was planning a war that would carry his forces into the heart of Licinius’ realm, assisted by a greatly enlarged fleet.
With the legacy of his father’s invasion of Britain still fresh in his mind as well as Maxentius’ more recent invasion of Africa, he may also have felt that he could draw from a reservoir of naval experience that his opponent would be hard-pressed to match. Given the record of hostility between the two regimes, surprise was not an appropriate tactic; massive advance planning was therefore the order of the day. Constantine was not a man to underestimate potential obstacles or to fail to take what he saw as the necessary steps to meet them. News that a fleet was building would give Licinius something to worry about. Was the plan for a direct assault or was it to land troops somewhere in the rear of his army? Anything that would inject a degree of uncertainty into Licinius’ deliberations would be useful—he had shown himself rather too competent when it came to a straight-up confrontation.
Constantine’s invasion of the east began in the summer of 324. Meanwhile the empire still had to be governed, and it was to men like Locrius Verinus—last seen dealing with Donatists as vicarius of Africa and now prefect of Rome—that Constantine turned. One task that he allotted to an official named Dalmatius was to set down the ages at which young people would be considered mature; and Constantine himself sent an important missive to Severus, probably praetorian prefect at the time, telling him that people who merely purchased their ranks at the palace should be booted out—it was “fitting that only those who are employed in the palace or work in the administration should be selected for the bestowal of honors.”10 The measure looks like a house-cleaning operation ahead of what would predictably be the complex task of integrating survivors of Licinius’ regime with his own people (Constantine appears to have been totally confident about the likely outcome of the campaign). The last communication on record as the campaign began is also to Verinus: it is a lengthy discussion on the subject of the appropriate rate of pay for swine-catchers.11
The same texts that show Constantine in action also reveal a novel feature of the regime: the extensive involvement of members of his immediate family in positions of very great responsibility. One praetorian prefect this year who was traveling with him was one Flavius Constantius. We have no information as to who he was, but the fact that he shared two elements of Constantine’s name (the emperor was formally known as Flavius Valerius Constantinus) suggests that he was probably a blood relative. The Dalmatius mentioned in the preceding paragraph is likely Constantine’s half-brother, and his son Crispus, now in his early twenties, was in command of the fleet.12
As Constantine and his family moved east with his entourage and troops, Licinius once again mustered his forces at Adrianople. On July 3, he was utterly defeated.13 Constantine seems to have led the decisive attack himself, in the course of which he was wounded in the leg, while Licinius fled the field for the city of Byzantium.14 There he appointed a general called Martianus to command his forces on the far side of the Bosporus (the straits dividing Europe from Asia).
The record of Constantine’s wound reveals not only the continuing importance of the warrior ideology of the imperial position—it was just three years earlier that Nazarius had added Constantine’s secret scouting mission to the story of the Italian campaign—but also further problematizes the narrative of Eusebius. In his Life of Constantine the bishop reports that Constantine went into battle with the aid of a miraculous battle standard. Evidently visualized as taking the form of the labarum first mentioned in relation to the battle of the Milvian Bridge, this standard had amazing power.15 Carried into battle by fifty select guardsmen, it provided special protection for those around it: if the standard bearer should drop it in fear, the javelin coming his way would skewer him, while the man who then seized the standard was safe from all peril. The standard’s staff acted like a magnet, attracting javelins to itself so that it came to resemble a giant pincushion. As with the story of the cross in the sky before the Milvian Bridge, Eusebius claims Constantine himself as the source for this information “much later.”16 If this was the case and since Eusebius seemed not to know about the standard or the vision until a year before Constantine’s death when he wrote his speech celebrating the thirtieth anniversary of Constantine’s accession, one might wonder if “much later” in The Life of Constantine means “more than a decade later.” In 325 there seems to have been no need to Christianize this fast-moving narrative, or conceal the emperor’s injury.
With Licinius in Byzantium, the next phase of the campaign took place at sea: the western fleet was unmatchable, as Licinius’ admiral learned at his peril. Having lost control of the Bosporus, Licinius abandoned his men in Byzantium to take command of fresh forces near Chalcedon. Constantine landed his army without opposition north of Licinius’ position, forcing him to fight, probably on September 18, at a place called Chrysoplis (modern Üsküdar in Turkey). The result was now a foregone conclusion as Licinius was plainly outmatched. He fled to Nicomedia, and the troops who had been left in Byzantium surrendered, the campaign all but over. On or just before December 16, 324, Constantia, assisted by Eusebius (bishop of Nicomedia, no relation to Constantine’s biographer), negotiated the surrender of her husband.17 He was sent into exile at Thessalonica, where he was executed shortly afterward, allegedly for conspiring with barbarians.
Constantine was now sole ruler of the Roman Empire. He may have learned something of the art of government from his father, more perhaps from Diocletian. As we have seen, he knew how to govern: he guided his officials with a firm hand, and he understood his position as emperor within the tradition of imperial power that had developed over the centuries. But the victory of Constantine stemmed from more than just skill in the art of government, from more even than his extraordinary ability on the battlefield. Constantine’s victory stemmed from his own toughness and determination, qualities honed in the train of Diocletian but perhaps instilled earlier in the palace at Trier, or as his mother grasped her dignity and self-respect in the wake of rejection. Constantine had learned that there would be no one upon whom he could rely as much as he relied upon himself, and this is reflected in his belief in the god who guided him. Constantine’s god was still a very personal god, one whom he met on his own and who provided him guidance on an intensely personal basis; the god who Constantine believed to have guided him to victory was the god who had mercy upon him for his failings, and who protected him from evil.