NICOMEDIA WAS A CITY with which Constantine had powerful associations. In his speech to the bishops he vividly recalls the demeanor of Diocletian on the day that his palace caught fire—the result of a lightning strike, he says—and it was very likely the city where his first wife Minervina died.1 It was not a place that he could avoid as the physical infrastructure of administration had been built up there since the time of Diocletian: he needed a palace, a basilica, a mint, and a circus, all of which Nicomedia provided. What he did not need was a palace dominated by the staff of his predecessor, or a basilica and a circus redolent of earlier regimes. He needed a new place to live, and by the time of his decisive victory over Licinius at Chrysopolis he had already chosen it—a place that could also serve as a memorial to his triumph.
Having to choose a new residence doesn’t mean that Constantine was permanently shifting his center of government: he had had his reasons for moving the court to Serdica after 317. The problem that he now faced was that Trier was too far to the west to be an effective seat of administrative power, while a return to Rome would mean leaving the east before he could be sure that it would be loyal to him. Serdica was a very useful base for an emperor who was planning a war against a foe located at the other end of the Balkans, but it had no harbor and was harder to get to than a place like Nicomedia.
At a pinch, of course, any of these places could serve, so long as the emperor was content to be constantly on the move, but that’s something that Constantine, along with his immediate predecessors, appears to have been less keen on than Diocletian. So if he was uncomfortable with Nicomedia, where to settle? He considered a number of spots, including Ilium, Chalcedon, Thessalonica, and, finally, Byzantium. It is alleged that he was on the verge of deciding on Ilium when he was convinced by a divine vision that it would be wrong to found a new Rome on the site of a city so closely linked with the old (Ilium was the descendant of ancient Troy, birthplace of Aeneas who was one of the founders of Rome). The result was that he chose Byzantium instead, declaring that God ordered him to give the city his name.2
Byzantium—Constantinople as it would be known from now on—may have been, in Constantine’s formulation, God’s choice for him. It was also a reasonably obvious choice from a practical point of view. The city was, by this time, nearly as old as Rome itself, having been founded in the sixth century (Rome was a seventh-century foundation); it had long been an important stopping point for ships trading with the Black Sea, an important source of grain for the Mediterranean lands. As a result of its economic importance, it had always been powerfully defended, as Constantine knew from the recent war with Licinius, and many of the essentials for an imperial city were already in place there. Moreover, despite stories that he took an age to make up his mind about it, there is evidence he had identified the city as his future capital before Licinius’ surrender.3
Byzantium had a record of supporting losers. It had the appearance of a major Roman city, rather than a Greek one, because it had chosen poorly in 193: in that year the city’s council had decided to back Pescennius Niger when he contested the throne against Septimius Severus (and had continued to resist Severus for several years after Niger’s defeat). When he finally captured Byzantium, Severus, a man not renowned for his merciful disposition, decided to punish not simply those who had defied him (they were executed) but the city itself, which he ordered to be burned and remodeled in a new Roman style that would efface its former Greek identity.
Severus’ new city boasted colonnaded streets, a basilica, a massive new shrine to the emperors of Rome—which included a courtyard surrounded by four stoas, or Tetrastoön—plus a bathhouse and a circus. The Tetrastoön and the bathhouse stood opposite each other on the north and south sides of an avenue that fed into the Forum. The basilica was on the other side of the Forum and flanked a second new avenue running down from the north, beginning at a building known as the Strategeion, which appears to have included a training ground of some sort. A third avenue, the Mese, connected the Forum with the city wall in the west. The circus was to occupy the area to the south of the bathhouse. It was a good beginning even if it had been left incomplete at the time of Severus’ death in 211.
In selecting Byzantium as his Constantinople, Constantine committed himself to providing the necessary buildings for the imperial government and to enhancing the city’s overall appearance. In choosing a place with a quasi-imperial past he was also linking himself with the days preceding the reign of Valerian when a single emperor ran the empire. As he celebrated his victory he could feel confident that the spirit of Diocletian would no longer loom over him as it probably had when he entered the palace at Nicomedia.
What we do not know is how precisely Constantine carried out the city’s refoundation, but certain things were supposed to take place when a new city came into being whether or not it was replacing an old one on the same site. The reason for this, in the Roman tradition, is that cities were by definition sacred spaces, and the establishment of a new city involved two religious ceremonies.
The first of these was the limitatio in which the city limits were set out, traditionally involving a procession during which a priest would plow a furrow to mark the new boundary. When the city was ready, the next ceremony would be the inauguratio in which the civic space was “liberated and pronounced to be designated,” meaning that that space and its functions were freed from all divine constraints. According to Roman tradition, this could only be carried out when enough of the city had been built for the ceremony to be meaningful—but it was also Roman tradition that the ceremony should involve augurs, who belonged to one of the traditional Roman priesthoods charged with overseeing the relationship between the city and the gods (especially Jupiter) by observing signs, especially in the sky and, in particular, the flight of birds. Constantine appears to have participated in the rites (which may have involved the casting of a horoscope, possibly as a substitute for augury) on November 8, 324, before Licinius’ surrender.4 It is likely that he led the procession, and, if it was part of this ceremony, he may even have plowed the furrow (or part of it) himself, but there would have been no animal sacrifice: the ceremony would have been a Christian adaptation of an age-old tradition not unlike his entry into Rome in 312. Then, probably in the year after that, he began to make detailed plans, laying out the location of new churches and temples.
Even as the new capital was being made ready, Constantine was headed west to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of his accession on July 25, 326. He determined to commemorate the event at Rome. This would be the last time that he would see the city.
FIGURE 27.1
The Great Cameo of Constantine and Fausta. The boy in front of Constantine in the chariot in this scene is probably Crispus, and the date is most likely 315. The identity of the female figure behind Constantine is problematic, but it could be Helena. Constantine assumes the role of Jupiter with his thunderbolt. What is especially striking is the way the artist depicts the affectionate relationship between Constantine and Fausta. Source: Courtesy of the GeldMuseum, Utrecht, The Netherlands.
His wife, Fausta, who had been living with him in Serdica, had presumably journeyed with him to Nicomedia, quite probably with the numerous offspring that had resulted from what was plainly an intensely physical relationship: she had produced her second son, Constantius, on August 7, 317, exactly a year after the birth of Constantine, her first son; then her elder daughter, Constantina, within a year or so of Constantius’ birth, and shortly afterward a second daughter, Helena. Her fifth child, Constans, was born in 323.5
In 324, Fausta’s role in guaranteeing a new generation of rulers began to be widely advertised. In one series of gold medallions struck at Trier, Constantine appears on the obverse (front); the reverse (back) depicts the two Caesars Crispus and Constantine (II) standing with clasped hands on either side of Fausta, whose hands are placed on their shoulders with the legend “fortunate offspring of Constantine Augustus.”6 A second series has a bust of Fausta on the obverse while the reverse depicts her with a nimbus of light around her head and facing a throne set on a platform decorated with garlands. She is holding a child and standing between two goddesses—Good Fortune (Felicitas) and Piety (Pietas)—and two lesser divinities stand on either side of the throne. This is a style that is repeated on two other gold series showing Fausta on the obverse with the legend “Piety of the Empress.” Coins of the kind that would circulate far more widely—and probably represent miniature versions of larger paintings—depict her on the obverse carrying two children, with the legend “Hope of the State” and Optatianus, the poetically inclined future prefect of Rome, offers a rather poor pun on her name in a poem describing Constantine as triumphing throughout faustis saeculis (“the fortunate centuries”). At the same time, Constantine’s mother Helena also appears on coins, perhaps to remind people of the importance that both generations of women played in perpetuating the imperial line.7 It is worth noting that Fausta had assumed the role of Crispus’ mother—possibly an ideological gesture, but one that might have struck people as odd as she was only about four years his senior. Her relationship with him would have been formed many years earlier during their joint childhood in Trier, at which point her role was likely that of older sister.
The one person who would not be traveling west with the imperial party was Crispus, who had returned to Trier—the city served as his headquarters while Constantine was in Serdica—where he presumably had played an important symbolic role as the “family presence” in the area. A contemporary poet, writing about the anniversary of Constantine’s accession, praises Crispus for protecting the Rhine and the Rhône while handing out harsh laws to the Franks. He is the “sacred boy, rightly the hope of such great peace.”8 He was not the only member of the family to stay in the west; Constantine’s half-brother Julius Constantius had taken up residence in Etruria where his wife had further augmented the imperial clan by giving birth to a son named Gallus. Gallus would briefly hold the position of Caesar to Constantius II in the 350s, and it is his fate in that role that offers the only legitimate clue to Crispus’ death in the spring of 326.
In 350, Constantine II was long dead after a quarrel with the court of his brother Constans, and Constans was recently dead as the result of an uprising in Gaul led by a German general named Magnentius. In order to reassert control over the west, Constantius II felt that he needed to leave a family member in charge of the east, which he had ruled since Constantine’s death thirteen years earlier—and he had for this but two choices: the sons of his cousin Constantius, Julian and Gallus. Gallus, being the eldest, was the natural choice and was duly married to Constantine’s daughter Constantina, just as a few years later Julian would be chosen for the same job and would be married to Helena.
As Constantius took his army west for what proved a highly successful, if bloody, campaign, Gallus was sent to Antioch. The problem with Gallus is that he seems to have had a very poor understanding of his role, which allowed him very limited authority. When Gallus tried to claim greater authority fights broke out with senior bureaucrats, one of whom was murdered in a riot that Gallus fomented at Antioch. When Constantius ordered his cousin to leave the city, Gallus stopped off at Constantinople, where he further offended Constantius by taking his seat in the imperial box to enjoy a day of chariot racing. On his way to Pola (modern Pula in Croatia) where he was taken next, Constantina died. At Pola, members of Constantius’ court interrogated him about his behavior in Antioch. Gallus tried to blame Constantia, at which point the proceedings were reported to Constantius who ordered the immediate execution of Gallus, along with three of his close associates. We are also told that this is where Crispus had been executed many years before.9
The relevance of Gallus’ story to Crispus’ stems both from Constantius’ evident interest in imitating his own father and from the nature of the position that both held. Constantine’s conception of the role of Caesar seems to have been very different from that of Diocletian or, indeed, from that of Licinius, whose two short-lived appointees to that post had both been experienced generals. Constantine, who appointed his infant son Constantine to the post at birth, and did the same for Constantius a few years later, seems to have reverted to an earlier definition whereby the holder of the post, as successor designate, possessed only as much authority as the emperor deemed fitting. When Constantius appointed Gallus, then Julian to the position, he seems to have been doing so according to his father’s notion that a Caesar was essentially to be seen but not heard.
Junius Bassus, a member (most likely pagan) of the Roman aristocracy had been in office as praetorian prefect in the western provinces since 318; it is significant that he remained in office. Did he have a hand in Crispus’ downfall? It’s hard to imagine that so senior an official would not have been consulted on a matter of such importance. One of the consuls of 325, Valerius Proculus, was removed from office in disgrace. Was there a falling-out between Constantine and elements of the Italian aristocracy? Had Crispus gotten himself involved in a fight on the other side of his father? If none of this can fully explain what happened to Crispus, it does suggest that everything might not have been well in the western empire.10
We will never know what happened to Crispus, or why he plummeted, in the space of just over a year—we can date his death to the first half of 326—from glorious heir apparent to the chopping block. It is likely that he was summoned to his death from Trier and it is possible that Constantine could not bear to be present for the trial, if we are right to read Constantius’ conduct here as an imitation of his father’s.
A few months later, Fausta vanishes from public view. Again we cannot know why, but one source tells us that she died in 328. Her sudden disappearance from the imperial record makes it very tempting now, as at the time, to link her exit from public life with that of Crispus. The fact that her actual death may have taken place a couple of years later suggests that she was sent into internal exile.11 Another piece of evidence may confirm that Fausta’s removal was the result of a severe disagreement with which it might be possible for others to sympathize: both Helena, Constantine’s mother, and Eutropia, Fausta’s mother, stepped into the role of empress while Fausta was evidently still alive. It is also telling that Eusebius never mentions her in his Life of Constantine.
The story as we have it from the most reliable sources was substantially expanded over time. Aurelius Victor, who completed his Book Concerning the Caesars in 361, says simply that Constantine had ordered his eldest son killed for some unknown reason.12
It is Eutropius, writing in 369 (under a regime that would not be as chary of mentioning embarrassing events of the previous dynasty), who gives much more precise information: “Constantine, through insolence born of success, changed somewhat from his pleasant mildness of spirit. First he assailed his relatives, killing his son, an excellent man, then the son of his sister, a youth of agreeable nature, and after that, his wife, and then many friends.”13 The fact that Eutropius would be able to come up with this information reveals that there was some sort of narrative tradition, now lost to us, that preserved the memory of events that were otherwise obscured. What is particularly interesting about Eutropius’ version—aside from the fact that he interposes the death of the younger Licinius between the deaths of Crispus and Fausta (a somewhat unlikely proposition considering that Licinius’ father was killed a year earlier)—is that he sees their deaths as resulting from a change in Constantine’s behavior rather than from their own misconduct. He seems unaware of the story that Fausta caused Crispus’ fall—a story that doesn’t appear in the record for another generation.
The first extant report that Fausta was responsible for the death of Crispus, and that Constantine was then convinced by a grieving Helena to kill Fausta in a hot bath, is in the anonymous Short History Concerning the Caesars, written shortly after the death of Theodosius I in 395: “Constantine, having obtained the whole Roman empire, and ruling through great good fortune in war, on the suggestion of his wife, Fausta, so they say, ordered his son Crispus to be killed. Then he killed his wife Fausta, throwing her into blazing hot baths, when his mother Helena assailed him in intense grief for her grandson.”14 It is only later that we are told that Fausta had tried to seduce Crispus, and that when she failed she persuaded Constantine to kill him. Then according to the fifth-century historian Philostorgius, Constantine found that she had committed adultery with a cursor (scout) and had her eunuchs cast her into the bathhouse. The significance of this version is the timing: while the fall of Crispus is attributed to Fausta, her own demise is put at some later time and not seen as directly linked with his. Philostorgius is a notoriously independent witness to political events of the fourth century, and we might reasonably see in his account a reflection of the very nasty stories that were circulated about Fausta after the end of the Constantinian dynasty.15 Certainly his account is not the same as that known to the anonymous epitomator, and it is not the one known to our final late witness, the sixth-century pagan Zosimus who derives what he has here from late fourth-century historian Eunapius.16 His version goes as follows:
When he arrived at Rome, full of arrogance, he found it necessary to initiate his career of impiety in his own household, for Crispus, his son who, as I have already said, was judged worthy of the rank of Caesar, came under suspicion of having an affair with his step-mother, Fausta, and was executed without regard to the laws of nature; when Helena, the mother of Constantine was upset by the violence, and unable to accept the young man’s execution, Constantine, to console her, piled a greater evil upon that evil, ordering a bath to be super-heated, and that Fausta be placed in it until she died.17
He goes on to say that Constantine converted to Christianity because he could find no one else to forgive him for the killings, and founded Constantinople because he could no longer bear to be in Rome.18 Both these observations are plainly wrong and simply confirm the impression that later authors were dealing with a sufficiently fluid tradition, stemming from lack of real information, that their accounts are fantasies.
Later stories do nothing to illuminate the situation in 326. All we can know is that Crispus was executed upon his father’s orders, and that Fausta was ousted from public life. Constantine may have been ever after profoundly sorry for what had happened. Even years later, when he felt that the imperial college could be expanded to include more than Fausta’s three sons, he did not remarry, and there is no suggestion that he contracted any other significant relationship with a woman. This doesn’t at all fit the pattern of his earlier conduct, or that of other emperors, for whom prolonged bachelorhood seems not to have been an option. Constantine’s self-imposed celibacy leaves us one final impression. However serious their quarrel, and serious it must have been, he seems never to have ceased loving his wife.