ALTHOUGH THE MOST DRAMATIC events of the year AD 326 resist definitive reconstruction, there is a great deal of evidence for Constantine’s ongoing efforts to forge a new empire-wide government. With the foundation of Constantinople, a new order began to take shape as he realized what Diocletian had long ago known: one man could not govern the empire from one place. Constantine had recently learned, to his bitter cost, that neither could it be governed by young men who did not understand their place in the greater system. Thus, while his surviving sons would be showcased as fine examples of dynastic continuity and his mother and mother-in-law would emerge as important dynastic banner carriers in the absence of an empress, the actual business of government was carried on by Constantine with highly experienced civilian and military officials.
With Crispus dead, the government of the west was now in the hands of Junius Bassus. As praetorian prefect, he filled a part of the administrative role that under Diocletian’s system had been held by a Caesar. In 331 the superior position of the prefects was recognized when Constantine issued an edict describing them as individuals “who alone are known to be representatives of our sacred self.” These men were remembered as possessing power that was virtually imperial in scope. The military duties of a Caesar would presumably have been performed by the commanders of the field armies, the magistri peditum (masters of foot) and the magistri equitum (masters of cavalry), who are attested in the records of Roman government after Constantine’s death in such a way as to make it plain that these posts existed while Constantine was on the throne.
One of Constantine’s officers, whom we encounter briefly, is the Frankish general Bonitus, who is said to have done important service in the war with Licinius, while Bonosus, a very senior officer in the 340s, and Magnentius (mentioned earlier) were busy climbing the ladder of promotion during Constantine’s lifetime. Magnentius would seize the throne thirteen years after Constantine’s death, wearing his devotion to the Christian faith on his sleeve. In the east it is likely that Ursicinus, who would command the cavalry forces along the Persian frontier for many years, was already established. He too was a westerner, as was the German Barbatio, whose career probably began before Constantine’s death since he was commanding Gallus’ guards in 350. Arbitio, who seems to have risen from very humble origins—it is alleged that he entered the imperial service as a common soldier—is described as one of Constantine’s generals. When we meet him in the 350s he is disagreeable and old; in the 360s, when he played an important role in a civil war, he is positively ancient.
On the civilian side, where the highest office remained the praetorian prefecture, officials who were making their presence felt were Aemilianus, known only through a single document that shows he was a praetorian prefect at Rome in 328; Valerius Maximus, soon to be praetorian prefect; Flavius Constantius and Evagrius, then praetorian prefects, who stayed in the east and in the Balkans while Constantine went west in 326. Then there was Flavius Ablabius, even then en route to the praetorian prefecture that he would occupy throughout the 330s; Lucius Papius Pacatianus would serve in the same office primarily in Italy, from 332 to 337; and Felix was praetorian prefect in the African provinces. Ablabius was a devout Christian, allegedly from a very humble background; while Evagrius’ birthplace, Megara, a smallish place in mainland Greece, suggests that he too was not a product of the imperial upper crust; other evidence suggests he was a pagan.1
The nature of the regime is further indicated by the list of consuls in the 330s, which is dominated by the praetorian prefects and members of the highest (western) aristocracy. The consuls for 331 were Junius Bassus and Maximus; Papius Pacatianus was consul in 332 along with a future prefect of the city named Hilarianus. Dalmatius, Constantine’s half-brother, makes an appearance in 333 (a moment of some significance for Constantine’s succession-planning) along with Zenophilus, a long-term servant of the regime best known to us now for his investigation of Donatists. Optatus, consul in 334, was a powerful courtier who had made his mark as a rhetorician, even though he was not of aristocratic birth; it was said that he owed his influence to his wife’s willingness to put herself forward to obtain favors. He was the first man to be awarded the status of patrician; an ancient term, once the designation only of an elite group within the Senate at Rome, it now came to indicate a person specially favored by the emperor. There could be no question about the background of his colleague Anicius Paulinus, a member of an immensely powerful Italian clan, who was heading for the prefecture of the city the next year. The consuls of 335 included Julius Constantius, Constantine’s other half-brother, along with Ceionius Rufius Albinus whose background was similar to that of Paulinus. The only consuls of this period about whose families we have limited or no information are Facundus (336) and Felicianus (337). We do know, though, that their colleagues were, respectively, Nepotianus, a brother-in-law of the emperor, and Titianus, a future urban then praetorian prefect. One of the striking features of the post-Licinian regime as it took shape is that the soldiers, many of whom entered the imperial service from outside the empire, appear to have been more routinely Christian than the civil officials, recruited as they were from the upper echelons of urban society. The other point that emerges is that, while marginally less uniformly a collection of Italian multi-millionaires than it had been before 324, Constantine’s inner circle remained very western.2
Although he brought that inner circle with him, he continued to reach out to his new subjects, issuing orders both ideological and practical. On January 5, 326, for instance, while at Heraclea near Constantinople, Constantine wrote to Evagrius saying that if a person caught committing a crime worthy of “prison barriers and the squalor of custody” confessed the deed so that there was a public record, that confession could be used in court to restrain a judge’s “intemperate rage.” His point was that with a confession in hand, there was no need to torture the defendant. On March 8, possibly about the time the action against Crispus was under way, Constantine wrote to Bassus telling him that lawyers who “by their criminal bargains despoil and denude those who are in need of their resources” and take on cases simply to see if they can acquire the best of their clients’ property “ought to be separated from the company of honest men and the sight of judges.” In September he wrote to Evagrius to the effect that if a man sold anything under duress to any imperial official (even a minor one), both the property and the money paid for it should be returned to the seller—and that the same penalty would hold if the official extorted the property in the name of a relative.
The next month he addressed Acilius Severus, prefect of Rome: judges should exert themselves, he told him, to protect the property of absentees so that those who were abroad for some reason need not fear that whoever was looking after their property might lack adequate instructions; Constantine granted additional time for filing recovery suits. The people covered by this law are unlikely to have been the poor and downtrodden—rather, the scenario envisioned fits better those who had been in the imperial entourage during the war years and this may reflect the tensions between east and west we find elsewhere. Likewise it reflects Constantine’s strongly held view that things like this shouldn’t happen in his empire. On a very different note, but one mirroring these same tensions, he wrote to Evagrius on August 11, that year:
Veterans to whom there is a good mind should work the fields or make money in the most respectable occupations or engage in trade. Capital punishment shall soon rise against those who neither cultivate fields nor display a useful life in worthy trades. Those through whom public quiet is disturbed ought to be stripped of all privileges so that if they should do wrong in the least way they may be subjected to all punishments.3
It is perhaps ironic in light of Constantine’s own marital situation by the end of 326 that the early months of the year involved him in a number of significant decisions concerning marriage, all evidently governed by the principle that good marriages made for a good empire and that women needed to be, to some degree, protected from nasty gossip.
The first of these rulings, on February 3, was issued to an official named Africanus, a man possibly not of sufficiently high status that the emperor would ordinarily have seen correspondence regarding him. In this case the topic is adultery, and the ruling states that with women who work in taverns, account must be taken of the role that they play there. If a woman is a tavern keeper and is charged with adultery, a judge should hear the case. If, however, the woman is a server, she should be excused from the charge because of her low status—not because she might be forced through poverty to have sex with her customers but rather because “such persons, because of the poverty of their lives are not considered worthy of the consideration of the law.” Scarcely an attitude that strikes the modern ear as enlightened, but not one likely to have bothered the average Roman. The class bias of the Roman world regarded the working poor as quite simply beyond the bounds of polite society.4
Of the next three surviving rulings of 326, one is an edict and the other two are embedded in correspondence with Evagrius. All of them raise the issue of class in the context of sexual misconduct and, thus, behavior that Constantine expected of people he sees as members of the class of persons who should set an example of reputable behavior for others to follow. The first of these documents is an edict, issued on April 4, taking on what seems to have been the not uncommon practice of “abduction marriage.” Today it is a complex practice that in some cultures might be employed by consenting adults trying to avoid the economic penalties—dowry for the woman, bride price for the male—of traditional marriage customs; alternatively, it could be an act of extreme violence to compel a woman into a relationship she does not want. In Constantine’s view the practice was wholly wrong no matter what anyone wished. In his view, even if the girl were to acquiesce in her abduction, her wishes should not be considered and she should be punished along with her abductor. If the “abduction” turned out to be elopement, it might be assumed that the girl had made the necessary arrangements through her nurse. In that case, “punishment shall first threaten the nurse whose service is proved to be detestable and whose discourse was bought so that her mouth and throat, which brought forth nefarious encouragements, will be blocked with the ingestion of molten lead.” Even if the case was genuinely one of forcible abduction that the girl had tried to resist, doing “everything to protect herself with every effort and seeking the aid of neighbors,” she would be punished by disinheritance. Slaves who produced information about such goings-on were to be rewarded, and parents who refused to prosecute were to be exiled. The punishment for the abductor, for any assistants, and, by implication, an unresisting abductee, was to be burned at the stake.
To judge from the envisaged participants in the cases just outlined—nurses, thugs, slaves, and suchlike—it is clear that Constantine was looking at instances involving members of the “respectable classes” and that he was demanding what he considered “respectable conduct” from them, which is probably why girls, who might more reasonably be seen as victims, were punished; he seemed to think that “respectable girls” did not get themselves into situations where they could be abducted. Insofar as Constantine might see these situations as typically involving the invasion of upper-class “territory” by the lower class, the ruling is in keeping with his wish to keep members of the different social classes in their places. In any event, members of the lower classes (and any others, for that matter) wishing to avoid dowries or bride prices could, under Roman law, simply cohabit for a year and a day to be recognized as a married couple. Interestingly as well, while some might be able to appeal to the biblical precedent whereby the “children of Benjamin” in the Book of Judges stole the “daughters of Shiloh,” or the Roman story of the rape of the Sabine women in which Romulus, the founder of the city, had stocked his heavily male environment with women stolen from his neighbors at a festival, Constantine would have none of it.
When it came to governing the empire, what mattered to Constantine was reputable tradition, not the Bible. The view of “the ancients” that girls (by which he plainly meant teenagers) could not give testimony in court or conduct a lawsuit supported his view that even if a girl claimed that she was happy with the outcome of the abduction, she should be punished.5 Since the victims of bride-kidnapping were then, as now, overwhelmingly teenagers, the effort to end the practice protected their interests by making it clear that they should resist any arrangement that was not completely above-board, or so Constantine appears to have thought. If so, it is consistent with his earlier measure on the return of betrothal presents, and with another one, issued to Bassus three days later, in which he concerns himself with the welfare of upper-class girls who might be coerced into having sex with their guardians or tutors when they wished to marry. In such a case, he pointed out that when a girl comes of age and wishes to marry, her tutor is responsible for “determining that her virginity is intact.” Clearly, some tutors were willing to make this declaration if the girl had lost her virginity to them. Constantine noted that a man like that should be deported to an island and his property confiscated, a punishment he regarded as moderate since elsewhere he suggested that this kind of person should be burned at the stake. That, however, was not a typical punishment for people of high status, which by definition included tutors.6
The subject of adultery cropped up again in April 326 when Constantine wrote to Evagrius on the subject. He noted that since adultery as it now stood was a public crime (a legacy of Augustan marriage legislation), anyone who wished to do so could bring a charge. From now on, however, the right of denunciation should no longer be permitted to “those wishing to defile marriages”: in future, only “the nearest and closest kin”—in particular the father, the cousin, and especially the brother—“whom truth or anger drives to accusation” could bring a charge. Most of all, he said, it was up to the husband “to be the avenger of the marital couch, for the ancient emperors in the past granted to him the right to accuse on the grounds of suspicion and not to be constrained within a certain period of declaration.” By excluding outsiders from bringing accusations of adultery, Constantine again appears to be protecting the interests of the “polite classes” from outsiders.7 The new rule is also consistent with Constantine’s dislike of nasty gossip.
That June Constantine issued another edict on the subject, from which only one bit survives: “that no one shall be permitted to have a concubine while married.” This refers to the situation in which a man of some standing entered into a long-term relationship with a woman of lower status. This was typical of men on either side of marriage, the most famous instance being Bishop Augustine of Hippo, who had an extended relationship with a concubine before his conversion. Older men tended to enter into such relationships after divorce or the death of their spouse when they didn’t want any more heirs. With younger men it was because they wanted sex and companionship before marriage. Constantine’s aim here is most likely to discourage people from maintaining any ongoing relationships with lower-status women when they marry.8
From the surviving marriage legislation in April 326 we can deduce why the compilers of the Theodosian Code a century later did not feel it necessary to include post-Constantinian texts in their work. The documents produced during Constantine’s time were regarded as good enough to determine later practice, which was what that emperor intended. The concentration of rulings, evocative of moments such as Hadrian’s ruling on the entertainment industry 200 years earlier, may also suggest that Constantine decided this was the time to issue a set of his own rules. It is perhaps significant that the primary beneficiaries of his new policies were envisioned as young girls or women of good families, while the ruling on concubines demonstrates an interest in the welfare of wives since the ban would enable them to divorce their spouses and retrieve their dowries. By moving to assist those who were most disadvantaged under current law, Constantine may have been trying to advertise his interest in fair deals for all—or at least for those who were regarded as existing in the eyes of the law.
Just as his regime diverged from Licinius’ on retirement plans for soldiers, it also deviated concerning other members of the imperial service. Now that a new court was being established, it was important that new rules be established that would apply to imperial service in all parts of the empire. We find the first sign that something was brewing in a couple of rescripts issued the previous year. In one, sent to Valerius Maximus in July 325 and dealing with those reappointed to official positions, Constantine asks him to make sure that these people are not evading their curial duties, while also asserting that those already approved for imperial service are protected by their oaths and by patronage.
Three months later he decreed that people who deserted their town councils for imperial service without having obtained a moderately senior rank should be compelled to carry out their municipal duties. In April 326 he wrote to Constantius that “since the most unjust tyrant” (Licinius) had ruled that magisterial assistants in the imperial service who had earned an honorable discharge were subject to those same municipal services, he should make sure that the practice stopped. In May he wrote to Evagrius that “town councils are being deserted by those who are linked to them by birth” and that places in the imperial service were being obtained through patronage: he wished all councils to know that if these deserters were caught, provided they had spent less than twenty years in the imperial service, they would be recalled to fulfill their duties. Given that Evagrius, like Constantius, was operating in the east, the problem was plainly to do with people employed under Licinius and Maximinus.
In case Constantine’s efforts to sort these matters out should be seen to threaten the status of members of his entourage, he issued about now a ruling that any who had acquired property were allowed to keep it since they had without doubt earned it: after all, “they are not strangers to the dust and labor of the camps who accompany our standards, who are always present at our official acts, and whom the difficulties of expeditions and the multiplicity of journeys exercise even though they are intent on their erudite studies.”9
Despite the turmoil in his personal life, Constantine continued to do his job as he saw fit, to communicate his values to his subordinates, and to try to ensure what, by his lights, was decent government for his people. The instability within the palace is balanced by stability among the senior officers of the administration who ensured that the complex transition from a divided to a united empire continued to run as smoothly as possible. Whatever he felt in private, Constantine tried to show his public the face of an emperor who knew his job.