AS THE YEAR 337 opened, Constantine’s preparations were nearly complete. He was at Constantinople, along with his friend and loyal henchman Evagrius, and would be there until the early spring. Gaius Annius Tiberianus, who had been climbing the administrative ranks for some time—we first meet him as an official in Africa during the mid-320s—was praetorian prefect in Gaul; also living in Gaul was Constantine, Constantine and Fausta’s eldest son, now in his early twenties. In Africa a man called Gregorius now held the prefecture long occupied by Felix, Maximus was in Illyricum with Dalmatius, and Ablabius accompanied Constantius at Antioch.1 The Christian community in Persia, especially those living in present-day Iraq, appears to have heard a rumor that the Roman emperor was coming. Sapor was mustering his forces.
Constantine had made sure that, should he not survive, the plan of succession was clearly laid out. There would again be four emperors, each with an experienced adviser as his prefect to ensure an orderly transfer of power. The man with whom he now chose to spend his time was Evagrius, and this attention may have lent him—by far the most senior of the prefects—a certain authority over the others. In Constantinople, the mausoleum built for Constantine himself was finished, though at this point, the emperor had no inkling how very soon he would be resting within it.
Sometime around Easter (April 3, in that year), a Persian embassy had appeared in Constantinople, which the emperor had promptly dismissed. The moment for diplomacy was long past.
Shortly after leaving the city Constantine fell seriously ill. Alarmed, his entourage persuaded him to make a detour to the baths of Pythia Therma, near Helenopolis. His condition worsened. He proceeded to Helenopolis where he worshipped at the shrine of the martyr Lucian, to whom his mother had been devoted, and from there to the environs of Nicomedia. He was now fading fast, and, according to Eusebius, it was at this point that he summoned an assembly of bishops, telling them that although he had wished to be baptized in the waters of the Jordan like Christ himself, that was no longer possible:
God who knows what is good for us judges us worthy of these things here and now. So let there be no delay. If the Lord of life and death should wish us to live again here, even so it is once and for all decided that I am hereafter numbered among the people of God, and that I meet and join in the prayers with them all together. I shall now set for myself rules of life which befit God.2
Constantine spent the last six days of his life at Achyron, an imperial estate a little way from Nicomedia. As he felt death approaching, Eusebius of Nicomedia baptized him. No members of his immediate family were present, but he was surrounded by the vast extended family with which he had spent so much of his life, the imperial court. It is hard to imagine that Evagrius was not in the room when he died; and the presence of both the Christian bishop and the pagan prefect at his deathbed—if they were both there—expressed Constantine’s dual aim during the last several decades of his life: namely, to worship the god who brought him victory and to fulfill his destiny as emperor in a way to equal, even exceed, the achievements of those who had gone before him.
Around noon, on May 22, 337, Constantine breathed his last.