Arch of Constantine

The Arch of Constantine

A gilded coffin, draped in purple silk, stood in the center of the audience chamber. Around the casket, hundreds of candles sent streamers of smoke heavenward, and dozens of courtiers did their level best to weep. With a rustle of leather and the rasp of hobnails, a young man in gilded armor led a small troop of palace bodyguards into the room. Reflections gliding over the burnished marble floor, the soldiers slid carrying poles through the coffin’s base, and lifted it with creaking armor and infinite ceremony.

Then, led by the golden-armored prince, they processed through the door and into the sunlit courtyard. The courtiers, following the coffin, adjusted their cloaks; the morning, chilled by a breeze off the Sea of Marmora, was cool for June.

Spear tips glittered and togas fluttered in the breeze as the procession made its unwieldy way down the colonnaded central avenue of Constantinople. It halted before the gleaming façade of the recently-completed Church of the Holy Apostles. The honor guard was dismissed, and replaced by a group of bishops in black vestments, who carried the coffin into the church.

There, beneath a gilded ceiling, the coffin was lifted onto a candle-studded dais before the altar. The service commenced; and after the Archbishop Alexander had delivered a long eulogy praising the wisdom and piety of the dead emperor, the coffin was carried into a circular mausoleum adjoining the church.

In the echoing interior, where clerestory windows checkered the marble floor with light, a colossal porphyry sarcophagus waited. Six marble cenotaphs carved with the names of the Apostles were arrayed among the columns on either side. A golden cross glittered in the cupola. The emperor’s coffin was lowered into the sarcophagus; the two-ton lid was levered shut; and so, sometime in the first week of June, AD 337, Flavius Valerius Constantinus, emperor of the Romans and defender of the Christian faith, was laid to rest.

When Constantine had been proclaimed emperor thirty years before, perhaps 10% of the Roman Empire’s population was Christian. Most Christians then lived in the cities of the Greek-speaking eastern provinces, where – by imperial edict – they were being savagely persecuted. Few could have imagined that the Roman Empire would be governed by a Christian within a few years, or that a majority of the Empire’s population would convert within the century.

To understand Constantine’s career and the emergence of a Christian Roman Empire, we need to briefly survey what came before: polytheism, and the crisis of the third century.

Before the spread of Christianity, most inhabitants of the Roman Empire practiced religions that were polytheistic and essentially local in character. There were a few common points of reference, most notably the Greco-Roman Pantheon (that is, Jupiter and friends), and the imperial cult. But every city and village had its own temples, traditions, and gods. Even the Roman state religion was really just a city cult blown up to gargantuan proportions. Although religion permeated daily life, it tended to be conceptualized less as a source of universalizing ethical codes than in terms of time-honored rituals and lived practice.

There were of course exceptions to these bald generalizations. Certain cults – most famously, the Eleusinian Mysteries of Demeter and Kore – appealed to men and women from across the Mediterranean, promising a blessed afterlife alien to most local traditions. New proselytizing religions like Mithraism and Manicheism, moreover, spread widely through the Empire, creating communities that bridged traditional regional and social divides.

The most prominent outlier was Judaism. The Romans always regarded Jewish monotheism as something of a curiosity; but it was never persecuted, even after the Roman-Jewish Wars. The historical heart of Judaism was of course in Palestine; but by the time of the Roman conquest, large Jewish communities existed in virtually every sizeable city in the eastern Mediterranean. Rome itself had no fewer than eleven synagogues. The Jews of the Diaspora spoke Greek as their first language, and often participated fully in the political and cultural life of their polytheistic neighbors. In fact, considerable numbers of polytheists, intrigued by the ethical dimension of Judaism, either converted outright or affiliated themselves with the synagogues as God-fearers. In was in this milieu that Christianity first spread.

Initially, Christianity was regarded by the Roman government – and indeed by many Christians – as a sect of Judaism. By the early second century, however, it was clear that Christianity was a distinctive, and rapidly growing, religion. A few governors and city councils organized regional suppressions of the church in the ensuing decades; but the first general persecution did not take place until the mid-third century, when the emperor Decius ordered every Roman citizen to offer sacrifice for the safety of the Empire.

Decius took this unprecedented step in response to the crises of the mid-third century. Since the end of the Severan Dynasty twenty years before, the Empire had lurched from disaster to disaster: emperor after emperor had been assassinated, frontier after frontier had collapsed, and the value of the currency had spiraled ever downward.

With the benefit of hindsight, we can see that this crisis originated in a failure of central authority. Since no emperor had the time, luck, or talent to establish a lasting dynasty, the only way to seize and hold power was to buy the loyalty of the troops with ever-higher pay – a policy that destroyed both the prestige of the emperorship and the value of the currency.

The situation was exacerbated by invasion on multiple fronts. First, in the 220s, the Parthian Arsacid Dynasty – Rome’s punching bag for centuries – was replaced by the much more aggressive and efficient Sassanid Dynasty, which invaded and briefly conquered the provinces of Mesopotamia and Syria. Although the Romans wrested back their lost territory, the Sassanids remained a thorn in the Empire’s side. In the same years as the Sassanid incursion into Syria, a new threat – the Goths – appeared on the Danube frontier. This tribal confederacy exploited Roman disarray to raid deeply into the Balkans, reducing vast tracks of the frontier provinces to a smoldering wasteland.

To counter the enemies that beset the Empire on every side, emperors gave increasing authority to provincial governors. Though often successful in the short run, this policy sometimes encouraged the most powerful and efficient governors to declare themselves emperor.

The Roman Empire, in short, was tottering in the mid-third century, and Decius thought that only a return to ancestral tradition and worship could save it. He never imagined that the Christians – by now a sizeable minority in many eastern cities – would refuse to sacrifice on religious grounds. But on encountering resistance, he ordered provincial governors to enforce the decree. Some did so zealously, executing Christians who refused to sacrifice as traitors to the Empire. Fortunately for the church, however, the persecution was short-lived; Decius marched against the Goths and, at the catastrophic Battle of Abritus, was trapped in a swamp and killed along with most of his army.

The crisis deepened in the following decades. The Goths returned, ravaging cities in Greece and Asia Minor; the Sassanids captured Antioch, the third city of the Empire; and for years, nearly half the provinces were in the hands of rebel governors.

From the 270s onward, however, disaster was averted by a series of tough and competent soldier-emperors. The first of these, Aurelian, reunited the Empire, drove back the invaders on all sides, and built the great wall that still encircles Rome.

The greatest of the reformers, however, was Diocletian, who reigned from 284 to 305. Diocletian was a superb organizer. To increase revenue, he regularized taxation, sidestepping the ongoing problem of inflation by allowing payments in kind. To ensure effective administration, he subdivided the provinces and greatly enlarged the bureaucracy. And to end the civil wars and succession crises that had troubled the Empire for so many years, he created the Tetrarchy, a college of four emperors. In this system, the two senior emperors, with the title of Augustus, would make the two junior emperors – or Caesars – their heirs; when a senior emperor died or retired, a junior emperor would take his place, and select a trusted comrade as the new junior emperor.

As his co-emperors, Diocletian chose three experienced fellow-generals: Maximian, Galerius, and Constantius. Appointing himself senior emperor of the east, he made Maximian senior emperor of the west. Galerius served as Diocletian’s junior emperor, and Constantius as Maximian’s. Each of the tetrarchs was made responsible for a cluster of provinces, and based in a city near a troubled frontier – a policy that ensured constant surveillance of Rome’s enemies.

Having stabilized the frontiers and regularized the imperial succession, Diocletian set out to promote the unity and loyalty of his subjects. Like most Romans, he understood moral decline as the fundamental cause of the Empire’s woes; and as a staunch traditionalist, he sought to use the ancient state cults of the Roman religion as a means of rectifying the problem. On coins and in rituals, he associated himself with Jupiter, king of the gods. He promoted the restoration of ancient temples and festivals. He ordered the leaders of the Manicheans – a dualistic religion that originated in Persia – to be burned alive atop their scriptures. And he began to consider how he might eradicate the greatest threat to traditional religion: the rapidly-growing Christian church.

Early in 303, Diocletian and his co-emperors published an edict ordering all churches to be destroyed, all Christian scriptures to be collected and burnt, and all Christian meetings to cease. Other edicts soon followed, imprisoning all clergy and ordering every inhabitant of the Empire to sacrifice to Jupiter. The severity with which these measures were implemented varied; Constantius, who governed the far western provinces, seems to have done no more than tear down a few churches. Diocletian and Galerius, on the other hand, ordered their governors to execute hundreds of defiant Christians.

In the eastern provinces, the Persecution continued for eight years, causing mass confusion and apostasy among the Christian faithful. It failed, however, to destroy the church, for several reasons. Most obviously, it created martyrs, whose deaths – described and praised by the surviving priests – inspired Christians to risk the ultimate penalty. Equally important was the organization of the church. Every city with a substantial Christian community had a bishop – a prelate who oversaw all local priests, churches, and charities. By the time of the Great Persecution, a network of bishops extended across the Mediterranean; and though many eastern bishops were executed or driven from their posts, the hierarchy did not collapse, and managed to maintain a degree of order.

But perhaps the most important factor underlying the church’s survival was the simple inconsistency of the persecution. The western tetrarchs never showed much enthusiasm for it; and a succession crisis would soon bring a patron of Christianity to the imperial throne.

In the spring of 304, Diocletian, now old and sick, took the unprecedented step of declaring that he and Maximian would retire the following year, and be succeeded as senior emperors by Galerius and Constantius. It was further announced that Severus and Maximinus, two experienced generals, would become the new junior emperors. The problem with this arrangement was that two of the tetrarchs – Constantius and Maximian – had adult sons who had been groomed for years to succeed their fathers. Shortly after Diocletian’s abdication, these sons – Constantine and Maxentius – would seize power for themselves, and bring about the end of the tetrarchy.

Constantine had been born in 272, when his father Constantius was still an obscure officer in the imperial bodyguard. Once Constantius was promoted to the imperial office, Constantine was sent to Diocletian’s court in Nicomedia, where he was tutored by eminent scholars and accompanied Diocletian and Galerius on campaigns against the Persians. After Diocletian abdicated, Constantine rejoined his father, who was then campaigning in northern Britain. The following year, when Constantius suddenly died, his army proclaimed Constantine their new emperor.

Maxentius, Maximian’s son, was born a few years after Constantine. Raised in the imperial court at Milan, he was groomed to succeed his father, but – like Constantine – was passed over in Diocletian’s succession plans. In 306, following the precedent set by Constantine a few months earlier, he was declared emperor in Rome.

For the remainder of the decade, Constantine governed Britain, Spain, and Gaul, and Maxentius ruled Italy and North Africa. At first, relations between the two were amicable, not least because Constantine had married Maxentius’ sister. But tensions gradually mounted. Neither man was content with his share of the Empire, and each stood to benefit from the other’s removal. And so, in 311, Maxentius declared war on Constantine.

Constantine responded by invading Italy the following spring. With a relatively small army – he probably only had about 30,000 men – he crossed the Alps, scattered the forces guarding the cities of northern Italy, and marched on Rome. Maxentius sallied forth to meet him, and the emperors met at the Milvian Bridge just north of Rome.

Our two sources for what happened next, both produced decades later by Christian authors, present different accounts. According to one author, Constantine was instructed in a dream the night before the battle to set a Christian emblem on his soldiers’ shields. The other author reports that Constantine experienced a vision of the cross while marching, which was explained in a dream the following night. It is clear, in any case, that Constantine instructed his soldiers to mark their shields with a Christian emblem – either a cross or the Christogram, a symbol consisting of the superimposed letters chi (which looks an ) and rho (which looks like a ) – the first two letters of χριστός (Christ in Greek).

The following day, under the sign of the cross, Constantine won a resounding victory over Maxentius. He did not become a Christian on that day, or indeed for some time afterward; but the victory at the Milivan Bridge started Constantine along his path to patronage of, and eventual membership in, the church. Within a few months, he would issue the famous Edict of Milan, which proclaimed full toleration of the Christian faith and the restoration of all Church property seized in the Great Persecution; and within a few years, he would identify himself as a Christian.

Immediately after his victory, Constantine entered Rome in triumph, and was acclaimed by the Senate. He spent the next three years in the city, where he permanently disbanded the Praetorian Guard, completed Maxentius’ public works, and began a massive program of church building. In 313, he tore down the barracks of Maxentius’ cavalry guards, gave the land to the Bishop of Rome, and began building the Church of St. John Lateran. A few years later, he financed the construction of the first St. Peter’s Basilica over the traditional site of the Apostle’s tomb.

In 315, the final year of Constantine’s residence in Rome, a monumental arch was dedicated to commemorate his defeat of Maxentius and liberation of Rome. Though nominally erected by the Senate, the arch’s construction was almost certainly orchestrated by Constantine himself, and so provides a unique glimpse into the emperor’s public image at a crucial point in his career.

The most distinctive feature of the Arch of Constantine is its extensive use of spolia – that is, sculptures and other elements taken from older monuments. To some degree, this was a matter of convenience; the arch was built quickly, and there was plenty of material from decommissioned monuments lying in storage. The chief motivation for the inclusion of spolia, however, seems to have been to associate Constantine with the great emperors of the past. The statues and relief panels re-used in the arch came from monuments constructed by Trajan, Hadrian, and Marcus Aurelius – three of Rome’s greatest rulers. Although all of the emperors in the re-used pieces were re-carved to resemble Constantine, no attempt was made to disguise the contrast between their style and that of the cruder new reliefs beneath them.

The spolia of Constantine’s Arch may have been intended to offset the impression made by the emperor’s radical religious policies. Rome would not be a majority Christian city until at least the late fourth century, and the Senatorial aristocracy was resolutely pagan for decades longer. The arch, accordingly, makes no explicit reference to Christianity. Even the inscription is ambiguous. Constantine, it says, gained victory over Maxentius “instinctu divinitatis” (by the inspiration of the divine) – without clarifying which god or gods was doing all the inspiring.

In 315, Constantine left Rome, and would only return once in the remaining twenty-two years of his reign. Over the next decade, he would defeat Licinius, his sole remaining rival, and become the first man in forty years to govern the entire Roman Empire. He brought Diocletian’s military and financial reforms to their logical conclusions, establishing highly-mobile field armies and a stable gold currency. He also became increasingly involved in the theology and unity of the Christian church.

By the 320s, Constantine was both a committed Christian and an emperor. He never saw any contradictions between these roles: as a Christian, he wanted his faith to thrive; as an emperor, he sought to use Christianity as a language of power and an instrument of rule. Constantine had always hoped that Christianity would be a source of unity and loyalty to the Empire; but he underestimated the power of the theological disagreements that had torn the fourth-century church in rival factions. The greatest of these controversies was the Arian Heresy.

Briefly, most Christians believed that the Trinity – the three persons of God: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit – were co-ordinate and co-eternal aspects of the same being. The Arians, on the other hand, maintained that Jesus was created by and subordinate to the Father. In the fourth century, them’s were fightin’ words, and the ensuing controversy nearly destroyed the church.

To end the crisis, Constantine called the Council of Nicaea – the first ecumenical (that is, universal) council of the Church. There, under the emperor’s direction, three hundred bishops declared that the father and the son were equal – and a precedent was established for the coordination of church and state authority.

Equally pivotal for Roman history was Constantine’s establishment of Constantinople – a new, Christian Rome on the Bosporus. In the last years of his reign, this was his capital.

It was near Constantinople that Constantine was finally baptized at age 65. Many early Christians deferred baptism until the end of their lives; and Constantine was no exception. Feeling a serious illness overtaking him, he summoned bishops from the surrounding cities, and asked them to perform the ritual.

After confessing his sins, the old emperor turned to the west, and formally renounced Satan and his all works; then, turning to the east, he pledged his allegiance to Christ. He removed his purple robes, and was anointed with oil. Then, standing waist-deep in the baptismal pool, he nodded to the officiating bishop, who asked “Do you believe in God, the father almighty?” The emperor replied, “I believe,” and allowed the bishop to immerse his head in the water. The bishop asked “Do you believe in Jesus Christ his son?” Again the emperor replied that he believed, and was immersed. “And do you believe in the Holy Spirit?” The emperor again affirmed that he did, and was immersed a third time. When he emerged from the pool, sacred chrism was poured over his head, and he was, at last, formally received into the church. He clothed himself in pure white versions of the imperial vestments, and declared himself at peace. A few days later, during the festival of Pentacost, he died.

When the news reached Rome, a painting was hung in the Senate house, showing the emperor’s entry into heaven. The God or gods to whom that heaven belonged, however, were left diplomatically unclear.