Naspeuringen van Paul Theelen: Helios and the Emperor/THE POLITICS OF MEMORY AND VISUAL POLITICS/Constantinople, history and monuments/The Statuary-Art-Gathering Policy

Helios and the Emperor in the Late Antique THE POLITICS OF MEMORY AND VISUAL POLITICS: Constantinople, history and monuments The Statuary-Art-Gathering Policy of the Early Peloponnese THE POLITICS OF MEMORY Byzantine Emperors, 4th–5th Centuries. COMPARING THE SELF-REPRESENTATIONS OF SARAH E. BASSETT GEORGIOS DELIGIANNAKIS CONSTANTINE AND AUGUSTUS Professor Liliana Simeonova Located on a hilly peninsula at the confluence of the waters of the (Institute of Balkan Studies & Thracology at the Bulgarian Academy This paper discusses a badly damaged over-life-sized marble head Mariana Bodnaruk Golden Horn, the Sea of Marmora, and the Bosphorus, of Sciences) with radiate headgear found in the Roman theater of Gytheum. It Constantinople covered an area of approximately 14 sq km at its probably belonged to a public statue or shield monument of the god Augustus primus primus est huius auctor imperii, largest extent and was, by dint of its lavish urban infrastructure, In Late Antiquity, public spaces and monuments played an important Helios and is thought to be late antique. It is here argued that this et in eius nomen omnes velut quadam adoptione among the most impressive cities of the later Roman world. This role in the life of cities. Statues, reliefs, honorific columns, arches monument was in fact intended to pay honor to the ruling emperor, aut iure hereditario succedimus. entry outlines the city’s historical fortunes and urban development and every other type of public monument added an element of who was associated with the god Helios. It is also suggested that the The first Augustus was the first founder of from the period of its initial settlement as a Greek colonial outpost in embellishment to the city and gave character and meaning to place. association of the new Flavian dynasty with the solar god represents this empire, and to his name we all succeed, the seventh century BCE through its Late Antique heyday in the Also, as political, social and cultural arenas, public spaces with their a particular way by which the people of Greece, among other either by some form of adoption or by sixth and early seventh centuries CE. Three major phases, each design played a role in the staging of important events in public life. provincials, chose to express their loyalty to the emperor along hereditary claim. independently named, define this development: Because, in Late Antiquity, both pagans and Christians were raised traditional religious lines. (Scriptores Historiae Augustae, Alexander Severus 10.4) Byzantion (seventh century BCE to second century CE), Colonia in an urban environment that was filled with visual imagery, late Antonina (second to fourth century CE) and, finally, New Rome or antique urbanism focused on the public display of art, which was as Description and Identification I begin with political history. To understand what happened after the Constantinople (fourth to seventh century CE). much a part of the classical legacy as an efficient means of The head is carved of local beige marble, with a height of 0.52 Battle of Milvian Bridge on 28 October 312 CE and how the new Known formally as Istanbul from 1930, the city has been propaganda, especially as regarded the ruler’s connection to his meters and a width of 0.37 meters. It has a strong frontal rendering political order of theempire was constituted I start with the question: continuously inhabited since its initial foundation. Construction in people and the assertion of the established order. and cursorily curved features. It may be reworked from a previous What does Constantinian artsay about imperial politics in the the later Middle Ages together with development as the Ottoman When Constantine the Great (306-337) decided to move his capital piece (Figs. 1–5). It now appears severely damaged due to later re- aftermath of the year 312 CE? This article addresses this question at imperial capital from 1453 and the explosivegrowth ofmodern to the East, he found a city the location of which was both use; the back side is hollowed out. It seems that the head was later the intersection of art, politics, and ideology, comparing Istanbul in the last fifty years means that, apart from scattered strategically important and spectacular. But in an imperial capital it placed upside-down and the newly carved concavity used as a Constantine’s visual self-representation with that of the first monuments, very little of the ancient city survives. Reconstruction of would have been necessary for public Roman ritual to continue, with fountain urn. It features large almond-shaped eyes, wide-open. emperor, Augustus. The visual image Constantine created its earliest development therefore depends largely on textual sources. all its trappings. Therefore, the reconstruction and enlargement of the Boldly emphasized eyelids frame the eyeballs. The damaged nose is incorporated a variegated mixture of messages that echoed These sources include a variety of genres, among them histories and city of Byzantium required more than simple urban planning: to wedge-shaped and crudely modelled. The mouth simply appears as a contemporary trends in the equally complex eulogistic writing. traveler reports, and range in date from the fourth through the make the city meet the requirements of a capital architects and urban horizontal sharpcut across thickly modeled lips. The ears are It all began with the Constantinian Arch in Rome. Constantine had sixteenth centuries. [...] planners undertook the design of particular spaces and structures. rendered by curved incisions invery low relief. The hair projecting in just overcome the army of the usurper Maxentius and captured The very novelty of the capital allowed the fourth- and fifth-century front of the forehead is a compact mass, defined against the flesh by Rome. Maxentius died disgracefully and his head was paraded in CONSTANTINOPLE (FOURTH TO SEVENTH CENTURIES) emperors freedom in the crafting of public ritual sites, as a setting for a continuous chisel-line above the forehead. The hair is rendered in a triumphal procession exhibited to the populace of Rome, his military In 324, after the defeat of his last major rival to the imperial throne, the imperial ceremonial. cursory way as being thick and long and brushed back-wards on all forces – the equites singulares and Praetorian Guard – were his co-emperor Licinius, Constantine I (305–337) occupied the site And, in order to give the capital a distinct identity of its own, sides of the head; superficially incised chisel lines on the left and dissolved, and his memory was obliterated. In the exultation of of Colonia Antonina and re-founded the city as New Rome. A formal Constantine and his successors imported antique statuary, relics right temple can be discerned; below the left ear the head is broken victory, the time was ripe for Constantinian revenge, yet the Roman dedication on 11 May 330 reconfirmed this name; however, by the and sacred objects. The import and re-use of classical sculpture off. Seven rectangular mortises (0.02 m×0.03 m) are still visible, senators, the very aristocrats who had supported Maxentius, retained end of the century the city was established both in popular and enabled Constantinople to develop a civic identity – the identity of a chiseled above the hairline for the support of metal inserts. Their their offices. Like young Octavian, who chose to exercise the politics official nomenclature as Constantinople. New Rome. Also, in the course of time, the organi- number, size, and near rectangular shape suggest that these deep of clementia towards supporters of Mark Antony after his Actian The foundation of Constantinople created a new seat of imperial zation of religious life in Constantinople, the setting and shaping of mortises were most probably intended for the insertion of metal rays. victory, Constantine sought to maintain good relations with the most government. This action was consistent with the Tetrarchic policy of the processional liturgy and the import of relics and Christian sacred Near the center of the cranium, a thin metal spike is still preserved. If influential members among the senatorial aristocrats. At that time he decentralization that had established imperial residences in such objects helped the city become one of the most this is a feature of the head and not a later addition, it may be a appeared to be a glorious winner over the common enemy and as major cities of the empire as Trier, Thessalonike, and Nicomedia. important spiritual centers of Christendom – a New Jerusalem. dowel for the attachment of a separate piece of stone to complete the such received the triumph traditionally granted by the senate. However, unlike these earlier residences, and as the name New In other words, Constantine the Great set in motion the process by top of the head. The head gives the impression that it was left What is more, around 315 CE the emperor also received a Rome suggests, Constantine’s foundation probably was intended to which, in the space of a century or two, Constantinople would unfinished. Yet the sockets for metal rays and the metal spike on the commemorative monument from the senate, the triumphal Arch; supersede the functions of the capital at Rome. become the capital of the civilized world. top of the head leave little doubt that this piece, together with the rest Constantine’s defeat of his enemy was therefore put in the context of This intent was also borne out by such administrative choices as the For centuries to come, Constantinople boasted a collection of antique of the monument of which itpresumably was a part, had been placed previous famous imperial victories. establishment of a Constantinopolitan Senate and the institution of statuary and sacred objects that was unrivaled by any city in the on display in antiquity. Having liberated Rome from the rule of a tyrant, in terms legislation designed to attract the Roman aristocracy to the city. medieval world. One of the chroniclers of the Fourth Crusade Despite its bad condition, the characteristic headgear identifies this reminiscent of the claims of Augustus expressed in the Res Gestae That the project was a success is indicated not only by the city’s (1204), Robert de Clary, noted that "two-thirds of all the wealth of as animage of the god Helios. Its style and technique places it three and a half centuries earlier, Constantine evoked his ideological increasingly important role in government and administration over the world was in Constantinople, and … the other third was chronologically afterthe collapse of the provincial sculpture "father", the founder of the empire Octavian, the future Augustus, the course of the fourth century, but also by the growth in its scattered throughout the world". workshops in Late Antiquity, which canbe roughly placed after the had received a triumphal arch from the senate in the Roman Forum population. Estimates suggest a population of around twenty Largely composed of pre-fourth-century antiquities, 270s. Thereafter only a few workshops, located mostly in provincial about 29 BCE, after the naval victory over Mark Antony and thousand at the time of its foundation; Constantinian arrangements Constantinople’s classical art collection was created by bringing capitals or big cities, were able to produce high-quality portrait Cleopatra. The Roman revolution of Augustus was paralleled in the for provisioning from the Egyptian grain supply imply that the statuary from all parts of the Empire to the new capital: by order of sculpture for the needs of local elites and for representatives of the Roman revolution of Constantine: An empire at peace with itself was emperor projected growth to approximately eighty thousand. the emperors pagan temples, public buildings and town squares were imperial government. The rendering of the frontal, bulging eyes, founded on the forgetting of civil conflict. A massive rebuilding campaign accompanied this expansion. At its being stripped off of their best statues, reliefs, columns and every awkwardly placed on the face, appears similar to the style of a life- Constantine reigned longer then any of the emperors had since the foundation Constantine extended the city limit west and with it the other type of ornamentation. sized portrait head made of local marble and found in the theater of forty-five years of Augustus, who had created the imperial system fortifications: a new land defense was built from the Golden Horn to Under Constantine I and his immediate successors, the classical- Sparta. In the case of the Spartan head, which probably portrayed a three centuries earlier. For twenty-three of the thirty years of his the Sea of Marmara, and the existing sea-walls were extended to sculpture gatherings spread throughout Constantinople’s public local dignitary or a provincial governor, the pupils of the eyes are reign, Constantine ruled as a Christian, the first ever to sit in meet this western perimeter. In the city itself activity centered on the spaces. When, in the late fourth and early fifth centuries, the areas of drilled. Its excavators suggested a date close to the last phase of the Augustus’ place. Resembling the first Roman emperor, Constantine completion and refurbishing of the Severan projects that had been the Theodosian enlargements were incorporated into the city, in the theater, about 375–400 (Fig. 6). Moreover, two late antique statues launched an enormous urban building program and spread imperial abandoned in the third century. An imposing monumental core grew new urban spaces additional ensembles of antique statuary were of similar technique and style, one an imperial portrait (probably images all over the empire. up around the armature of colonnaded streets. Thus, the Tetrastoon formed. Constantine I), from an urban mansion in Messene can be Evoking a comparative perspective, Constantinian art can be was enlarged and renamed the Augusteion in honor of Constantine’s The policy of antique-statuary-gathering was continued under the approximately dated on archaeological grounds to no later than assessed on a large scale in its relation to earlier imperial imagery, mother, Helena Augusta, and the Hippodrome and the Baths of fifth-century emperors until the habit of transporting classical art to 360/70. Based on its late antique style and crude technique, the apart from specifically Christian affiliations. However, approaching Zeuxippos, both apparently operational in structural terms, were Constantinople altogether died out in the reign of Justinian the Great Gytheum head could be dated to any period from the late third Constantinian visual politics, the samples of approximately fifty completed and outfitted with sculptured decoration. At their (527-565). But by that time, the city had already turned into a giant century onwards. Yet it is its possible connection to imperial surviving sculptural portraits of Constantine pose limitations when completion these spaces formed the major ceremonial stage on open-air museum. imagery, as we will see below, which provides a more specific contrasted to the samples of two hundred and twelve preserved which the emperor presented himself to his public. At present, few monuments of classical art survive in situ in Istanbul: chronological and histori-cal context, in the second or third quarter portraits of Augustus. New buildings also were introduced and integrated into this the most notable among them are the so-called Serpent Column and of the fourth century. armature, enhancing the city’s ceremonial and ritual aspect. The the Theodosian (Egyptian) Obelisk. Archaeological excavation has In a period when the local production of sculpture had sharply Eusebius and the Theology of Augustus Great Palace, designed as the main imperial residence and only provided a handful of antiquities associated with decreased and the cutting of new pieces of life-size sculpture Focusing on the structural correspondence between the realm of the administrative center, rose as a series of interconnected pavilions and Constantinople’s collection of classical art. It is mostly the surviving Naspeuringen van Paul Theelen: Helios and the Emperor/THE POLITICS OF MEMORY AND VISUAL POLITICS/Constantinople, history and monuments/The Statuary-Art-Gathering Policy depicting mythological themes was rare, the discovery of this head divine and the empire, the domain of politics – following the original court-yards on the terraced slopes leading from the Augusteion and literary accounts, miniatures in illuminated manuscripts, and from Gytheum is striking. Schmittian construct of political theology – Erik Peterson has dealt the Hippodrome to the Sea of Marmora. On the model of such sketches made by people who visited Constantinople at one time or Gytheum in southernmost Laconia was the most important city of the with an ancient version of political theology that consisted of an Tetrarchic imperial residences as those at Thessalonike and Milan another that give us an idea of what certain classical monuments may region and the major port for exporting the famous local green ideological correlation of political structure and religious belief and, ultimately, the imperial residence on the Palatine hill at Rome, have looked like. porphyrystone in Roman times. The Expositio totius mundi et system: One God and one emperor on earth. In the Christian version direct connection to the Hippodrome via a staircase leading from the Both the Byzantine written sources (chronographies, panegyrics, and gentium (composed around 359–360) singles out "Laconica" as one after the conversion of Constantine, this construct served the same imperial apartments to the imperial box (kathisma) created an ekphraseis) and the written accounts of foreign visitors to of the three districts of the province of Achaia. By "Laconica" one purpose as previous polytheist theories on kingship had; it analogy to the relationship between palace and circus in the western Constantinople provide us with a two-tier understanding of the should understand the cities of the League of the Free Laconians, legitimated a monarchical government by authorizing the belief that capital that was intended to enhance the prestige of the emperor. collection – the documentary description of the classical statuary art rather than Sparta. Thinking in commercial terms, the author of a single divine power is the ultimate source of political rule. It The analogy between Old Rome and New Rome was borne out in the and its deployment, on the one hand, and its perception and Expositio adds, "it is considered to be rich in one product alone, the demonstrated a particular affinity for theologies that emphasized the construction of other monuments, among them the Milion, a interpretation by the city’s inhabitants and visitors, on the other. As stone of Crocinum which they call ‘Lacedaemonian’." The Tabula subordinate character of the Logos (Word) to God the Father. tetrapylon arch marking the confluence of the colonnaded streets at has been noted by Cyril Mango, the post-classical perception of Peutingeriana (Tetrarchic to fifth century) names Gytheum, along With Melito of Sardis and Origen, a link between the establishment the western edge of the Augusteion. As the name suggests, the classical art in Constantinople testifies to the desire, on the part of with Asopos and Boeae as part of the late Roman cursus publicus. of the Augustan Pax Romana and the birth of Christ became a topos. Milion drew its name from the Milliarium Aureum in Old Rome, and post-seventh-century viewers, to interpret classical sculpture in terms Moreover, the late Roman imperial fleet probably used Gytheum as With Eusebius, who historicized and politicized Origen’s ideas, one like its Roman model it served as the mile marker for the roads of local, non-classical history, to attribute it to mythical powers, and an occasional port of call on the east–west sea route, while encounters firstly a typological parallel connecting Augustus with leading out of the capital. to interact physically with statuary, either to prevent evil or to punish auxiliaries in the Roman army from Sparta and Laconia are attested Constantine (not really conveyable by quotation), the moment of Constantine also oversaw the westward expansion of the city. These a certain statue for some wrongdoing. in the second and third centuries. imperial foundation with its ultimate accomplishment through which territories, which were enclosed between the old Severan wall and The afterlife of classical statuary art in post-classical Constantinople It is important to ask why the people of Gytheum decided to erect both Augustus and Christ were finally manifested in the person of the new Constantinian defense, grew up around the western has been discussed at length by a number of scholars. this imposing statue of a pagan god in the public domain, despite its the first Christian emperor, Constantine. For Eusebius, in principle, extension of the Mese and its northern spur, the road leading to the In early Byzantine Constantinople, much of the imported antique poor work-manship and deviation from the trends that we postulate monotheism – the metaphysical corollary of the Roman Empire – Adrianople gate. At the juncture of the Mese and the ruined Severan figural sculpture was carefully selected for public display. But the about late antique public statuary in Greece and the Greek East, began with Augustus, but had become reality in the present under wall, Constantine built the Forum of Constantine. Circular in shape very practice of stripping ancient sanctuaries and temples of their when we find almost no public statuary monuments with polytheistic Constantine. When Constantine defeated Licinius, Augustan political with a monumental porphyry honorific column bearing ornaments and the subsequent transportation of those works of art to themes. The choice of a pagan god whose cult was of little order was reestablished and at the same time the divine monarchy Constantine’s statue at the center, the Forum straddled the street and the capital was by no means an invention of the early Byzantine popularity in Greece but with strong links to Hellenistic and imperial was secured. Eusebius asserts that Augustus inaugurated marked the boundary between the old city and the new territories. rulers: their Roman predecessors had been doing this for centuries. perceptions of rulership, along with the fact that the majority of monotheism by triumphing over the polyarchy, the cause of endless Further west, at the bifurcation of the road, the emperor and his Apollo’s sanctuary in Delphi, for example, was often plundered public statuary in Late Antiquity normally consisted of images of the wars, and Constantine only fulfilled what Augustus had begun. The planners erected a Capitolium, itself preceded by a space known as in Roman times: the dictator Sulla took many of Delphi’s treasures, emperor, suggest a connection between this mythological figure and political idea that the Roman Empire did not lose its metaphysical the Philadelphion that appears to have been an elaboration of the and Emperor Nero (54–68) is said to have carried off some 500 the ruling emperor. character when it shifted from polytheism to monotheism, because Mese’s colonnade with porphyry columns. On the Mese’s northern bronze statues. Amongst them was the column that held the tripod Drawing on extensive previous scholarship in this field, Bergmann monotheism already potentially existed with Augustus, was linked extension, an imperial bath, the Thermae Constantinianae, and with the sacred fire; later, it was moved to Constantinople by order and Bardill have recently offered a systematic study of the use and with the rhetorical-political idea that Augustus was aforeshadowing Constantine’s mausoleum stood as the major imperial monuments in of Constantine the Great and became known as the Serpent Column. meaning of the radiate portrait by Hellenistic and Roman rulers as of Constantine. neighborhoods that were otherwise residential. Also, Egyptian obelisks began to be transported to Rome as early as well as the relation of solar imagery to imperial iconography. Bardill Peterson has emphasized the "exegetical tact" – a "striking lack" of The Constantinian refurbishing of the city also included 10 BC, shortly after the Roman conquest of Egypt (30 BC). points out that Constantinehad tried to re-employ iconographic traits which he found in Eusebius – that kept all other ecclesiastical writers ecclesiastical building. The city’s first cathedral church, Hagia Special cargo ships carried the obelisks down the Nile to Alexandria of Alexander, Augustus and Nero, among them an association with from binding the empire so closely to God’s intentions that it would Eirene, was built in the area immediately to the north of the and from there to Rome. the god Apollo-Helios and the use of the radiate crown. The statue of appear to be less an instrument and more the object of divine Augusteion, possibly on the site of an old domus ecclesia. The On site, Roman cranes were used to erect the heavy monoliths. Constantine as Apollo-Helios on the porphyry column in blessing for its own sake. At stake in this open political struggle was building’s original form is not known; however, it is likely that it A fourth-century author, Ammianus Marcelinus, describes the Constantinople had an obvious precursor in the statue of Augustus that, if monotheism, the concept of the divine monarchy in the sense was a basilica. A second Constantinian foundation, the removal of a huge Egyptian obelisk from its foundations and its on a column in the precinct of Apollo on the Palatine Hill, and also in which Eusebius had formulated it, was theologically untenable, cemeterychurch of Hosios Mokios, rose outside the Constantinian transportation to Rome, providing us with some interesting details the "Colossus of Nero" in Rome. Although many later emperors had then so too was the continuity of the Roman Empire, and walls to the west at the supposed site of the saint’s burial. Like Hagia regarding the transportation techniques that were being used in such worn radiate crowns on coins, only with Constantine did this Constantine could no longer be recognized as the fulfiller of what Eirene, its plan is not known; however, analogy to the cemetery cases: attribute convey a profound solar aspect in the guise of Sol Invictus, had begun in principle with Augustus, and so the unity of the empire churches of Rome suggests a use of the basilican form here as well. "And because sycophants, after their fashion, kept puffing up with the exception of Aurelian(reigned 270–275). In fact, a itself was threatened. Of less certain date are the churches of Hagia Sophia and Holy Constantius [II] and end-lessly dinning it into his ears that, whereas fascination with solar imagery and the imagery of light as an Apostles. Although both buildings were constructed in the fourth Octavius Augustus had brought over two obelisks from the city of attribute of imperial rule under divine guidance would endure until Actium and the Milvian Bridge as Sites of Civil War century and have been associated with the name of Constantine, Heliopolis in Egypt, one of which was set up in the Circus Maximus, the end of his life, whether expressed in a traditional religious Constantine’s commemoration of the victory over his political rival evidence suggests that they should probably be understood as the the other in the Campus Martius, as for this one recently brought in, context ora Christian one. By 310 Constantine offcially declared Sol referred to the first and paradigmatic one in the imperial context, work of his son and successor CONSTANTIUS II (337–361). he neither ventured to meddle with as his new religious patron. The Latin panegyrist of 310 has him evoking the Augustan victory over Mark Antony that constituted a Dedicated by Constantius in 354, the first church of Hagia Sophia it nor move it, overawed by the difficulties caused by its size — let witness a vision from Sol while on a military campaign, near an precedent for Constantine. Like Maxentius, Mark Antony suffered stood immediately to the north of the Augusteion. Its entrance was me inform those who do not know it that that early emperor, after important sanctuary of Apollo Grannus in Gaul. All of Constantine’s sanctions against his memory soon after his suicide in Egypt; before through an atrium off the colonnaded street running between the bringing over several obelisks, passed by this one and left it imperial mints for the years from 310 to 317 massively produced victorious Octavian returned to Rome, the senate had ordered the Milion and the Golden Horn, and like the earlier church of Hagia untouched because it was consecrated as a special gift to the Sun copper alloy coins that displayed Sol on the reverse. He also adopted erasure of Antony’s name along with the names of all his ancestors. Eirene, which was its neighbor to the north, it was basilican in plan. God, and because being placed in the sacred part of his sumptuous the legend SOLI INVICTO on his gold solidi as well as the epithet This severe action did not meet with Octavian’s approval, however. Constantius is also the likely patron of the church of the Holy temple, which might not be profaned, there it towered aloft like the INVICTUS as part of his personal titulature. After his victory over Exercising clementia Caesaris, both Octavian and Constantine Apostles. Built at the site of Constantine’s mausoleum and equipped peak of the world. Maxentius, Constantine issued a gold medallion (Ticinum, 313) forgave political opponents their previous loyalties to the losing side. by Constantius first with the relics of the apostle Timothy (356) and But Constantine [the Great], making little account of that, tore the showing Constantine’s bust overlapping that of Sol wearing a radiate By the very proclamation of clemency and amnesty they strove to then with those of Luke and Andrew (357), neither its plan nor its huge mass from its foundations; and since he rightly thought he was crown; on the shield of the emperor, Sol in his horse-drawn chariot forget, officially and institutionally, that there were two parties and exact relationship to the Mausoleum can be determined with any committing no sacrilege if he took this marvel from one temple and rises from the ocean (Fig. 7). Constantine and Sol were overtly the winners themselves solicited the forgetting by making equal both degree of certainty. consecrated it at Rome, that is to say, in the temple of the whole juxtaposed on the Arch of Constantine dedicated in 315 in Rome and those who were on their side and those – no longer dangerous – who Whether civic or religious, pagan or Christian, the Constantinian world, he let it lie for a long time, while the things necessary for its also the colossal statue of Sol nearby. Even after Constantine began were not. architectural enrichment of the Severan city created a monumental transfer were being provided. And when it had been conveyed down to advertise his conversion to Christianity, the images of Sol and Ordered by the senate, born of a negative sentiment of repentance set of interrelated yet independent buildings and spaces. These not the channel of the Nile Constantine continued to be featured together on the gold solidi of after Maxentius’ defeat, the Arch of Constantine did not glorify a only accommodated the institutions necessary to life in a Roman and landed at Alexandria, a ship of a size hitherto unknown was various mints between 316 and 324 or 325, describing Sol as the splendid foreign victory, but a civil war between Roman armies, city, but also created a visual setting that expressed the idea of constructed, to be rowed by three hundred oarsmen. After these protector of Constantine. In this period, Sol probably provided a radically different from most, if not all, of its precursors. Hence, the integration into the Roman imperial project. This was achieved provisions, the aforesaid emperor [i.e. Constantine the Great] unifying bridge between Licinius’s paganism and Constantine’s only related monument was Octavian’s commemorative series of through the construction on the one hand of Roman building types departed this life and the urgency of the enterprise waned, but at last Christian God. Furthermore, Licinius’s troops in 324 marched Actian arches, and, in particular, the Arch in the Forum Romanum such as the bath and the hippodrome, and the use on the other hand the obelisk was loaded on the ship, after long delay, and brought against Constantine under Sol’s protection, while Constantine too that mirrored the Augustan politics of memory and forgetting. One of the trabeated building systems made of richly carved marbles that over the sea and up the channel of the Tiber, which seemed to fear seems to have celebrated his victory over his opponent with gold of the monuments honoring Actium, which Octavian dedicated to had been characteristic of Roman imperial architecture since the that it could hardly forward over the difficulties of its outward course solidi bearing the legend SOLI COMITI AUG. Even though after 325 Neptune and Mars in Nikopolis with a celebratory inscription and second century. to the walls of its foster-child the gift which the almost unknown or 326 Constantine abandoned Sol Invictus on his coins and his ornamentation in the form of spoils of war – the prows and warship This architectural setting served as the backdrop for one of the more Nile had sent. But it was brought to the vicus Alexandri distant three support for Christianity became more manifest, the erection of the rams of Antony’s fleet – was erected in 29 BCE near the very site of important aspects of the city’s Late Antique development, its display miles from the city. There it was put on cradles and carefully drawn Naspeuringen van Paul Theelen: Helios and the Emperor/THE POLITICS OF MEMORY AND VISUAL POLITICS/Constantinople, history and monuments/The Statuary-Art-Gathering Policy colossal radiate statue in Constantinople as late as 328 or 330 shows the battle. Another one was the Actian arch in the Roman Forum of sculpture and other monuments. Under Constantine, monuments through the Ostian Gate and by the Piscina Publica and brought into that Constantine continued to promote his solar associations in a way recorded on the coin reverses of 29–27 BCE. from the cities and sanctuaries of the Roman Empire were brought to the Circus Maximus. After this there remained only the raising, that easily appealed to a pagan and a Christian audience. In various What unites early Augustan and Constantinian monuments is the Constantinople for display in the capital’s major public spaces. which it was thought could be accomplished only with great sources of this period the solar imagery isnow used to symbolize the idea of inception; through momentous victories both cemented, first These displays, which included imperial portraits, mythological difficulty, perhaps not at all. But it was done in the following eternity of Constantine’s unified rule, the beginning of a Golden and foremost, their positions as rulers, and, at the same time, the sculptures, and votive offerings such as the Serpent Column of the manner: to tall beams which were brought and raised on end (so that Age, but also the coming of a new Christian era. conquest was presented to the populace of Rome as one over a Plataian tripod (a fifth-century BCE dedication from the Sanctuary you would see a very grove of derricks) were fastened long and The most remarkable monument that associated Constantine with despot (Antony), a foreign queen (Cleopatra), and a tyrant of Apollo at Delphi), dominated such places as the Hippodrome, the heavy ropes in the likeness of a manifold web hiding the sky with Helios, which is also the most pertinent to our discussion, is the (Maxentius). This version of negation also concerns the positive Baths of Zeuxippos, and the Forum of Constantine. their excessive numbers. To these was attached that veritable colossal bronze statue of Constantine on a porphyry column in the content of memory in relation to a military victory. In other words, Together with the architectural decor that was its backdrop, this great mountain engraved over with written characters, and it was gradually middle of his forum in Constantinople (Fig. 8). Its model was the triumphant one hesitates between not – or never – evoking an collection drew on the Roman expectation that sculpture was an drawn up on high through the empty air, and after hanging for a long apparently the Colossus of Sol in Rome, which was erected by Nero enemy who must be forgottenand exploiting a procedure for essential ingredient in any great urban center, as it not only lent the time, while many thousand men turned wheels resembling and later moved to the Colosseum. Constantine’s New Colossus was commemorating his own military achievement. Yet he could city an air of beauty and majesty, but also, through the choice of millstones, it was finally placed in the middle of the circus and erected in 328 or 330 but is now lost. Only the column survives, emphasize the negation as such. Negation resulted in an official subject matter and theme, spelled out the history of a place. In capped by a bronze globe gleaming with gold leaf; this was truncated, but later textual sources refer to the statue above. It wore a decree of forgetting; the case of Mark Antony after his defeat in 31 Constantinople sculptured displays emphasized the city’s mythic immediately struck by a bolt of the divine fire and therefore removed radiate crown and carried a spear in one hand and a globe in the BCE was the first example of the "sanctions against memory," thus, links to Troy and Rome, thereby making it a grand urban center in and replaced by a bronze figure of a torch, likewise overlaid with other. Whether it was naked or draped is not certain, as comparative as with the striking resurrection of the practice in the early fourth the Roman manner. gold foil and glowing like a mass of flame. And subsequent evidence suggests either possibility. Most modern scholars agree that century, Maxentius became one of the first victims of the damnatio The next great phase of Constantinopolitan building activity took generations have brought over other obelisks, of which one was set the image of Constantine incorporated the identity of Apollo-Helios. memoriae decree. place under the aegis of the Theodosian Dynasty. [...] up on the Vatican, another in the gardens of Sallust, and two at the Writing in the sixth century, Hesychius mentions "the notable https://www.academia.edu/12058521/Constantinop mausoleum of Augustus." porphyry column on which we see Constantine set up, shining forth To Remember and Forget in Rome: A Founding Forgetting le_history_and_monuments?swp=rr-rw-wc-15286616 The Egyptian obelisk, which Ammianus Marcellinus writes about, is to his citizens in the manner of the sun". He gives an interpretation of A panegyrist praises Constantine by referring to Virgil’s Fourth what is known today as the Theodosian Obelisk in Istanbul. It was the image that emphasizes the element of solar and divine radiance Eclogue, implicitly evoking the Pax Augusta. The laudatory first shipped to Rome by Constantius II (337–361) and later on to of the emperor, while avoiding any explicit pagan association, and in inscription on the Arch of Constantine thanks the emperor for having The Balkan Peninsula Constantinople by Theodosius the Great (378–392). Some scholars that it seems to reflect to a great extent the way Christians viewed it. saved the state from a tyrant and his faction in a way that linked a [...] After the administrative reforms of Diocletian (284–305) and (such as Sarah Bassett and Labib Habachi) argue that Constantius II Later texts make explicit that the figure was a statue of Apollo number of Augustus’ accomplishments: ending civil wars, restoring Constantine I (306–337), the eastern part of the peninsula was must have shipped not one but two obelisks down the Nile to (Patria) or Helios (Anna Comnena, Zonaras) re-used by Constantine, peace, and returning power to the senate and the Roman people. The organized into the Diocese of Thrace, part of the Eastern Prefecture Alexandria: from there, one of those obelisks was taken to Rome to something that may be taken as yet another indirect proof of the Constantinian inscription – reminiscent of Augustus’ Res Gestae – (Praefectura per orientem). The Dioecesis Thraciae included the commemorate the emperor’s ventennalia, or 20 years on the throne, intentional religious ambiguity of the message that the monument claims to have taken revenge over the tyrant, stopped the factio, and provinces of Thracia (with Philippopolis as its capital), Rhodope in 357; the second obelisk must have remained in Alexandria until had originally intended to transmit. Another sixth-century source, saved the city. Alluding to the founder of the Augustan Peace, the (capital: Enos), Haemimontus (capital: Hadrianopolis), Europa 390 when Theodosius I had it trans ported to Constantinople. This Malalas, reports that the statue bore seven rays on his head, as in our inscription characterizes Constantine’s accomplishments by calling (capital: Selymbria/Eudoxiopolis), Moesia Secunda (capital: hypothesis, however, does not find corroboration in Ammianus example from Gytheum. Constantine’s crown probably had angled, him liberator urbis and fundator quietis. It is not surprising that the Marcianopolis), and Scythia Minor (capital: Tomis). Marcellinus who only mentions one obelisk. The transportation rather than vertical, rays, of a type that appeared often in the Christian Lactantius eulogized Constantine for his unification of the The western part of the Balkan Peninsula was organized by techniques that were used for the shipment of the giant monolith iconography of Hellenistic kings as well as the representation of empire, the "illegitimate" division of which during the period of Diocletian into the Moesian diocese for military purposes. This from Rome to Constantinople must have been the same as the ones Nero-Helios, thus making later observers identify it with the Sun tetrarchy is considered to be against God’s will. turned out to be ineffective, and the territory was attached to the Pars that had been used for its transportation from Alexandria to Rome. god. An illusion to the sun could also be contained in the inscription It was only later that Eusebius fully adopted the traditional language Orientalis (eastern part) [...] Constantine’s activities, which focused on the reconstruction and that was probably placed on the base of thecolumn, whose text (or of the panegyrists and the ideas that stemmed from the rhetoric. embellishment of the city of Byzantium, have been described in part of it) is given by a mid-tenth century source. Symptomatically – appearing as a "curious accident" entirely in a From Paganism to Christianity different ways by his contemporaries or near-contemporaries. Thus, Constantine’s adoption of the diadem, of Sol-Apollo as the dynasty’s Sherlock Holmesian sense of the term – there is but a single explicit In much of central and southern Greece, pagan and Christian the fifth- (or early sixth-) century historian Zosimus, who is known protector, and the Apolline portrait (modeled on Alexander and literary parallel to the growing resemblance of Constantine to practices coexisted until the fifth and sixth centuries, much later than for his strong anti-Constantinian bias, writes that, having incurred Augustus) denoteda striking break with previous Tetrarchic Augustus over time, which, on the contrary, is wholly visible in Constantine’s law of 321 banning sacrifice, the most important upon himself the hatred of both the Senate and the people of Rome, traditions. The new message offered different readings to his representational art. practice of paganism. Christian communities existed in many Greek Constantine decided to seek "for another city as large as Rome, subjects. With the majority of the empire’s population still pagan, it In turn, Maxentius’ massive architectural program aiming to restore cities and towns by the time of the Council of Nicaea in 325. It is where he might build himself a palace." is reasonable to suppose that most would have tried to situate the Rome to her former glory as the capital of the empire was difficult, nevertheless, to draw a definitive line separating paganism At first, he "discovered a convenient site between Troas and old emperor against traditional religious forms of mediation, foremost appropriated by Constantine, who in fact did not launch an from Christianity in the early centuries of our era or to determine Ilium [at the Hellespont], he there accordingly laid a foundation, the imperial cult and the assimilation of the person of the emperor architectural damnatio memoriae, destruction of the buildings of his exactly when Christianity became the dominant religion). The main and built part of a wall to a considerable height". But shortly with ancestral cults. The promotion of Sol Invictus as the heavenly ill-fated predecessor. After Augustus’ demise, the buildings of the focus of pagan (polytheistic) religious activity was on rituals afterward, Constantine changed his mind and moved on to protector of the emperor provided a universal point of reference. It first emperor became emblematic of the Golden Age he had honoring the gods in order to receive protection and prosperity. [...] Byzantium on the Bosphorus "where he admired the situation of the was this parallel association with Apollo-Helios and a Hellenistic inaugurated, and restoring or rebuilding one of them constituted a The accession of Constantine in the early fourth century marked the place, and therefore resolved when he had considerably enlarged it, royal style in his official self-representation that probably shaped visible act of alignment with his memory: Maxentius thus beginning of a new era. Various later laws contained in the Codex to make it a residence worthy of an emperor". how a Greek-speaking population sought to naturalize the official deliberately publicized his affiliation to the "founder of the city," theodosianus and Codex justinianus forbade pagan cults, closed Zosimus describes the location of Byzantium and the building imperial message. Augustus, the new Romulus-Quirinus. The resonant message of temples, and forced conversion. undertakings of the emperor in the following way: "The city stands The following examples illustrate this dynamic. Sometime between Maxentius’ building campaign – that Rome had been saved and on a rising ground, which is part of the isthmus enclosed on each 324 and 337, the city of Termessos in Pisidia erected a monumental reborn – was ideologically significant enough to ensure PAROS side by the Ceras [i.e., the Golden Horn] and Propontis [i.e., the Sea equestrian bronze statue in which the emperor Constantine was Constantine’s unreserved expropriation of it. A quick walk through The final phase of the basilica of Katapoliani, dedicated to the Virgin of Marmara], two arms of the sea. It had formerly a gate, at the end honored in the guise of the local god Helios Pantepoptes, "All- Maxentian Rome would have included his major building projects Mary, in Paros has been dated to the sixth century. There are, of the porticos, which the emperor Severus built … Seeing Sun" (Fig. 9). The latter appears on the city’s past bronze (appropriated by Constantine together with the disfigured andre- however, indications that a church existed already in the early fourth At that time the wall reached down from the west side of the hill at coins with a radiate crown and riding on a horse; it seems that the carved portraits of his defeated enemy) – the basilica, the circus century at the site. There, according to tradition, St. Helena prayed the temple of Venus to the sea side, opposite to Chrysopolis. On the equestrian statue along with the inscribed block were re-used to complex on the Via Appia, the imperial baths on the Quirinal. In on her way to the Holy Land in 326. Paros certainly had an north side of the hill, it reached to the dock, and beyond that to the create an image of Constantine from a previous dedication to the effect, in an intricate play of metaphors, Constantine, the expander of organized church administration already at the beginning of the shore, which lies opposite the passage into the Euxine Sea. This local solar god. There seems to be only a single way to interpret this the city, reappeared as a new Augustus, the pater urbis of Rome. fourth century. Acedemius, bishop of Paros, is listed among the narrow neck of land between there and the Pontus [i.e. the Black evidence: the people of Termessos tried to respond to the strong participants at Nicaea in 325, as is Athanasios at the Councils of Sea] is nearly three hundred stadia in length. This was the extent of solar associations of the new Flavian dynasty by assimilating him The Revenue of Remembering: The Evocative Power of spolia Ephesus in 431 and Chalcedon in 451, [...] the old city. Constantine built a circular market-place where the old with a local solar deity. Once again, forgetting was the foundation of the Pax Constantiniana; gate had stood, and surrounded it with double roofed porticos, On the inscription of a statue dedication to Constantine in Lepcis traces of the internal war were quickly erased and replaced Tomis erecting two great arches of Praeconnesian marble against each Magna in Libya Tripolitania, we read that the provincial governor set metaphorically. While the re-use of sculpture and architectural Tomis was the metropolis of Scythia and the only bishopric of the other, through which was a passage into the porticos of Severus, and up a marble statue that "was radiant by his divine spirit to our lord elements formerly belonging to the defeated rival was triumphant in province, at least until the fifth century (Sozomen, Hist. eccl. 6.21.3; out of the old city. Intending to increase the magnitude of the city, he Constantine, most powerful victor, eternal Augustus" (dated between character (as such related to the spoils of victory and thus reminders 7.19.2; cf. Theodoret, Hist. eccl. 4.35.1). The considerable number of surrounded it with a wall, which was fifteen stadia beyond the 324 and 326). The language is more allusive here, but as Tantillo of the conflict), the treatment of spolia in the Constantinian politics martyrs from Tomis speaks of an important Christian community former, and enclosed the whole isthmus from sea to sea. Having thus suggested, a badly damaged imperial head of Julio-Claudian date, of memory appears revivalist. Whether in opposition or affinity, already in the early fourth century. Its bishop attended the Council of enlarged the city, he built a palace little inferior to that of Rome, and which was re-carved and given seven holes for the insertion of metal Constantine bound himself with the symbolic capital of its owners Nicaea (Eusebius, Vit. Const. 3.7.1). Several churches have been very much embellished the hippodrome, or horse-course, taking into Naspeuringen van Paul Theelen: Helios and the Emperor/THE POLITICS OF MEMORY AND VISUAL POLITICS/Constantinople, history and monuments/The Statuary-Art-Gathering Policy rays, possibly came from the same monument. Another example is a through spolia. It was not by chance that in a series of alignments totally or partially excavated. it the temple of Castor and Pollux, whose statues are still standing in reused portrait head of a clean-shaven man from Augusta and juxtapositions he associated himself with the victorious the porticos of the hippodrome. Treverorum (Trier), who is wearing a diadem and radiate crown and emperors of the second century – expanders of the empire – THESSALONICA He placed on one side of it the tripod that belonged to the Delphian has also been identified with Constantine. A fourth example is a appropriating Trajanic, Hadrianic, and Aurelianic reliefs. Moreover, One of the most important monuments not only for the history of art Apollo, on which stood an image of the deity. As there was at reused bust of Caracalla with a dedication to Constantine, found in a the civil war panels of the Constantinian monument – the only and religion in Thessalonica but also in the whole of the early Byzantium a very large market-place, consisting of four porticos, at Mithraeum in Rusicade in Numidia. Constantine’s name replaced representation of internal stasis in imperial art – included Christian world is the so-called Rotunda of St. George. There still the end of one of them, to which a numerous flight of steps ascends, that of Caracalla. In the inscription, the emperor is addressed with representations of great victories over barbarians, and metaphorically are important questions about its building phases that remain he erected two temples; in one of which was placed the statue of the standard epithet of Sol: "to the divine spirit (numini) of the most equated abominable domestic conflict with the prestigious foreign unanswered, but the most widely accepted conclusion is that it was Rhea, the mother of the gods, which Jason’ s companions had sacred (sanctissimi) and invincible (invictissimi) Constantine." campaigns of the Roman army in a single narrative. begun by Galerius (293–311) to serve as his mausoleum (recently formerly fixed on Mount Dindymus, which is near the city of Furthermore, a group of late antique images, which have long been Jaś Elsner has suggested a structural parallel between the aesthetics suggested as Constantine’s mausoleum). When the memorial Cyzicus. It is said, that through his contempt of religion he impaired only tentatively identified as reproducing radiant portrait images of of spoliation, e.g., Constantine’s Arch, and the cult of Christian complex at his residence in Romuliana (Gamzigrad) was conceived, this statue by taking away the Constantine in minor form (for private veneration?), further relics exemplified in his Constantinopolitan mausoleum. The the Thessalonica project was abandoned [...] lions that were on each side, and, changing the position of the hands. underline how fertile the ground was for the cultivation of this mausoleum rotunda bears are semblance to mausoleums of the age of For it formerly rested each hand on a lion, but was now altered into a particular assimilation of the emperor with Sol. Each of them, it has the tetrarchy, themselves referring to an Augustan precedent. SIRMIUM supplicating posture, looking towards the city, and seeming to been suggested, may be a reminiscent of the image of a radiate Although, Eusebius explains, Constantine had consecrated the Constantine resided in the city between 316 and 321, and again after observe what the people were doing. In the other temple he placed Constantine holding the Tyche of the city of Constantinople, which building to the Saviour’s apostles, he himself intended to be buried his victory over Licinius in 324. the statue of the Fortune of Rome. He afterwards built convenient on the day of the city’s anniversary would be paraded on a golden there, to place his tomb in the midst of the "cenothaphs" of the dwellings for the senators who followed him from Rome." chariot into the hippodrome and parked before the imperial box, or twelve apostles so that his soul would benefit from the prayers that SERDICA Zosimus undertook the task of describing the events that led to the that of the forum. would be addressed to them. Serdica (also spelled "Sardica"; Sofia, Bulgaria) was one of the most decline of the Roman Empire, from a pagan point of view. He is by Returning to the Gytheum head, it was found in the Roman theater, Thus, the late antique practice of using spolia structurally paralleled important cities of the Balkan provinces. Situated on a strategic no means sparing of the faults of the Christian emperors. His but we cannot rule out that the monument stood in the nearby (if it was not genealogically related to) the use of polytheist trophies crossroad, within a beautiful landscape and rich in mineral springs, credibility has been fiercely assailed by several Christian writers: for Kaisareion of the city. The Kaisareion is only epigraphically attested and, later, Christian relics like those kept in the celebrated statue and the city almost became the capital of the empire under Constantine. example, the late sixth-century author Evagrius Scholasticus attacked but is believed to have been part of the so-called "Roman Agora," its pedestal in the Forum Constantini, the monument that later Zosimus, on account of his anti-Christian bias. And this is what located close to the theater. According to the well-known lex sacra acquired symbolic status far above that of any other non-Christian Patriarch Photius (858–867; 877–886) has to say about Zosimus: of Gytheum (15 CE), the sacred procession of the local Kaisareion monument in Constantinople. One of the famous spolia the "It may be said that Zosimus did not himself write the history, but passed by different sanctuaries of the city and finally reached the Palladion, an ancient guardian statue of the armed Pallas Athena, that he copied that of Eunapius, from which it only differs in brevity Kaisareion and the Agora, where sacrifices took place; then the associated first with Troy and its fortunes and later with Rome and and in being less abusive of Stilicho. In other respects his account is sacred images of the emperor and his family (probably panel its destiny, is reported to have stood under the porphyry column much the same, especially in the attacks upon the Christian paintings) were carried to the theater, where they could watch the Constantine brought from Rome. Similarly, the largest collection of emperors." festivities. The head, whether originally erected in the theater, or the heroic statuary appropriated for Constantinople, around three dozen Zosimus seems to have pieced together his sources, mainly Kaisareion, could be linked to the local festival of the imperial cult, in all, placed in the Baths of Zeuxippos, were linked to the Trojan constructing his history from contemporary or near-contemporary which is epigraphically attested until the late third century. The epic. The vision of Roman origins articulated by Virgil in the sources, such as Olympiodorus and Eunapius. connection with the festival of the imperial cult in the reign of Augustan age still retained its currency in the Constantinian era. Similar to the fourth-century author Eunapius, whose works are Constantine in Gytheum is also likely, since a priest of the imperial If, looking for the possible location of his new city, as is clear from marked by a spirit of bitter hostility to Christianity, Zosimus was an cult is attested at Sparta in 325 or 329. Could the veneration of the fifth-century commentaries on the foundation written by Zosimos avowed pagan, not hiding his animosity towards Christianity, the person of the emperor also be embedded in a traditional local cult of and Sozomen, Constantine had chosen Ilion, there could be little Church, and Constantine the Great. Yet even Zosimus readily admits the god Helios in Gytheum or its periphery? An honorific inscription doubt that the empire would have eventually reenacted its primary that Emperor Constantine I managed to assemble an impressive dated to the imperial period refers to a local priesthood of Helios and Augustan model. The first Roman emperor was known for his collection of classical sculpture, to adorn his new capital. Selene. One may assume that the cults of Septimius Severus and foundation of a new Ilium city on the alleged site of Troy. As for Constantine’s Christian contemporaries, they too seem to Julia Domna, who had been closely associated with that divine Constantine’s foundation thereafter, itself an appeal to Augustus, have encountered a moral problem when describing the emperor’s couple, and later that of Constantine, were integrated into this local would have been grounded in the reality of its mythical origin. art-collecting activity. Their problem stemmed from the fact that cult. Be that as it may, a temple of the god Helios in Gytheum is not Constantine I showed a weakness for pagan sculpture and erected known. Regarding cults of Helios in Laconia, we know of a An Embarrassing Triumph: Augustus and Constantine as pagan temples in the new capital. sanctuary of Helios in Taleton on the peak of Taygetos; an oracle triumphatores In his Life of Constantine, Eusebius Pamphilus, the bishop of sanctuary of Ino-Pasiphae (Selene) at Thalamae, where Helios was From the day of Constantine’s entry into Rome in triumph on 29 Caesarea, tells the story of how classical statuary art was removed also worshipped; and a place sacred to Helios on the Tainaron October 312 CE, one parallel with Augustan times seems from pagan temples by order of the emperor. Understandably, promontory mentioned in the Homeric hymn to Apollo. It is indisputable. His battle resembled the Battle of Actium in 31 BCE in Constantine did not entrust simple soldiers with this delicate task but impossible to know whether the foundation of the statue of Helios two fundamental respects. As Timothy Barneshas phrased it, first, sent out people whom Eusebius refers to as being friends of the was connected to these Laconian ancestral cults, or was anchored in both battles started with an awareness of a foregone result, for emperor’s: a previous cult of Helios and Selene at Gytheum. Constantine could have been defeated by Maxentius no more then "For as soon as he [i.e., Constantine I] understood that the ignorant I would propose instead that the Gytheum head should be understood Octavian could have been crushed by Mark Antony, and, second, multitudes were inspired with a vain and childish dread of these along the same lines as the above examples, that is, as an attempt on both conflicts provided a foundation myth for the victor to transform bugbears of error, wrought in gold and silver, he judged it right to the part of the local community to read the solar associations of the Roman state and its ideology. Both succeeded in a discursive remove these also, like stumbling-stones thrown in the way of men Constantine’s official image through a local religious idiom. The alteration of their internal enemy into a foreign one. Augustus walking in the dark, and henceforward to open a royal road, plain transcendent power of the association between Constantine and himself and the Augustan poets intentionally portrayed the campaign and unobstructed to all. Having formed this resolution, he considered Apollo-Helios in Achaia is explicitly attested by the issue of a of Actium as a war waged by a united Italy against an Egyptian no soldiers or military force of any sort needful for the suppression bronze coin of Constantine from the mint of Thessalonica, which queen and her Oriental allies together with the Roman renegade, of the evil: a few of his own friends sufficed for this service, and together with Achaia was part of the diocese of Macedonia, featuring Mark Antony, reinforcing it with cultural opposition by presenting these he sent by a simple expression of his will to visit each several a unique iconographic type on its reverse: Sol Invictus together with the conflict between Octavian and his adversaries a match between provinces. Accordingly, sustained by confidence in the emperor’ s an enigmatic solar pattern made of overlaid X-formations (Fig. 10). "our Roman Jupiter" and "barking Anubis." pious intentions and their own personal devotion to God, they passed It is dated to 319, that is, only two years after the annexation of Constantine denied that his defeated rival was the son of the through the midst of numberless tribes and nations, abolishing this Illyricum by Constantine. legitimate tetrarch Maximian and forced Maximian’s widow to ancient error in every city and country. They ordered the priests The veneration of an emperor styled as Apollo-Helios in the Greek confess in public that she had conceived Maxentius in adultery with themselves, amidst general laughter and scorn, to bring their gods East had a striking precedent in the case of Nero. Drawing on the a Syrian. Remarkably similar to Augustus’ transformation of Mark from their dark recesses to the light of day: they then stripped them model of Alexander and Augustus, Nero associated himself with Antony into the ideological figure of an eastern tyrant, Constantine, of their ornaments, and exhibited to the gaze of all the unsightly solar and Apolline aspects, wishing to express his aspiration for a in the guise of a legitimate defender of the Roman people, presented reality which had been hidden beneath a painted exterior. Lastly, new Golden Age of peace and prosperity. He too appeared wearing a Maxentius as a tyrannus. whatever part of the material appeared valuable they scraped off and radiate crown on coins, while his Colossus in Rome was presumably When Constantine entered Rome, his arrival was conducted and melted in the fire to prove its worth, after which they secured and set the model for Constantine’s similar statue in New Rome. In response perceived as a triumph, even if in the form of urban adventus. apart whatever they judged needful for their purpose, leaving to the to court propaganda that linked the emperor with Apollo and Helios, Roman emperors never celebrated triumphs over foes in a civil war; superstitious worshipers that which was altogether useless, as a Naspeuringen van Paul Theelen: Helios and the Emperor/THE POLITICS OF MEMORY AND VISUAL POLITICS/Constantinople, history and monuments/The Statuary-Art-Gathering Policy

Greek cities venerated Nero as New Apollo (at Athens) and New in August 29 BCE Octavian held triumphs on three successive days memorial of their shame." Helios (at Akraiphia in Boeotia and at Sagalassos in Pisidia). It is which officially commemorated his victories over the Dalmatae, the Finding it hard to explain Constantine’s erection of pagan statues in therefore likely that the strong similarities between the ideological defeat of Cleopatra, and the conquest of Egypt. Although Roman Constantinople, Eusebius says that those statues were displayed in package of Nero and that of Constantine (including a close forces marched into the city in times of civil war, they had never public with the single purpose of exciting the contempt and the association with Sol-Helios-Apollo; the imitation of Augustus’s been forced to besiege the sacred Urbs Roma. His seizure of Rome ridicule of the beholder: persona; the Golden Age; the Colossi) stimulated similar initiatives was simultaneous with the construction of the enemy within the "… the venerable statues of brass, of which the superstition of on the part of the Greek provincials of Greece and Pisidia, while imaginary discourse. The degree to which art and ceremonies were antiquity had boasted for a long series of years, were exposed to striving to pay honor to a benevolent emperor associated with used by both sides to foster this discourse in the popular imagination view in all the public places of the imperial city: so that here a Apollo-Helios. is striking. Pythian, there a Sminthian Apollo, excited the contempt of the I have so far argued that the Gytheum head can be associated with Octavian’s naval victory was commemorated by founding the city of beholder: while the Delphic tripods were deposited in the public honors to the emperor Constantine, based on the strong solar Nikopolis in Epiros, beautified with a triumphal arch. Similarly, in Hippodrome and the Muses of Helicon in the palace itself. In short, imagery of his official representation and the receptiveness of this 324 CE, Constantine founded Constantinople in commemoration of the city which bore his [i.e., Constantine’s] name was everywhere particular aspect of his image into local contexts, as the numerous his victory over Licinius. The great Constantinian project of filled with brazen statues of the most exquisite workmanship, which examples presented above show. It should be noted that Licinius and founding the city, viewed from the perspective of a visual strategy had been dedicated in every province, and which the deluded victims Julian too were associated with Sol Invictus, yet the almost total that developed over three decades, paralleled the Augustan of superstition had long vainly honored as gods with numberless absence of public dedications to these emperors in Achaia, the exploitation of imagery. victims and burnt sacrifices, though now at length they learned to shorter period of their reigns, and the lack of similar evidence Along with a collection of statuary, Constantine brought a bronze think rightly, when the emperor held up these very playthings to proving the connection of Helios and these emperors on a provincial statue of the Ass and Keeper from Nikopolis to Constantinople, a ridicule and the sport of all beholders." level in Achaia or elsewhere make Constantine our most plausible monument of Octavian’s victory at Actium. The fifth-century church historian Sozomen provides additional candidate. Like Augustus, Constantine was repudiating a system of power- information about the stripping of ancient temples of their most If we accept the proposed identification, the earliest chronological sharing in favor of the more traditional apparatus of the Principate, a venerated images as well as about the statuary that was brought to context of the Gytheum head should be the year 317, when mode of rule defined by Augustus himself. One of the monuments Constantinople, to adorn the Hippodrome: Constantine took control of the province of Achaia. Since Constantine imported from Rome was an imperial portrait of "… it appeared necessary to the emperor [Constantine I] to teach the Constantine felt no qualms about representing the Sun god as his Emperor Augustus himself, which would have invited advantageous governors [of the provinces] to suppress their superstitious rites of divine companion on coins down to 325 and 326 (at least on the comparison. The statue of Augustus would even have pushed the worship. He thought that this would be easily accomplished if he gold), and his Colossus was erected in Constantinople as late as 328 equation back in time to imply similarity not only between could get them to despise their temples and the images contained or 330, it is possible to place the Gytheum head any time between Constantine and Augustus as rulers, but also between the Principate therein. To carry this project into execution he did not require 317 and Constantine’s death in 337. Besides, pagans preferred to and the Constantinian Empire. military aid; for Christian men belonging to the palace went from associate Constantine and his successors with the sun long after their city to city bearing imperial letters. The people were induced to conversion to Christianity. Circus and Palace remain passive from the fear that, if they resisted these edicts, they, As much as the triumph staged political harmony by eliminating their children, and their wives, would be exposed to evil. The vergers Greece and Constantine conflict, the ritual of circus games enacted social consent. Meeting and the priests, being unsupported by the multitude, brought out their By exploring additional aspects of the regional history of Greece in eye-to-eye with the populus Romanus at the circus, Augustus firmly most precious treasures, and the idols called diopetê, and through the early fourth century, the present section seeks to set the Helios recognized it as an emperor’s duty to attend the games and when these servitors, the gifts were drawn forth from the shrines and the head of Gytheum in a wider historical context. I begin by unable to be present he sent his apologies (petitia venia) to avoid hidden recesses in the temples. The spots previously inaccessible, highlighting a serious landmark in the late Roman history of the offence. Like Caesar, he used to watch games from the pulvinar, in a and known only to the priests, were made accessible to all who province of Achaia: the regaining of its proconsular status after a way constructing the shrine as an imperial box that allowed for his desired to enter. Such of the images as were constructed of precious short interlude during the Tetrarchy. This occurred either after a joint divine recognition. In Constantinople it was the kathisma where the material and whatever else was valuable, were purified by fire, and decision of Constantine and Licinius in 314 or — more probably — emperor appeared in his full splendor before the public at the races, a became public property. The brazen images which were skillfully by Constantine alone, after he took control of Illyricum from box reminiscent of the pulvinar, the couch of the gods at the Circus wrought were carried to the city, named after the emperor, and Licinius in 317. A remarkable number of statue dedications to Maximus at Rome. placed there as objects of embellishment, where they may still be Constantine and his sons are attested in Greece. They come from The circuses’ spina was frequently adorned with obelisks, and if one seen in public places, as in the streets, the Hippodrome, and the even insignificant cities, to the extent that these stones are often the can believe Pliny the Elder, the earliest obelisk had been installed on palaces. Amongst them was the statue of Apollo which was in the only late antique public inscription, or the last attested, from the site. the euripus of the Circus Maximus on Augustus’ orders after the seat of the oracle of the Pythoness, and likewise the statues of the Julian in his Speech of Praise for Constantius mentions that the annexation of Egypt following his victory at Actium. Constantine Muses from Helicon, the tripods from Delphos, and the much Athenians had granted the title of strategos of the Athenians to enlarged the circus eastwards and his son bestowed an obelisk on it extolled Pan, which Pausanias the Lacedaemonian and the Grecian Constantine and also dedicated to him a statue with an elaborate to match that of Augustus, still standing in Constantius’ times. cities had devoted, — after the war against the Medes [i.e., inscription. Greatly pleased with this action, which gave him "more Although it is possible that Constantine had already planned to Persians]." than the highest honors," Constantine bestowed on the city an annual remove the Theban (Lateran) obelisk before 324 CE, the obelisk Under Constantine the Great, the re-used antique statues began to gift of many tens of thousands of bushels of wheat. A series of statue would have been the most appropriate gift on the occasion of his form the canvas of the new capital’s ideological fabric. As has been dedications to Constantine and his sons (in Latin) were recently twentieth anniversary visit to Rome in 326 CE. The obelisk would noted by Sarah Bassett, public ensembles of statuary imported in discovered near the Roman Agora. Two prominent Athenians were have been seen by the senatorial establishment as a pagan monument Constantine’s day were conceived largely in historical terms, to closely connected with Constantine; one is Nicagoras, son of in the balance to the imperially-funded church-building program. It emphasize the historical links with Rome and the dominion of Minucianus, a cultured man and priest of Eleusis, who travelled at would therefore have been an offering to the capital from the newly Constantine, to make the city a New Rome. Thus, in the Hippodrome the emperor’s expense to the Valley of the Kings in Egypt in 326. He re-conquered East, for the unique single obelisk (a major cult-object, there were images of victory – both military and sporting – and left two graffiti in the tomb of Ramses VI in the Valley of the Kings previously the focus of its own small temple) could stand for the statues, which made association with the Roman past (such as near Thebes commemorating his visit and naming his benefactor, empire’s unity under a single ruler. According to Ammianus, Aeneas; the she-wolf with Romulus and Remus; Augustus, Julius "the most pious emperor Constantine". There was also the Athenian Augustus, who beautified Rome with other obelisks, left it Caesar, and Diocletian) to evoke memories of the Golden Age of Praxagoras, who wrote a flattering history of Constantine in two untouched for religious reasons. imperial greatness and to foster the idea that the empire would regain books, of which only small fragments survive. Yet Constantine, as Ammianus continues shifting his focus from its past glory. A third possible example is Onasimus, a historian and rhetorician, Augustus, "rightly thought that he was committing no sacrilege if he A figure of strength and fortitude, Herakles was a mythological hero who was a citizen of Sparta or Athens (or both) and wrote an took this marvel from one temple and consecrated it at Rome, that is who was capable of underscoring Constantinople’s superiority to the Encomium of Constantine. to say, in the temple of the whole world." As Ammianus points out, Old Rome. For this reason, at least two statues of Hercules, or The aim of Nicagoras’s mission at Thebes is puzzling. For several it was a solar symbol, and inscriptions confirm that Augustus Herakles, stood in the Hippodrome: one showed him struggling with scholars, by sponsoring it Constantine intended to favor the pagan dedicated his obelisks in the Circus Maximus and the Campus the Nemean lion, and the other (the Herakles Trihesperos) showed aristocracy of Athens and present himself as a friend of the arts. Martius to Sol. Egyptian obelisks with a pyramidal tip covered in him as seated and exhausted after having cleaned the Augean stables. Moreover, Fowden has suggested that Constantine entrusted gold glorified the sun, as the likeness of Apollo-Helios extolled The second Herakles statue was the work by Lysippus and was Nicagoras to visit Egypt and secure the removal of two obelisks, Constantine on top of the porphyry column, another immense task of reported to be sixty feet high. It had been brought from Tarentum to which were later erected on the spina of the Circus Maximus in transportation from Egypt to Constantinople that he had embarked Rome in 209 BC, as an act of punishment for Tarentum’s taking the Rome and of the hippodrome in Constantinople, and a porphyry upon. Intending to move the obelisk which Augustus had not moved, side of Hannibal against Rome in the Second Punic War; in the Naspeuringen van Paul Theelen: Helios and the Emperor/THE POLITICS OF MEMORY AND VISUAL POLITICS/Constantinople, history and monuments/The Statuary-Art-Gathering Policy column for his Colossus in Constantinople. As he notes, this project planning to place it in proximity to the existing Augustan obelisk of fourth century, it was shipped by Constantine I to his new capital – should be understood as a conciliatory move by Constantine, who the Circus Maximus in Rome, Constantine launched a project that first to the Basilica and then to the Hippodrome. had already started to favor Christianity, towards the pagan surpassed the height of the monolith Augustus had acquired, But the transfer of the imperial seat to the East along with establishment of his Empire. Constantine’s favors to Athens, a aggrandizing his sole rule enunciated after civil wars. Although he Constantine’s collecting activity had a negative effect on the Old predominately pagan city and center of learning, are customarily never acquired a genuine Egyptian obelisk, Constantine adorned the Rome. In his Lives of the Artists, the sixteenth-century author interpreted in the same way. central barrier of Constantinople’s hippodrome with one built of Giorgio Vasari blames the decline of art in late antique Rome on There is much scholarly discussion about the motives and the masonry. Constantine I: circumstances of the removal of statues and other religious objects The Chronicon Paschale, the Chronicle of Malalas, and the "Thus … one sees just how low sculpture and with it the other arts from Greek cities by Constantine. The emperor had dispatched Parastaseis Syntomoi Chronikai describe the ceremonial procession had fallen by the time of Constantine. And if anything else were officials to travel through the provinces and confiscate treasures at the hippodrome on the occasion of the encaenia of Constantinople necessary to bring about their final destruction, it was the departure from Greek sanctuaries either to melt them down into bullion or to on 11 May 330 CE. Recalling the pompa circensis of Caesar and of Constantine from Rome to establish the seat of his empire at transport them to Constantinople. Despite what Eusebius wanted his early Augustan Rome, Constantine’s gilded statue with the Tyche of Byzantium by which act he brought to Greece not only all of the best readers to believe (that Constantine wanted his subjects to ridicule his new city in its right hand and, probably, the radiate crown, was sculptors and artisans of the age, whoever they might have been, but pagan art), the emperor really intended to adorn and glorify the new transported on a wagon from the starting gates of the hippodrome to also an infinity of statues and other examples of the most beautiful city with the art and iconic cultural symbols of the Greek East. The a point opposite the imperial box. After that, Constantine appeared sculpture." removal and transfer of temple treasures from the provinces wearing a diadem and presided over chariot races. Augustus did not As regards its city plan, the New Rome was largely modeled on the apparently intensified around 330. The famous Panhellenic victory dare to follow Caesar’s precedent of displaying his own statue in a Old Rome, with the necessary requisite of public buildings and monument of the battle of Plataea (479 BCE), the Serpent Column of chariot in the procession of deities, but his keen interest in the pompa spaces. To be a capital, fourth-century Constantinople also required a Delphi, together with a statue of Apollo and sacred tripods, were is demonstrated by Suetonius. The parading statue of the departing bigger Hippodrome, since the one that had been built in 203 by removed and placed on the spina of the hippodrome of Constantine suggests that he was claiming to be a presens deus, the Emperor Septimius Severus (183–211) could no longer serve the Constantinople. It accompanied other victory monuments, images of concept behind the ruler cult in the Greek East that had been needs of the quickly growing city. When Constantine reconstructed public figures and other spolia that intended to denote the supremacy articulated in Rome by Augustus’ time. The panegyrist of 310 CE and enlarged the old city of Byzantium, one of his major and grandeur of the city, graced by the authority of the Greek and refers to Constantine as the praesentissimus hic deus, this most undertakings was the renovation of the Hippodrome: it soon became Roman past. A group (or groups) of Muses from the Museion on manifest god. as much a place for state-sponsored public entertainment as a center Mount Helicon in Thespiae was also sent to Constantinople. It is The spatial context of the hippodrome in Constantinople, remarkably of political life. The Hippodrome in Constantinople was a typical striking that Nicagoras, a priest of the Eleusinian mysteries, would similar to every one in all the tetrarchic capitals, included an adjacent Roman circus, with the arena divided into two tracks by a slightly be assigned a mission that many pagans may have regarded as a palace directly connected to the imperial box by a stairway, oblique barrier called spina (or euripos). Ancient monuments sacrilege, as many expressed their indignation at the stripping of evidently in direct imitation of the Domus Augustana/Circus (statues and sculpture groups) were set up in the middle of the temples of their treasures and holy objects by Constantine’s agents. Maximus complex in Rome. Malalas reports that Constantine Hippodrome, on the spina. However, both Delphi and Thespiae, whose artworks were removed, completed the Severan hippodrome and built a kathisma like that in The Theodosian Obelisk too was set on the spina, on a specially built honored Constantine and his sons with several statue monuments. On Rome for the emperor to watch races, and also built a large palace, base. According to the Latin inscription on the east face of the base, the flip side, Constantine showed his favor towards the Pythian closely patterned on that in Rome, near hippodrome, with a staircase it took thirty days for the obelisk to be erected; according to the priesthood, even though Delphi may have also been responsible for leading from the palace to the kathisma. The author emphasizes that Greek inscription on the west face of the base, however, the process instigating the renewal ofthe persecution against the Christians by Constantine followed the pattern of Rome twice, once in the of re-erection of the huge monolith took thirty-two days. Diocletian. Indeed, this implies a reciprocal process between construction of the kathisma and once in linking it with the palace. Emperor Constantine Porphyrogenitus (913-959), who was a great Constantine and the prominently pagan local establishment. Local admirer of Late Antiquity, built another obelisk at the other end of elites had consented to Constantine’s policy of confiscating temple Consecratio the Hippodrome in the tenth century. It was originally covered with treasures, and in the case of Nicagoras may have been involvedin it, The ritual of consecratio, the funeral ceremony and apotheosis of gilded bronze plaques, but in 1204 the Latin troops mistook the perhaps in exchange for favors or other local privileges. On the other deceased emperors from Augustus in 14 CE to Constantine in 337 gilded bronze for gold, sacked the plaques and melted them down to hand, this may be the reason why so few artworks from mainland CE – the mostp roblematic for Christian ideology – was a re- mint coins. The stone core of this monument survives and is known Greece are reported in Constantinople in the early fourth century, in enactment of the elevation of the departed to heaven and his as the Walled Obelisk. Another antique monument that was set on comparison to those from other cities of the East. divinization. As rare examples of well attested imperial funerals, the the spina was the so-called Serpent Column: its torso represented Between 326 and 329, the city of Sparta dedicated a statue of the consecrationes three intertwined snakes. As I mentioned earlier, it had been brought provincial governor Publilius Optatianus (signo Porfyrius) and of Augustus and Constantine are remarkably parallel, for the latter from Rome to Constantinople by Constantine the Great. Throughout placed it next to the image of Lycurgus, along the east parodos of the partially followed a model provided by the former. the centuries, the populace of the city regarded it as a city talisman city’s theater. As proconsul of Achaia, Optatianus had the privilege Both emperors died outside of their residential capitals. After the against snakes. The Serpent Column was one of the very few of appealing directly to the emperor and enjoyed the pleasures of the death of Constantine the ceremonial began with a military procession classical monuments to survive the conquests of 1204 and 1453. intellectual life of Athens, the historical monuments of Greece, and that carried the mortal remains to Constantinople, where the body, At the center of the gates of the Hippodrome rose a tower perhaps traditional cult. Optatianus was a Roman aristocrat and a crowned and in imperial robes, was displayed in the palace. As in the surmounted by four gilded horses – the so-called horses of Lysippus. poet and had exchanged letters with Constantine on literary matters case of Augustus in 14 CE, the official deification of Constantine, The horses were made either by Lysippus, or by other sculptors in in 312. He was later banished (apparently in 322/323), but perhaps the last emperor for whom consecration coins were struck, came his school, in the fourth century BC. They may have belonged to a thanks to a series of poems he sent to the emperor, he was recalled immediately after the funeral, but the ceremonial was transformed group of twenty-five horses – a monument to the horses that fell in from exile (325/326) and advanced to prefect of the city of Rome (in for the burial. Imperial funerals traditionally included ritualized the Battle of the Granicus River (May 334 BC) in which Alexander 329 and 333). His post in Greece probably dated after his exile and deification of the emperor by staging a pompa funebris, which, for the Great defeated the Persians. Or, they were first made as part of a before his prefecture. The local magistrate Marcus Aurelius Augustus, was said to have included almost the whole population of quadriga sculpture group, i.e., the four horses, a chariot, and a heroic Stephanus, who paid for the statue of Optatianus, is also the last Rome. Eusebius portrays scenes of lamentation evoking the driver. In the first century AD, the four ‘Lysippus’ horses were recorded priest of the imperial cult in Achaia. Could Optatianus also iconography of the apotheosis, noting that the people and senateof brought to Rome by Emperor Nero. Some sources say that they were be responsible for the statue of Helios in neighboring Gytheum? This Rome dedicated an image to Constantine with him seated above the displayed in his Domus Aurea. Where the horses went after Nero is impossible to know. In the Spartan text, he is described as a heavenly vault, and describing a coin type chosen by Constantius II. died and his Golden Palace was torn down we do not know. In the benefactor in all things and savior of Lacedaemon. In his praises to It had a veiled effigy of the dead emperor on the obverse and him fourth century, they were shipped to Constantinople by Constantine Constantine, Optatianus makes regular references to Apollo and the driving a quadriga up to heaven, from which the hand of God the Great, to adorn the starting gates at his new Hippodrome. The Heliconian Muses primarily in terms of literary allusions, that is, as emerges, on the reverse. Gilbert Dagron has stressedthat four horses remained, undisturbed, on the Hippodrome main gate for gods of his poetic inspiration. At the same time, his collection Christianization allowed the Classical image of the imperial almost nine hundred years. Following the fall of Constantinople to includes clear references to Christianity. Regarding the protecting consecratio to be re-employed. the armies of the Fourth Crusade (1204), the Doge of Venice claimed deity, he often refers to him as "the Highest God", but in a few cases Augustus’ funeral was designed by the emperor himself, who left the ‘Lysippus’ horses. The Venetians carried them off to Venice; the god Helios is mentioned in this function or in an allusion to instructions for the senate to follow. Similarly, Constantine initiated there, for at least fifty years, they were warehoused in the Arsenal, to Constantine’s rulership. Along with these poetic allusions, in one of the building of his own mausoleum. The mausoleum-rotunda, as be protected from metal-hungry cannon makers. A later Doge, Optatianus’s picture–poems dedicated to Constantine the enigmatic Cyril Mango has discovered, resembled tetrarchic imperial probably Enrico Zanieri, finally put them up on the logia above the solar symbol we saw on the coin of Thessalonica appears once again. mausolea. It has been also assumed that the sarcophagus in which the main door of St. Mark’s, as a symbol of Venetian power. There they Although this evidence cannot be connected to the Gytheum head, it remains of Constantine’s mother, Helena, were placed had been stayed for another five hundred years, until in 1797 Napoleon carried Naspeuringen van Paul Theelen: Helios and the Emperor/THE POLITICS OF MEMORY AND VISUAL POLITICS/Constantinople, history and monuments/The Statuary-Art-Gathering Policy may reveal the attitude of a powerful imperial official who, as part of confiscated from the mausoleum of Maxentius, for whom it was them off to Paris where they were placed at the top of the Triumphal his conventus, must have visited Sparta and, probably on one of originally made. Arch of the Carrousel. The Congress of Vienna (1815) sent most of these occasions, was honored with a statue set up by the priest of the Constantine was buried in a holy place of apostles, inaugurated the Napoleon’s loot back to Venice, and the horses, in due time, were imperial cult next to that of the city’s mythical law-giver. cult of relics initiated by the Roman Arch with its abundant spolia. reinstalled on the St. Mark’s logia. Krallis has recently suggested that sections 2.22–28 of Zosimus New The circular mausoleum of Augustus on the Campus Martius, the Following the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople (1453), the History, which refer to Constantine’s war against Licinius, is ultimate prototype for later imperial mausolea, was one component Hippodrome taking the Turkish name At Meydani (i.e. Horse modelled on the battles of Salamis and Hydapses and might come of a tripatrite complex that also consisted of the Ara Pacis and Square) was used to train horses and for the equestrian game of from the work of the Athenian historian Praxagoras. The assimilation Horologium, which also used Augustus’ commemorative scheme cirit . But in the sixteenth century the Hippodrome continued to of Constantine’s victories to famous battles of the Greco–Persian and references to the Actian victory. Just as Augustus inaugurated serve as a place of state-sponsored popular entertainment and Wars and the campaigns of Alexander by an Athenian historian the empire with his victory in civil war, so too did Constantine, who political unrest (such as Janissary rebellions). For example, the possibly reveals how the Athenian intellectual elite tried to flatter the began the empire anew, establishing a new residential capital, palace, Hippodrome was the scene of splendid festivities on the occasion of emperor by giving a Panhellenic, or Athenocentric, myth–historical and burial place. The Constantinian mausoleum paralleled the the marriage of the sister of Suleiman the Magnificent (1520–1566) version of Constantine’s successful campaigns, casting his opponent message of the Augustan one as a dynastic monument, but also as a to the Grand Vizier Ibrahim Pasha in 1524 as well as on the occasion as an oriental despot of some sort fighting against Hellas. This new foundation of a new imperial line that had succeeded the original line of the circumcision feast held for Suleiman’s sons in 1530. reading also supports the view that the Serpent Column of Delphi in of Augustus. The town squares (fora) of Constantinople were considerably smaller the hippodrome should primarily be seen as a trophy monument, than those of Rome: this has led some scholars to believe that the which urged the viewer to compare the great moments of Hellas with Sculpture: Memory in Marble and Bronze public squares in the new capital were designed to fulfill mostly Constantine’s victories and, together with the Egyptian obelisks, The Constantinian reorganization of imperial portraiture was ceremonial functions. reinforced the solar allusions of Constantine’s image in the instituted in consequence of the civil war against Maxentius and Other scholars, however, argue that the town squares of hippodrome. When Prohaeresius was called forward to praise affiliated with an Augustan figure. Although it lost continuity with Constantinople were also being used as marketplaces, that is, they Constans publicly in Athens with respect to the renewal of the grant the tetrarchic representation, Constantine’s representation became a fulfilled commercial as well as ceremonial functions. There were of corn supply to the city, he cited Celeus, Triptolemus, and battleground for the different politics of memory. Iconography four fora in Late Antique Constantinople: the Forum of Constantine, Demeter. So, a mythical king of Athens, Alexander, Apollo-Helios, confirms that the emperor was aware of the advantages of the Forum of Arcadius, the Forum of Theodosius, and the socalled and Zeus Eleutherius (who was traditionally associated with the representing himself in Rome in the fashion of a princeps, a soldier, Augusteion. They were adorned with honorific columns, statues, and imperial cult in Athens andthe Panhellenic commemoration of the but a civilian at the same time, and images of Augustus served as a arches. In Constantine’s Forum, for example, apart from Persian Wars at Plataea) may all have been powerful comparisons to model for Constantinian portraits. Constantine’s honorific column, there stood a number of antique make for praising Constantine. Interestingly enough, when Himerius At least one marble head has been securely identified as a portrait of sculptures. According to the thirteenth-century Byzantine historian (315–386), a teacher of rhetoric in Athens, praised Constantius II on Augustus re-utilized to represent Constantine. The iconography of Niketas Choniates, in Constantine’s Forum there stood a thirty feet behalf of the city, he also used solar imagery and named the Sun as this colossal head from Bolsena suggests a date for the re-carving high statue of the goddess Athena and two other female statues, Constantius’s II ancestor (προπάτωρ), thus revealing that Sol still due to its similarity with the emperor’s figure in reliefs on the which the populace referred to as the "Roman woman" and the offered an appropriate comparandum for the son of Constantine Constantinian Arch. As soon as his quinquennalia of 311 CE a new "Hungarian woman". when an Athenian wished to praise him in 351. It is therefore portrait type was defined for Constantine. David Wright has outlined An impressive number of statues, reliefs, and inscriptions were possible to imagine thatthe head of Gytheum may have also been the basic iconography of the Constantinian portrait: A youthful face deployed all over the city: on top of the city gates, in front of the reconfigured several times in honor of different emperors in the with a broad forehead and prominent cheekbones that give the upper Senate building, on the premises of the palace, in the Milion, which course of the fourth century. part of his face a rectangular character. This is complemented by was the city’s busiest intersection, in the public baths, and on the strongly modeled facial muscles flanking the nose, mouth, and chin, Xyrolophos (i.e., the Dry Hill ) where the Mese (i.e., Main Street) Conclusion and by a jaw-bone that expands outward slightly at the back of the ended. In the medieval period, the populace of Constantinople and The Gytheum head belonged to a late antique sculptured monument jaw, giving a clear-cut articulation between jaw and neck. The the elite shared the folkloristic belief that certain ancient statues and representing Helios. The poor condition and technique of the work image, in form and certainly in meaning, was modeled on the tall, reliefs were endowed with magical powers. But in early do not allow us to decide whether the sculptor had also intended to lean-faced, and youthful-looking portraits of Augustus. Constantinople things were different: as has already been mentioned, combine divine and imperial portrait iconography. Be that as it may, More than a dozen surviving versions of this basic type that follows the deployment of classical statuary in the public spaces was an the image of Helios and his symbolism in the 320s provided a Augustus’ iconography embody diversity in the new clean-shaven integral part of late antique urbanism, its goal being to underscore syncretistic blueprint for the glorification of Constantine that image. One example is a colossal marble statue of Constantine that Constantinople’s unique right to urban preeminence in the Empire. possibly aimed to reassure the pagan population of the recently once occupied the west apse of the Basilica of Maxentius on the Fourth-century Constantinople could also be viewed as a "New conquered eastern territories in the face of Constantine’s Forum Romanum, the other is a large marble head displayed in the Troy", that is, the legendary ancestral home of the Romans in the Christianity. Deprived of traditional worship, entailing sacrifice and Palazzo Mattei in Rome. After Licinius defeat in 324 CE and the East, from which Aeneas fled following its sack by the Greeks. idol veneration, but also accommodating an attempted de-paganized seizure of the East, Constantine adopted the diadem and the (Some early Byzantine authors such as Zosimus version of imperial cult, the solar imagery offered a polysemy that heavenly-gazing Alexandrian type of representation, although the wrote that Constantine’s original plan was to build his new capital would cater to both pagans and Christians. I have argued that the physiognomy retained an idealized youthful face with an aura of near ancient Troy.) Many of the public statues brought in to decorate Gytheum head could be read as a manifestation of loyalty and majesty developed on the basis of the Augustan model. It only the early city refer specifically to the Trojan legend, such as the popular devotion towards Constantine, being expressed in a way that changed into a heavier and old-age style of portraiture around 333 ensemble that decorated the Baths of Zeuxippos at the entrance to was not only in accord with the official image promoted at that time CE. the Great Palace. Byzantine writers claimed that the colossal statue by the court, but also drew on traditional norms of honoring the of Constantine as Apollo-Helios, set at the centre of his Forum, had emperor in the Greek East. Key elements of Constantine’s negotiated Coinage as a Medium of Commemoration been brought from Troy itself. Sarah Bassett argues that early conceptualization by the cities of Hellas would include the close After a short period of conventional tetrarchic iconography on his Constantinople was very much an intellectual creation, one that association with the Sun god — the Supreme Deity and protector of first goldcoins, coin portraits of Constantine struck as early as 306– "grew up around the intersection of history and myth ... that makes the emperor — and the link between his recent military victories and 307 CE with the title "Caesar" abandoned the military image and the city the last link in a chain of destiny that stretched from Troy to classical Greek and Roman conceptions of the glorious past. If the defined a new one of a beardless young caesar, appropriate for Rome". But, as Robert Ousterhout points out, the success of Athenians liked to emphasize culture and letters, the Laconians Constantine’s political expectations of accession after 306 CE. Rare Constantine’s "invention" may be best judged by the fact that the prized more the god who was still most connected to the late Roman gold and almost equally rare silver coins of high artisticq uality from myths and legends promulgated by the collections of statues long army. In all these time-tested strategies of praise, the people of Trier suggest different stylistic developments. The type established outlived the imported works of art. When the city was again Hellas were walking a well-trodden path, whose value an emperor at the Trier mint during the first months of Constantine’s reign were "reinvented" by Mehmed the Conqueror after 1453, most of the like Constantine still knew how to appreciate. perpetuated – with some interruptions late in 307 CE when he statues were gone, but the associations with Rome and Troy were Open University of Cyprus assumed the title Augustus – for nearly three decades with only still vivid – so much so that Mehmed claimed descent from the [email protected] slight modifications. Trojans and viewed his conquest of the Byzantine Empire as With Maxentius’ defeat in 312 CE, the mints in Rome and Ostia, vengeance against the Greeks for their injustices against the Trojans https://www.academia.edu/30896517/Helios_and_t along with Ticinum (Pavia), began to strike coins for Constantine. and other Asiatics in centuries past. he_Emperor_in_the_Late_Antique_Peloponnese_Jou Maxentius at the mint of Ostia and Constantine at Ticinum had rnal_of_Late_Antiquity_10_2_2017_325_50 equally experimented with thin-faced frontal heads resembling the Among Constantine’s successors to the throne [...] lean-faced Augustan style. The type was modified to introduce more from: SECTION IV. Session 6 Naspeuringen van Paul Theelen: Helios and the Emperor/THE POLITICS OF MEMORY AND VISUAL POLITICS/Constantinople, history and monuments/The Statuary-Art-Gathering Policy

facial subtleties and became the standard Augustan portrait of The Statuary-Art-Gathering Policy of the Early Byzantine Emperors, Constantine. One can assess Augustan iconography on the famous 4th - 5th Centuries medallion of 313 CE that featured Constantine in a double profile https://www.academia.edu/41410353/The_Statuary portrait with Sol and on frontal coin portraits of 316 CE. _Art_Gathering_Policy_of_the_Early_Byzantine_E After his final victory over Licinius, Constantine remained mperors_4th_5th_Centuries?swp=rr-rw-wc-3334914 represented as a young ruler. About 324 CE he adopted the diadem of Alexander and his heaven-gazing pose with strong evocations of divine kingship for special issues of coins. The Constantinian portrait remained the heroic Augustan type that had been standardized a dozen years earlier; similar coins were struck in 324–325 CE at Thessalonica, Sirmium, and Ticinum. However, from circa 326 CE a new type was launched into circulation that eventually prevailed in the 330s CE. This type absorbed a placid Augustan tranquility yet kept the diadem. That Augustus was a model for Constantine (Fig. 1) is made explicit by a series of silver medallions minted late in Constantine’s reign (336–337 CE) carrying the legend "AVGVSTVS" and "CAESAR" in direct imitation of Augustan coins produced three hundred years earlier.

Conclusion The ideological discourse of the Constantinian empire was construed in remarkable resemblance to the Augustan one. Both the polytheist and Christian narratives placed the reign of Constantine in a typological relationship with that of the founder of the empire. Constantine appeared to re-enact the actions of his ultimate predecessor by putting an end to civil discontent and inaugurating peace anew, completing the work initiated by Augustus. The impulse toward typological thought and the desire to use this mode of interpretation that arose in the fourth century CE led Constantinian writers to see events that showed the way to the Augustan foundation of the empire as those that prefigured or foreshadowed political events in the time of Constantine. While the Christian texts are preoccupied with reconciling the Roman emperorship and salvation history, making Constantine the first Christian emperor and the liberating agent of divine providence through a typological link with Augustus, under whose reign Christ deliberately chose to be born, the polytheist panegyrics figurally interpret Constantinian rule as a return or indeed renewal of the Golden Age, referring to Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue. The visual narratives addressed the typological functions of the emperor insofar as Constantine was portrayed as a new Augustus, as a founder of a city and dynasty, and ultimately, as an architect of a new empire. Constantine’s visual politics thus stood in striking parallel to the program of Augustan classicizing iconography, imagining a Constantinian likeness typologically. Constantine thus adopted a youthful and handsome clean-shaven portrait image from an Augustan model. The cohesion and integrity of the empires of Augustus and Constantine were therefore preceded by devastating internal strife which they subdued. All this suggests a parallel: whereas Octavian had established order and unity by putting an end to the dying republic, the Pax Constantiniana was constituted due to the final disintegration of a quarrelsome tetrarchic arrangement. In this respect, Augustus became the primary model for the iconography in for the Constantinian image that was worked out after his victory at the Milvian Bridge in 312 CE. Although after the decisive defeat of the last Constantinian rival, Licinuis, in 324 CE, the typological focus shifted to Alexander the Great, it did not replace the Augustan iconography, now imbued with the divine attributes of Hellenistic kingship. The media of sculpture and coinage clearly show an increasing tendency to introduce elements from the royal iconography into the primary Augustan visual scheme first adopted by Constantine. Within the typological scheme inherent in both polytheist and Christian textual narratives, Augustus functioned as a forerunner of Constantine, while, at the same time, the latter is iconographically represented in visual narratives closely modeled on Augustan sculpted and coin portraiture that similarly celebrated the all-mighty triumphant emperor of the unified state. Every beholder of Constantinian imagery was thus exposed to the power of this bewildering ideological combination of intricately connected Naspeuringen van Paul Theelen: Helios and the Emperor/THE POLITICS OF MEMORY AND VISUAL POLITICS/Constantinople, history and monuments/The Statuary-Art-Gathering Policy

imperial image-making, Augustan visual allusion, and historical reference to contemporary Roman political concerns. https://www.academia.edu/40288763/_The_Politic s_of_Memory_and_Visual_Politics_Comparing_the_ Self_representations_of_Constantine_and_August us_