Читать книгу The Later Roman Empire - Averil Cameron - Страница 10

EVEN MORE THAN Diocletian, Constantine suffers from bias in the verdicts of both ancient and modern commentators. The problem centres on his support for Christianity, which fundamentally changed the fortunes of the Christian church and may well be responsible for its later history as a world religion. Our main contemporary source, Eusebius of Caesarea, was the author of a Church History which turned into a glorification of Constantine, and later became Constantine’s panegyrist in his Life of Constantine. Lactantius, too, sharply differentiates the virtuous Constantine from the wicked Diocletian, although in his case at least, since he was writing his tract On the Deaths of the Persecutors (DMP), on any dating, before the final victory of Constantine over Licinius in AD 324, Licinius is allowed an equal rating with Constantine. The relevant Latin Panegyrics naturally give maximum credit to Constantine and arrange their historical material accordingly. For the secular aspects of the reign, we unfortunately depend a good deal on Zosimus’s New History, which is not only equally biased (albeit in the opposite direction) but also naively distorted. As for documentary proof, much of the evidence for Constantine’s legislation is contained only in the Life of Constantine by Eusebius, and thereby comes under some suspicion (see Chapter II). Finally, though the imperial letters on the subject of Donatism preserved in the Appendix to Optatus’s history of the Donatist controversy are now normally accepted as genuine (and if so are highly revealing of Constantine’s own mentality), we have to remember that they were preserved in a Catholic milieu and represent only one side of the controversy.

As for modern historians, one must be equally on the look-out for bias, open or hidden. Sometimes it takes a very overt form: as a saint of the Orthodox church and the founder of Constantinople, Constantine is often straightforwardly and favourably presented as the founder of Byzantine civilization; his contribution to its religious development is thus what is most emphasized. Others, especially the nineteenth-century German historian Jacob Burckhardt and the twentieth-century Belgian scholar Henri Grégoire, have sought to denigrate the integrity of Constantine by attacking the credibility of Eusebius, an approach that has provoked a defence both of Constantine and of Eusebius, notably by Norman Baynes, in his essay, Constantine the Great and the Christian Church. Since to write about Constantine at all entails choosing between the conflicting sources, or at least, taking a view about the credibility of Eusebius, the main Christian source, it is impossible to avoid being drawn into these controversies. Constantine is one of the most important figures in the history of the Christian church; given the significance of the latter in our culture, even apparently neutral studies tend at times to reveal a hidden agenda. A critical approach is therefore needed, though not necessarily an ultra-sceptical one.

First of all, Constantine has to be seen in the context of the tetrarchy. Born in AD 272 or 273, his father was Constantius, yet another Illyrian soldier who had risen to praetorian prefect and Caesar to Maximian, and who had been made Augustus on the latter’s abdication in AD 305. Constantine accompanied Diocletian and Galerius on a number of military expeditions. The Constantinian version, wishing to blacken Galerius, has it that he eventually eluded the suspicious emperor only by a ruse, escaping post-haste and finding his father already on his deathbed; in fact he found his father about to cross the Channel, and went with him to York, where on the latter’s death Constantine was proclaimed Augustus on 25 July, AD 306 by his father’s troops. The politics and the chronology of the events between the joint abdication of Diocletian and Maximian in AD 305 and Constantine’s defeat of Maxentius at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge in late October, AD 312, are extremely confused and difficult to establish, even though the tendentious literary sources can be supplemented by the evidence of coins and papyri, as well as by a few inscriptions. Constantine’s propaganda began early: an anonymous panegyrist of AD 307 shows him allying himself with Maximian (who had returned from his short-lived abdication) by marrying his daughter Fausta. The author ends by imagining that he is addressing Constantine’s dead father Constantius and envisaging the joy he must be feeling in heaven that Constantine has the same adopted father (Maximian, the senior Augustus in the Herculian line), while he and Maximian now share the same son (Pan. Lat. VI (7).14).

Though Lactantius claims that he was already pro-Christian (DMP 24), the same panegyric makes much of Constantine as a Herculian, stressing his claim to the divine titulature adopted by Maximian. By AD 310, however, things had changed dramatically: Maxentius, the son of Maximian, had seized Rome and Maximian himself, having turned on both Maxentius and Constantine, had committed suicide after Constantine had taken up arms against him. A further justification of Constantine’s position was now required, and an anonymous panegyric of AD 310 duly produces a novel claim to dynastic descent from the third-century emperor Claudius Gothicus, as well as crediting him with a symbolic vision of Apollo:

you saw, Constantine, I believe, your own Apollo, accompanied by Victory, offering you a laurel crown, signifying three decades of rule. (Pan. Lat. VII (6).21)

In the same year Mars gave way on Constantine’s coins to Sol Invictus, the sun-god, with whom Apollo was identified. This new step looked back to the pre-tetrarchic precedent set by Aurelian (AD 270–5), who issued coins commemorating his immediate predecessor, the deified Claudius Gothicus, and associated himself with the sun-god. Constantine now claimed legitimacy on grounds of dynastic descent in order to defend himself against charges of having broken away from the tetrarchy.

The truth was that the tetrarchy had already broken down, and that Constantine was looking to the future. In AD 311, the eastern Augustus Galerius called off the persecution on his deathbed and expired in great pain, to the satisfaction of Lactantius and other Christian writers. Maximin (Maximinus Daia, nephew of Galerius), who had been declared Augustus by his own troops, now seized Asia Minor from Licinius, who had been appointed Augustus at the Conference of Carnuntum in AD 308. Constantine had now to protect his position; in 312 he marched down through Italy, besieging Segusio, entering Turin and Milan and taking Verona. Maxentius came out from Rome to meet his army and Constantine inflicted a heavy defeat on his troops at the Milvian Bridge over the Tiber on 28 October, AD 312. Many of Maxentius’s soldiers drowned in the river and his own head was carried on a pike through Rome. Constantine entered Rome in triumph and addressed the anxious senators, many of whom had supported Maxentius, promising clemency. The battle was depicted as a great defeat of tyranny by justice, as is recorded on the inscription on the the Arch of Constantine, still standing near the Colosseum in Rome and erected for Constantine’s decennalia (tenth anniversary) in AD 315. Dedicated in honour of Constantine by the senate and people of Rome, the inscription reads:

by the inspiration of the divinity and by the nobility of his own mind, with his army he avenged the republic by a just war at one and the same time both from the tyrant and from all his faction.

The Arch is decorated with reliefs depicting the campaign and the entry to Rome: the siege of Verona, the defeat of Maxentius, with his soldiers drowning in the Tiber, Constantine’s address to the Senate and his bestowing of largess.

The defeat of Maxentius left Constantine in control of the west. In February, AD 313, he and Licinius met at Milan, where Licinius married Constantine’s sister Constantia; a few months later Licinius defeated Maximin, leaving himself and Constantine as sole Augusti, based in the east and west respectively. Maximin had renewed persecution in AD 312 (Eusebius, Church History IX.9), but like Galerius is alleged by Christian writers to have called it off again before his death (IX.10). The so-called ‘Edict of Milan’ (X.5; Lactantius, DMP 48), confirming religious toleration, is often attributed to Constantine alone, but is in fact an imperial letter sent out by Licinius in the east and issued by convention in joint names.

Not until AD 324, therefore, when he finally defeated Licinius at Chrysopolis, did Constantine become sole emperor. A preliminary and inconclusive clash took place at Cibalae in AD 316, after which the two Augusti patched up their alliance, declaring their three sons Caesars on 1 March, AD 317. Since Lactantius wrote his pamphlet On the Deaths of the Persecutors before the battle of Cibalae, and since Eusebius was living in the east under Licinius, his coverage for this period is thin; moreover, in Eusebius’s account of the campaign of AD 324 in the Life of Constantine biblical allusion and tendentious rhetoric take the place of factual detail. In AD 324 he hastily touched up his Church History, removed or altered as many of the favourable references to Licinius as possible and added a brief description of the final victory. For the rest of the reign the main source is the Life of Constantine, written much later and completed only after Constantine’s death in May, AD 337, which it describes. The character of the Life itself also changes when it reached this point in the narrative: so far it has followed, supplemented and subtly reshaped the narrative in Book IX of the Church History, but from now on the work (which is expressly described as a portrait of Constantine as a Christian emperor rather than a complete history of the reign) becomes a repository of information of very varied type and origin, all of which needs careful and detailed analysis.

Before turning to the subject of Constantine and Christianity, however, the extent of continuity between this period and the previous one first needs to be stressed. We are badly informed about Constantine’s secular policies; here too the evidence is more readily available for the period between AD 324 and 337. As we have seen, on the military front Constantine was blamed by pagan authors, especially Zosimus (II.34), for having weakened the frontier defences by taking troops away to serve in the field army. Clearly the military needs of the years AD 306–24 did imply the development of strong mobile forces, but this was in fact no innovation. In other respects too, for instance in the idea of a Persian campaign that he entertained in his last years, Constantine followed precedent. He also continued and consolidated Diocletian’s provincial and administrative arrangements, with the significant alteration that the praetorian prefects now lost their military functions. The reasons for, and the details of the change, which did not take place until the end of the reign, have been much disputed; it is probably attributable to the assignment of territorial areas to Constantine’s remaining sons and to two sons of his half-brothers in AD 335, but in any case it was a perfectly logical extension of Diocletian’s reforms. Similarly, the chief treasury minister henceforth, the comes sacrarum largitionum (literally ‘Count of the Sacred Largesses’), is first attested only in the latter part of the reign, and probably evolved in a similarly ad hoc fashion. Inflation continued under Constantine just as it had earlier. He was able to issue a new gold coin, the solidus, which was never debased and which remained standard until late in the Byzantine period; however, this does not indicate any fundamentally new economic measures so much as the fact that he had the necessary gold at his disposal. In part this came from the treasures of the pagan temples, which Eusebius tells us were confiscated, but it also derived from new taxes in gold and silver which were imposed on senators (the follis) and merchants (the chrysargyron, ‘gold-and-silver tax’):

he did not even allow poor prostitutes to escape. The result was that as each fourth year came round when this tax had to be paid, weeping and wailing were heard throughout the city, because beatings and tortures were in store for those who could not pay owing to extreme poverty. Indeed mothers sold their children and fathers prostituted their daughters under compulsion to pay the exactors of the chrysargyron. (Zos. II.38, writing after the tax had been abolished in AD 499)

The recent reforms were still working themselves through during the reign of Constantine, and if there was some sense of recovery, it was doubtless partly because the changes then introduced were now gradually being felt. The wars of Constantine’s early years also eventually gave way to his sole rule, which in itself brought respite and consolidation. One way however in which he seems at first sight to have dramatically departed from Diocletian’s precedent is in his use of senators in high office. According to Eusebius (VC IV. 1), Constantine greatly expanded the senatorial order, bestowing senatorial rank without the obligation to reside in Rome and attend meetings of the Senate itself. Later, a second Senate was founded at Constantinople, which had to be filled largely by new appointments. The role played by the new senators was however significantly different from that of senators in the early empire (see Chapter I). Interestingly, in view of their eclipse during the third century, Constantine used members of the great Roman families in his administration, as senatorial governors (consulares), as correctores, governors of provinces in Italy, as prefects of the city of Rome, and in the now largely honorific office of consul. Emulating their early imperial predecessors, these men were proud to record their offices on inscriptions, though the offices themselves were often different. The consul of AD 337, the year of Constantine’s death, was Fabius Titianus, who had been corrector of Flaminia and Picenum, consularis of Sicily, proconsul of Asia, comes primi ordinis (in Constantine’s comitatus), and was prefect of the city from AD 339–41 (ILS 1227, see Barnes, New Empire, 109). One of the consuls of AD 335 was Ceionius Rufius Albinus, son of Rufius Volusianus, who was himself consul in 311 and 314; the son survived exile for magic and adultery by Constantine in the fateful year 326 to become consularis of Campania, proconsul of Achaea and Asia, consul and prefect of the city (Barnes, New Empire, 108; for his father’s career, see 100).

This development gives the lie, incidentally, to the commonly held theory of estrangement between Constantine and the Roman Senate. It would be natural to suppose that Constantine surrounded himself with Christians, but few of his appointees, to these posts at least, are provably Christian. An exception is the famous Ablabius (cos. AD 331), a Cretan of humble birth who came to Constantine’s attention, rose to become praetorian prefect and had the honour of having his daughter betrothed to the emperor’s son Constans (see Barnes, New Empire, 104); but most were from the new aristocracy which emerged in Rome out of the third-century confusion. Constantine’s expansion of the senatorial order was extremely important; it was to provide the foundation of a further enlargement over the next two centuries, in the course of which the equestrian order effectively disappeared. But it can be seen as supplying a need rather than as an act of deliberate social policy, and it seems less of a reversal of Diocletianic policy when it is recognized that the latter had no provable animus against senators as such; nor is it likely that it was part of a deliberate effort by Constantine directed at conciliating the still-pagan Roman aristocracy.

Constantine’s legislation continued the tendencies already apparent under Diocletian, by further restricting the freedom of movement of decurions and coloni. The financial burdens on the former were considerable, as is clear from the difficulties Constantine had in enforcing his law exempting Christian clergy from service on the town councils (Euseb., Church History X.7) – their disgruntled fellow-townsmen, with their own burdens correspondingly increased, kept trying to enrol them and had to be repeatedly restrained. Ironically, Constantine also found himself legislating to control the numbers of those who now flocked to be ordained and gain these privileges for themselves; ordination was to be permitted only when a member of the clergy died, or if there was a vacancy for other reasons. Coloni too were forbidden to leave their estates; landlords harbouring such runaways must give them up, and if those whose coloni had left succeeded in recovering them, they were allowed to keep them in chains as if they were actually slaves (CTh. V. 17.1, AD 332).

Even in the religious sphere, Constantine was following good precedent in claiming to be under special divine protection; it is very possible that he initially saw the Christian God in the same light as Apollo and Sol Invictus, as a protector who would grant favours in return for his own attachment. At any rate, he continued to put Sol on his coins until as late as AD 320–1, although in his letter of AD 313 exempting Christian clergy from curial responsibilities he clearly identifies the maintenance of Christianity with the good of the empire, saying that by being so relieved of fiscal demands, they will

be completely free to serve their own law [i.e. Christianity] at all times. In thus rendering service to the deity, it is evident that they will be making an immense contribution to the welfare of the community. (Euseb., Church History