Defending Constantine: The Twilight of an Empire and the Dawn of Christendom (8 page)

According to Lactantius, who had taught rhetoric in Nicomedia until the persecution decree of 303, all eyes were on Constantine. His father was Caesar of the West, and Constantine had distinguished himself in service to the aging Diocletian. He had marched with Diocletian to Thebes and was in the emperor's army when Diocletian visited the ruins of ancient Mesopotamia.'
He appeared to be an imperator oriens, a "rising emperor," groomed to take his position as Caesar. It was no surprise when Diocletian appointed Caesar Galerius as his successor as Augustus of the Eastern empire, but by Lactantius's account, everyone was astonished when Maximinus Daia3
stepped forward to stand between Diocletian and Galerius and receive the purple cloak that Diocletian had removed from his shoulders. Constantine held his composure, but he and many in the crowd were deeply disappointed.

A civilian again, no longer Diocletian but Diodes, the former emperor descended, climbed into a cart, and returned to Nicomedia. Soon after, he retired to his splendid villa on the waterfront in the city of Salonae (now the Croatian city of Split) on the Dalmatian coast, to enjoy the subtropical warmth, tend his cabbages, and wait for death.'

On the same spring day on the other side of the empire, a similar event was taking place. In Milan, the Western Herculian Augustus Maximian also returned to civilian life, elevated Constantius to the position of Au gustus, and appointed Severus to replace Constantius in the junior position as Caesar.

With its four armies and four emperors, the Tetrarchy was fairly successful at meeting the threats to the empire's periphery. But Diocletian's solution to the religion problem, which was destined to be the determining factor in the empire's future, had backfired, and so had his abortive efforts to solve the empire's fiscal crisis. His solution to the succession program fared no better. Diocletian had no sons, and he had constructed the Tetrarchy to ensure a peaceful transition of power to the next generation. By this mechanism the empire would, Diocletian hoped, be spared the bloodletting that had stained the succession for generations.

If the basic rationale behind the simultaneous abdications of the emperors was obvious enough, the import of their decision was not. A panegyrist claimed in 307 that the decision had been made some time before when Diocletian and Maximian met behind the gold-plated doors of the temple of Capitoline Jupiter in Rome.5
Perhaps, as Jacob Burckhardt has argued, Diocletian intended to initiate a system in which tetrarchs would retire after a twenty-year term, and perhaps too he intended to initiate a system that undermined dynastic pretentions.b
All of this is speculation, since neither Diocletian nor Maximian left any record of their reasons or the plan for successions in the future.

Lactantius claimed it was a sudden and rash decision and, as usual, blamed Galerius. Whether or not Galerius pressured Diocletian into abdication, he was certainly the beneficiary of the new arrangements. Neither of the Caesars was well known prior to their elevation-except to Galerius. The new Eastern Caesar, Daia, was Galerius's nephew, and Severus had fought alongside Galerius for years. Behind the decision Lactantius saw a Galerian plot, an effort to isolate the one independent member of the imperial college, Constantinius, force him to retire, and replace him with another ally, Licinius. Eventually Galerius planned to leave the
empire to Candidianus, his own son.7

Galerius's actions gave some support to Lactantius's suspicions. Later he "did promote Licinius to the rank of Augustus over the head of Maximinus, and he constructed a great palace for himself at Gamzigrad in Serbia on the model of Diocletian's at Split."'
For the first time in Roman history, he imposed the census on the cities of Italy and Rome, overturning tax exemptions that had been granted centuries before.'
Not only was this a novel act of tyranny-at least it was viewed as such by the citizens of Italy-but it indicated that Galerius was claiming the role of the senior Augustus. Under Diocletian's system, all four emperors were allowed to issue edicts, but only Diocletian himself, as senior Augustus, had the right to issue laws governing the whole of the empire. Galerius was Eastern Augustus, yet ignoring his senior colleague Constantius, he imposed a policy, and a controversial one, on Western territory?
Without the original chief Augustus, Diocletian, the Tetrarchy began to fracture.

CONSTANTINE'S EARLY YEARS

For Lactantius, the clearest sign of Galerius's ambition was his treatment of Constantine. Though his father was Western Caesar and then Augustus, Constantine had spent his life in the eastern part of the empire. He was born in Naissus, a military outpost near the Danube, on February 27, probably in the year 272,11
when his father Constantius was an officer in the army.12
He later claimed descent from the emperor Claudius, and medieval legend made his mother, Helena, a descendant of British royalty. Other legends made her a barmaid and claimed that Constantine's birth was illegitimate. Constantius, so the story went, stayed at an inn belonging to Helena's father while on a military excursion. Having been fed, he asked for a woman to enjoy for the night, and the innkeeper offered his beautiful daughter. During the night, portents in the sky, which the religious Constantius took as messages from Apollo, puzzled and amazed him. When
he departed the next morning, he left behind an embroidered purple mantle as thanks. Helena became pregnant and had a son, Constantine. Some years later, when Constantius had been promoted to the governorship of Dalmatia, some soldiers were visiting the same inn and teased Helena's child. She warned them that they were teasing the son of an emperor, and when the soldiers mocked her, she produced the mantle of Constantius. When the soldiers returned to court, they told Constantius what they had found, and he summoned both Helena and his son to be at court with him.13
Though the story is a fanciful romance, it is likely that Helena was of humble origins, as her marriage to Constantius was not a fully endowed marriage. Helena was a concubine, and Constantine's somewhat questionable parentage cast a shadow over his claim to power."

During his early years, Constantine served in Diocletian's army. He later reminisced about seeing the ancient ruins of Mesopotamian civilizations and traveling in Diocletian's entourage to Memphis in Egypt.15
According to the anonymous Origo Constantini, Galerius distrusted and hated him from early on, thrusting him into military danger in the hope that he would be killed. Fighting the Sarmatians, however, Constantine seized one barbarian by the hair and dragged him back to Galerius. When Galerius sent him into a swamp, he went boldly in on horseback, making a way for the rest of the army to follow him to victory.16

Even when his father was transferred to the West to secure Gaul and Britain, Constantine stayed behind. After Diocletian's retirement, he re mained in the court of Galerius. It was not a happy arrangement. Galerius was evidently suspicious of both Constantine's ambition and his father's prospects in the West, and keeping Constantine close at hand allowed the emperor to keep an eye on the rising young officer, to maintain leverage against Constantius, and to prevent a dangerous concentration of power in the West. "We beseech you, bend you to remain / Here," Claudius of Denmark said to his nephew Hamlet, "in the cheer and comfort of our eye, / Our chiefest courtier, cousin, and our son" (Hamlet 1.2). Galerius might have used the same rhetoric concerning Constantine, to the same effect: Stay close, so I can keep my eye on you.

Constantius repeatedly requested that Galerius send Constantine to join him in the West, and finally Galerius agreed. Fearing that Galerius might change his mind, Constantine left that same night, reputedly moving at great speed and maiming the post horses along the way to block pursuit."
Eusebius and other writers claim that Constantine arrived at his father's deathbed, but in fact his father was in Boulogne, in the last stages of preparation for his invasion of Britain, when his son arrived, and Constantine accompanied his father on this successful British campaign. Shortly after Constantius had brought Britain back under Roman dominion, he fell ill. On July 25, 306, scarcely fourteen months after assuming the position of Augustus, Constantius died at York and with his dying breath designated Constantine as his successor, a decision gladly confirmed by the troops."

Constantine was emperor in his midthirties.

END OF THE TETRARCHY

If Galerius's plots were one reason for the breakdown of the Tetrarchy, the elevation of Constantine highlights a more basic weakness in the system. The flaw in Diocletian's plan was obvious. So long as the members of the imperial college respected one another and restrained their own ambi
tions, it would work. But what would happen when one member attempted to bypass his colleagues? And what would happen to imperial sons who were not chosen for succession? As Burckhardt perceptively notes, sons must either join the imperial college or be controlled-and controlling rivals in fourth-century Rome meant killing them.19
It is not at all surprising that in the generation following Diocletian's retirement there were periods when as many as six men claimed the position of Augustus.

The Tetrarchy's treatment of the role of family ties was ambiguous from the beginning.20
Constantius married Theodora, daughter of Maximian, while Galerius married Diocletian's daughter Valeria. But Constantius and Galerius did not marry to join the original Tetrarchy; they joined the Tetrarchy because they were already sons-in-law of the two Augusti. Diocletian arranged the marriages ahead of time so that the Tetrarchy would be anchored in more traditional family bonds.2'
From the beginning, then, marriage tied the Tetrarchy together, and the intermarriages of the Tetrarchs continued into, and confused, the following generation as well. Maxentius, the son of Maximian, married Galerius's daughter, while Constantine married Maximian's other daughter Fausta, thus making him brother-in-law to his father and both brother-in-law and nephew of Maxentius.22
These marriages created kin relations that resemble the fictive kin relations of the Principate, when emperors "adopted" a successor. It is not altogether clear that Diocletian intended to change the rules of succession; then again, it is not clear that he wanted to retain old rules.23
The ambiguity proved fatal.

No doubt it seemed perfectly natural to the troops in York to acclaim a new emperor and to confer that honor on the son of the dead emperor. Armies had been making emperors for several generations, and the transfer of power from father to son was one of the most ancient of succession systems. But Burckhardt describes Constantine as "the usurper," and many
scholars since have followed his lead.24
That is an ahistorical designation. In Latin, "usurper" translates tyrannus, and a tyrant is not a ruler who attempts to gain power without authorization but a ruler who attempts but fails to gain power. In the fourth century, it is a retrospective designation; a ruler legitimizes his rule by hanging on to power against his rivals.25
By the rules of the Tetrarchy, too, Constantine had a legitimate claim to the emperorship. His father was senior Augustus, and if the precedent of Diocletian was to be followed, it was the senior Augustus who selected his successor.26
In any case, Galerius was less rigid than Burckhardt and his followers. When Constantine sent the Eastern Augustus an image of himself crowned with laurel, Galerius accepted him as a constitutionally legitimate member of the imperial college.27
The acceptance was grudging, no doubt, but Galerius had no constitutional basis for refusing.

Yet the Tetrarchy was becoming unbalanced: Instead of two Augusti and two Caesars, there was Galerius and three Caesars (Daia, Severus, Constantine). Things became more complicated and more precarious in October 306 when Maximian's son Maxentius, envious of Constantine's elevation at York, seized power in Rome with the support of the praetorian guard and the plebs.2S
Galerius had subjected the city to census and taxation, a violation of the traditional sacred privileges of the capital. Maxentius rose to power claiming that he would restore Rome's central position in the empire and that he would defend the traditional status of the Italian cities against unconstitutional assaults from Galerius. It was no longer a Tetrarchy but a Pentarchy, and a highly unstable one: In Britain and Gaul there was Constantine; the two Caesars Daia and Severus remained in place, and Galerius continued to be the official Augustus. But Maxentius now claimed the same senior position. Maxentius sought to legitimize his
usurpation by appealing to Galerius for recognition, but Galerius, despite being Maxentius's father-in-law, refused.29

Victors write biography as much as history, and a later panegyrist, orating before Constantine around 313, described the defeated Maxentius as a man of "contemptibly small stature, twisted and slack of limb."30
Whatever his physical appearance, he had some political skill. Maxentius eschewed the symbolisms and paraphernalia of the Tetrachy, adopting instead an imperial style that harked back to the rugged simplicities of Augustus and Trajan. Like Constantine, he recognized that Christians, still persecuted in the East, were a disaffected and potentially powerful constituency, and he annulled the persecution edict within his territories.31
He was the last of the emperors to court traditional Roman elites to support his power, and when Constantine later invaded Italy, he led, by Maxentius's lights, a northern "army of Gauls" and "barbarians."32

Before the year was out, the Pentarchy turned into a Sextarchy, as Maxentius called his father, Maximian, out of retirement to assume the position of Augustus, joining his son in Rome. If any proof were needed of Maximian's reluctance to abdicate, this was it. If he agreed with Diocletian in principle, he did not share the senior tetrarch's self-restraint. He was all too ready to become what Maxentius called him, "Augustus for the second time." Diocletian, hearing the news in his seaside palace at Split, must have thought that all his work had been in vain. The political chaos of the third century had returned, only a few years after his retirement. The wheel turned, and Diocletian's golden age was rapidly losing its luster.