Defending Constantine: The Twilight of an Empire and the Dawn of Christendom (10 page)

About noon, when the day was already beginning to decline, he saw with his own eyes the trophy ofa cross oflight in the heavens, above the sun, and bearing the inscription, Conquer by this.

EUSEBIUS OF CAESAREA, LIFE OF CONSTANTINE

To Eusebius, the battle of Milvian Bridge was nothing less than a new exodus.'
Just as "once in the days of Moses and the Hebrew nation, who were worshipers of God, Pharaoh's chariots and his host [God] cast into the sea and his chosen chariot-captains [were] drowned in the Red Sea," so now in the fourth century "Maxentius, and the soldiers and guards with him, went down into the depths like stone." Like Pharaoh and his hosts, Maxentius "sank as lead in the mighty waters." Constantine and the Christians delivered by him "obtained victory from God" and thus joined in singing the song of Moses: "Let us sing unto the Lord, for he has been glorified exceedingly: the horse and his rider has he thrown into the sea. He is become my helper and my shield unto salvation. And again, Who is like you, 0 Lord, among the gods? who is like you, glorious in holiness, marvelous in praises, doing wonders?" When Maxentius attempted to flee
"the divinely-aided forces of Constantine" by crossing the river, his bridge became an "engine of destruction, really against himself." Like Moses' battle with Pharaoh, it was a battle of deities: Constantine's "God stood by the one to protect him, while the other, godless, proved to be the miserable contriver of these secret devices to his own ruin." Eusebius saw in Maxentius's fall confirmation of the proverbial wisdom of the Old Testament: "He has made a pit, and dug it, and is fallen into the ditch which he made. His mischief shall return upon his own head, and his violence shall come down upon his own pate."'

The comparison was multifaceted. Not only was Maxentius an oppressive pharaoh who had abused the people of Rome, but Constantine entered Rome as a Christian conqueror. His soldier carried a new standard known as the labarum, a long spear made into a cross with a perpendicular bar, and "on top of the whole was fixed a wreath of gold and precious stones," within which the first letters of Christos were inscribed.3
Constantine wore the same insignia on his own helmet.4
Israel's crossing of the sea was, the apostle Paul said (1 Cor 10:1-4), a baptism, a transition from Egypt into the wilderness and toward the land of promise. For Eusebius, Rome had been baptized in the Tiber.

CONFLICTING STORIES

Exactly what happened in the days before the battle of Milvian Bridge was disputed almost from the beginning. Eusebius recorded what became the most popular version of the story. Constantine knew that within the city Maxentius, like the Babylonian Belshazzar, was deploy
ing every form of magic and incantation against his rival. Being a religious man, Constantine realized that his army alone could not stand alone against such a supernatural attack, and he considered which god he might ask for help. He had already become convinced that the Diocletian-Galerian policy of persecution was ineffectual, and worse. Even at the height of the persecution, his father had enforced the policy leniently, and Constantine could not but be struck by the contrast between Constantius's prosperous life and calm death and the frenzied panic of the dying Galerius.s
The god of the Christians must be a very powerful god, and turning to him was worth the risk.

Almost immediately, his hopes were answered. When Constantine "called on him with earnest prayer and supplications that he would reveal to him who he was, and stretch forth his right hand to help him in his present difficulties ... a most marvelous sign appeared to him from heaven, the account of which it might have been hard to believe had it been related by any other person." According to the emperor's story, "about noon, when the day was already beginning to decline, he saw with his own eyes the trophy of a cross of light in the heavens, above the sun, and bearing the inscription, Conquer by this."6
His entire army saw it, and all were "struck with amazement" at "the miracle." Eusebius vouched for the truth of this account by claiming that he received it straight from Constantine: "But since the victorious emperor himself long afterwards declared it to the writer of this history, when he was honored with his acquaintance and society, and confirmed his statement by an oath, who could hesitate to accredit the relation, especially
since the testimony of after-time has established its truth?"
7

In the public reception area of the Vatican palace are four Stanze di Raffaello, each of which is decorated with paintings from the school of the Renaissance master Raphael. The largest is the Sala di Constantino or Hall of Constantine, and its frescoes depict episodes from the life (and legends) of Constantine-the battle of Milvian Bridge, the donation of the Vatican Hill to Pope Sylvester (who looks suspiciously like Raphael's patron, Pope Julius II), and of course the Vision of the Cross. Flanked by paintings of two popes, the Vision (painted in 1520-1524) shows a startled Constantine in Roman armor standing on a pedestal in front of his commander's tent. He is beginning to address the mustered troops, but something has interrupted him. His hands rise in surprise as he stares with wide eyes toward the sky. In the light that breaks through the turbulent dark clouds, three angels hold a cross, and the beams of light shining toward distant Rome double as a banner bearing the inscription EN TOYTO Nixes. A dragon twists through the sky, writhing in anger but also in abject defeat. In the seventeenth century, Peter Paul Rubens's painting of Constantine's conversion used the same imagery-light from heaven beaming onto an armored Constantine and his troops.

This seems to be what Eusebius had in mind, and this is the picture that most people have of the emperor's conversion. Earlier than Eusebius, though, Lactantius, who as the tutor to Constantine's sons was closer to the emperor than was Eusebius, recorded a simpler story. According to his account, "Constantine was directed in a dream to cause the heavenly sign to be delineated on the shields of his soldiers, and so to proceed to battle." Following the directive, he had their shields marked with the Greek letter chi (an "X" shape), through which a perpendicular line was drawn and then curved around at the top. The result was a chi-rho combination (which looks like the English letters XP), the first letters of the name of Christ. Lactantius says that "having this sign.... his troops stood to arms."8

The differences of the two accounts are obvious. Eusebius records no dream, and though Lactantius says that Constantine marked his soldiers' shields with the "heavenly sign," he does not inform us where Constantine got the idea for the sign. By Lactantius's account, Constantine's vision could well have taken place in private, while Eusebius claims that Constantine's entire army witnessed the sign.

Pagan writers offered their own account of Constantine's conversion experience. Writing in the late fifth century, Zosimus gives a detailed account of Constantine's Italian campaign-citing troops' strength, strategy, positioning, geography, and other details-but never mentions Constantine's vision or his conversion. He admits that Constantine became a Christian but dates the event a decade and a half later and claims it was Constantine's guilty response to a horrific family and political episode, the execution of his son Crispus and his wife Fausta.9
Zosimus's account is chronologically impossible, since it dates Constantine's conversion more than a decade after the emperor had begun to identify himself publicly with Christianity. Zosimus's history was published in a Latin translation in the late sixteenth century and was reprinted in its original Greek in the following century. It has had some influence on the image of Constantine. Without following Zosimus, many modern scholars have dismissed the Eusebian story. Jakob Burckhardt insisted that we have to give it up along with all the other legends of Constantine,10
and James Carroll describes it as a "boy's adventure story.""
MacMullen found in the different versions evidence that the story was blossoming over time into legend.12

CHRISTIAN EMPEROR?

Over the centuries, this has been the "Constantinian question," and it is still one aspect of the riddle of the fourth century: What, if anything, happened to Constantine on the night before the battle of Milvian Bridge? Did he become a half-committed polytheist? Was he a syncretistic monotheist, trying to split his loyalties between the Christian God and Sol the god of the sun? Was he a cynical politician ready to jump on whatever horse would carry him forward? Did he have any "subjective religious experience"?"

Eusebius claimed to have heard the story directly from Constantine, who confirmed the story with an oath. One might dismiss the oath, but this assumes a high level of cynicism on Constantine's part that is hard to believe. Credulous Eusebius may have been, but he was not the only one to hear the story. Coins issued in the middle of the fourth century by Constantine's sons depict the scene, and besides, Constantine told Eusebius of a public event, witnessed by soldiers-a story, in short, that could be confirmed or denied by men in Constantine's retinue. Constantine may have lied and taken a false oath; Eusebius may have lied or distorted what he heard. Neither option is plausible. The far more likely conclusion is that Constantine saw something that he took as a divine sign.

Constantine had a history of mystical experience.14
An anonymous panegyric delivered probably in 310 refers to an earlier vision of Apollo. The orator reminded Caesar Constantine that he did "see your patron Apollo, and Victory accompanying him, offering you a crown of laurel, each of which represents a foretelling of thirty years." Referring either to the god or perhaps to the "deified" emperor Augustus, he added, "You did see him, and you recognized yourself in the image of the one to whom the sacred poems of bards prophesied that the kingdoms of the whole world were due by right. That has now come to pass, seeing that you are, Emperor, like him, young, blessed, our saviour and a very handsome one!""
By other accounts, after 310 Constantine changed his loyalty from the war god Mars to the sun god Sol, who also doubled as Apollo. Though practical as any successful ruler and military man, Constantine was also so deeply religious in the fourth-century way that his religion often looks to us like superstition.

A superstitious/religious Constantine would be disinclined to insult the gods by changing the standards of his army on the eve of a major battle. Roman army standards were religious objects, venerated by the troops and often credited with talismanic powers, as indeed the labarum eventually
was.16
Changing standards announced a change of loyalty from one divine patron to another. Constantine would not have changed the standards without powerful justification, such as a direct communication that he believed came from a different god, perhaps even from God. For the ancients generally, war was no exercise of sheer power, no secular Realpolitik. War involved bloodshed, and bloodshed was always hedged about with ritualized taboos. Diocletian's forces constituted a "sacred retinue,"17
and Constantine would have thought of his army in the same way. Armies won by divine intervention, and the victory of an army was the victory of the army's god. If military victory depended on the patronage of a powerful god, it would be extreme folly to abandon the gods at the very moment of engagement.18

It was not only the standard that changed. After 312 Constantine himself turned, increasingly firmly, from paganism toward Christianity. We will trace this shift in his policies toward the church, in law, and in his conduct of the empire in the following chapters, but for now we can note the significance of the changes in his visual propaganda.'9
Propaganda maybe the wrong term at the outset. As I have already emphasized repeatedly, fourth-century Romans were religious to the point of superstition. It is anachronistic to attribute to the political leaders of the time the kind of ironic stance toward religious legitimation that is often implied by the word propaganda. Diocletian, Galerius, Maxentius and Constantine-all of them believed their propaganda.

To be sure, Constantine's iconography sent multiple messages. Portraits associated him with the "good emperors" of the past. In contrast to the grizzled soldier-emperors of the Tetrarchy, Constantine had himself depicted clean-shaven and youthful, a conquering Alexander or a new Augustus restoring the glories of the early empire.20
He was Constantine Tra- chala, Constantine of the Thick Neck, a physiognomic sign of his strength and firmness.21
Constantine's father had taken on the name Marcus Flavius Valerius Constantius. By taking this name, Constantius associated himself with the short-lived Flavian dynasty, and Constantine maintained the connection. His full name was Caesar Flavius Valerius Aurelius Constantinus Augustus. The Flavian title was calculated to endear him to the capital, which was dotted with monuments left by the earlier Flavians- the Temple of Peace, the Arch and Baths of Titus, and, most famously, the Colosseum itself. Constantine's own arch was later placed in the same area of the city, aligned with the Arch of Titus.22

The religious message of Constantine's propaganda was ambiguous. In 315 the Senate acknowledged Constantine's victory over Maxentius with an honorific arch, which declared Constantine the liberator urbis and attributed his victory to "divine instinct" (the Latin phrase is instinctu divinitatis). The senators' language was general enough to appeal to a Christian or a pagan, but it is significant that they did not name Jupiter, Apollo or Mars as the inspiring deity.23
Besides, the phrase had a well-known significance in Roman religious thought. Florus's standard account of the crimes and expulsion of Tarquin the Proud claimed that the Roman people were stirred to resist tyranny by "divine instinct" (instinctu deorum), and
now Constantine had been inspired to overthrow another tyrant by the same instinct. Cicero used the similar phrase instinctu divino in a discussion of divination, describing an impulse that enables the soul to see the future because of kinship with the gods (deorum cognatione). After Constantine's victory in 312, a panegyrist gave a twist to the Ciceronian phrase by complimenting the emperor on his ability to share secrets with "that divine mind" (illa mente divina), while his enemy was haunted by the Furies (pulsus Ultricibus). In other words, the Senate's inscription acknowledged that Constantine was in intimate contact with some divine power that gave him knowledge of future events. Even the predominantly pagan Senate of 315 recognized that its new emperor was divinely inspired.24