132 - In This Sign

Hello, and welcome to the History of Rome, episode 132, In This Sign. So as I'm sure you can guess by the title, we have arrived at one of the seminal events in Roman history, the moment Constantine decided that he was going to go out a conquering for Jesus. This, of course, is a massive oversimplification of a convoluted series of events, but still, it gets to the heart of the matter. Constantine is about to begin the long process of seizing control of the empire, and he will attribute his success in this endeavor to the Christian God. At least, we're pretty sure he attributed it to the Christian God, he attributed it to God anyway, and he will use Christian symbols to give him power, or at least he appears to have used Christian symbols, some of them might not have become Christian symbols until after Constantine adopted them. But at least we know that Christ himself will come to Constantine in a dream and tell him to conquer in this sign. Or was that an earlier vision he had had after staring at the sun for too long? And was that sign a cross? A Cairo? A Storogram? And maybe it was all made up after the fact? I am confused. Constantine was a complicated man living in complicated times. Did you really think his relationship with Christianity was going to be simple?

But before we get into all that, there is one last little bit of business we should dispense with. Conceptually, it should have probably come at the end of last week's episode, but there wasn't really time to get into it all, so here we are. Because before we can get into the age of Constantine, we need to finally close the door on the age of Diocletian. And that means killing off everyone's favorite senior, senior Augustus. In December of 311, now six years removed from power, and what must have felt like a lifetime removed from his dream of a perpetually stable Tetrarchy, Diocletian finally died in his palace on the eastern Adriatic coast. Despite his happy talk about how much fun retired life was, you get the feeling that by the end, Diocletian was more than ready to die. His last few months were spent in impotent agony as he found himself unable to ensure the safety of his wife and daughter, who had wound up de facto prisoners in the court of Maximinus Dia following the death of Galerius in May. Maximinus wanted to marry the widow of Galerius, but she had refused and was now at the angry mercy of the emperor she had just scorned. Diocletian tried to intervene on her behalf, but was completely ignored. Like his now dead friend Maximian, Diocletian was discovering that the world had moved on without him. I don't think it is out of line to wonder whether the dejected ex-emperor, unable to endure any more disappointments, simply committed suicide, again, like his old friend Maximian. However it happened, he was 66 years old and had once been the senior Augustus for 20 years.

The legacy of Diocletian is hard to figure. In terms of the quality of his administration, he ranks right up there with the best of the best—Augustus, Vespasian, the five good emperors. And in terms of his impact on the evolution of the empire, his only equal at this point seems to be the divine Augustus himself. Throw in the fact that he inherited a pile of smoldering rubble and turned it into a working empire again, and he is easily one of the two or three best emperors of all time. But there is no getting around the fact that he appears to have been exhausted at the end. Exhausted to the point that he made some very poor decisions that had disastrous consequences for the empire. The Great Persecution was ill-advised to say the least, and his replacement candidates for the Tetrarchy, first Maximinus Dia and Severus, and then Licinius, all threw the balance of power so out of whack that civil war became all but inevitable. It would be easy to blame all of this on Galerius, and a lot of it does appear to have been Galerius' fault. But Diocletian's inability to have more foresight when it came to picking the men who would succeed him is a great big black mark on his record. It stains his legacy, just as Commodus stains Marcus Aurelius' and Caracalla stains Septimius Severus'.

In Diocletian's defense, it might be the case that no matter who he elevated into the Tetrarchy, that civil war would have ensued. Four men with equal armies ruling separate corners of the empire? Eventually that turns on itself, right? But that opens up the question of whether the whole system was flawed from the start, and you can't blame that on Galerius. That was Diocletian, all by himself. I think at the end of the day, Diocletian was a victim of his own success. He was so good, so personally magnetic, wielding such, dare I say, divine gravitas, that it would have been almost impossible to make accurate assumptions about what would happen when he was removed from the equation. The Tetrarchy had worked great for twenty years, and the problems it had been designed to solve were, for that period, solved. So why couldn't things go on like that forever? Oh yeah, because Diocletian is the only one good enough, smart enough, and doggone it liked enough to hold it all together. Diocletian's lasting failure, then, is that no one else lived up to his standards. Something else he shares in common with the divine Augustus, and something I think we ought not hold against him too much. He was a great emperor who ruled effectively through very difficult times, and he should be remembered as such. But his time has now passed, and for the rest of this episode, I want to focus on the epoch-shifting transformation of the man who was destined to shut the door on the age of Diocletian and usher in his own age, the age of Constantine.

Thus far, Constantine has played a careful game, satisfied with incremental political advances while avoiding any overreaching, high-risk plays. Since he succeeded his father back in 306, he appears to have been focused mostly on securing his own legitimacy, establishing a rock-solid power base in Britain, Gaul, and Spain, and avoiding open confrontation with any of his brother emperors. But we are about to see a very different side of Constantine, that of a daring and audacious general who is convinced that God has made him invincible. Now, I don't think Constantine's shift from caution to aggression represents any sort of shift in his personality, but instead represents a shift in the circumstances. As long as Diocletian and Maximian and Galerius were around, Constantine was content to lay low and bide his time. But once that elder generation had been cleared out, there was nothing left to check Constantine's ambitions. After Diocletian died, Constantine appears to have looked into his own heart, then sized up the competition, and then decided that the time had come for caution to give way to daring, because, after all, fortune favors the bold.

What I mean to say, then, is that I don't think Constantine's ends ever changed. I think he wanted the whole empire to be his from the very beginning, but he can and did tinker around with the means he used to achieve that end all the time. He used a Fabian-esque strategy for the first few years, because that seemed to be what the times called for. But when those times changed, he was more than ready to follow the aggressive lead of a Scipio Africanus. But as much as his military posture is about to change from prudent holding pattern to reckless dive-bombing, it was Constantine's political posture that marked the most important change of all. And by political posture, I of course mean religious posture. As a young man, it appears that Constantine had no problem with the Jupiter-Hercules religious ideology of the Tetrarchy, nor with the pagan polytheism of the wider Roman Empire. He counted, for example, first Mars and then Apollo as his patron deities. But as he grew older, and perhaps as a result of finally joining up with his father, Constantine seems to have drifted into a vague monotheism. He was still respectful of the old pantheon and continued to make all the necessary sacrifices. But specifically, he was now moving in the direction of Aurelian's old cult of Sol Invictus. When he became Caesar in 306, the propaganda emanating from Constantine's court continued this march towards an almost exclusive solar monotheism.

This religious evolution seems to have rested on two main pillars, intertwined and not at all mutually exclusive. One pillar was Constantine's pious, dare I say superstitious, desire to identify the correct god and then worship it. The other pillar was Constantine's crass desire to identify the surest path to absolute power and then exploit it. There's been a great deal of ink spilled over the question of whether Constantine was really a Christian or whether he was just cynically exploiting the religion to his own advantage, and I've got to say, I think it's a bit of both. Throughout his life, Constantine was something of a seeker. But rather than seeking in the hippie sense of trying to find universal truth or everlasting peace or whatever, Constantine was seeking power. Tangible, worldly power. And I think he genuinely believed that not only did God play a role in how events on earth unfolded, but that getting on the right side of the right god was the ticket to the top. In other words, Constantine was not some cynical atheist like Cicero who thought religion merely a necessary fiction. Necessary yes, but a fiction nonetheless. Constantine was a true believer. But that being said, Constantine was also well aware that if he was going to topple the Tetrarchy and rule in his own right, that he was going to have to cobble together some kind of independent coalition. That is, gather together all those people who were unhappy with the existing order and get them working for him. And one of the largest and fastest growing groups who was unhappy with the existing order were the religious monotheists, and in particular the Christians who were mighty peeved about the Great Persecution. Constantine then was only too happy to promote his own personal monotheism, signal his sympathy for the Christians, and tell anyone who would listen that he was only doing what God was bidding.

So I'm not going to worry too much about how sincere Constantine was in his beliefs, because I reckon when it comes to analyzing the underlying ideologies of his reign, that we should probably just look to the spot where his religious zeal intersects with his political savvy and just leave it at that. Which of course brings us to one of the most important pieces of that underlying ideology, namely, that in the lead up to his war with Maxentius, that Constantine experienced visions and dreams that promised him victory as long as he gave himself over to the Christian God. That's what Constantine said later anyway, after he had become sole ruler of the empire and wanted to establish a nice smooth origin story for himself. Unfortunately for us though, Constantine's origin story is anything but smooth. Even something as simple as which sign Constantine used to conquer by is going to take a bit of untangling, but hey, that's why we're all here.

If you were asked the man or woman in the street to tell you the story of Constantine's conversion to Christianity, conversion in the loose sense here rather than the technical sense, they would probably stare at you blankly. But once you found someone who had any idea what you were talking about, they would probably tell you a story that goes something like this. On the day before some great battle, Constantine saw a vision of the cross in the sky and was told by Christ to conquer using this sign. Then he painted the cross on the shields of all his men and proceeded to win the battle handily, establishing Christianity as the official religion of the Roman Empire forever. Now, this is not the worst case of mashed up history you'll ever hear, but it is definitely a case of mashed up history. And of course, I tack that last bit on just to remind everyone that as much as Christianity was favored and promoted by Constantine, it did not actually become the official religion of the Roman Empire until the reign of Theodosius some 50 years after Constantine's death.

This commonly told version of the story is derived from two main sources, both of which provide some of the details, but neither of which tell the story exactly the same way, nor do they tell the story the same way that people usually tell it today. First, we have Lactantius, a contemporary Christian writer, who briefly mentions that on the night before the battle of the Milvian Bridge that, quote, 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. He did as he had been commanded, and he marked on their shields the letter X, with a perpendicular line drawn through it and turned round thus at the top, being the cipher of Christ. Having this sign, his troops stood to arms. Now one thing we should note right away is that the sign by which Constantine conquered was not the simple cross that we are all familiar with today. Instead, he is describing the Chi-Rho, a symbol comprised of the Greek letters Chi and Rho, the first two letters of Christ's name. And to help keep this stuff straight, a picture of the Chi-Rho is helpfully posted at thehistoryofrome.typepad.com.

Now what's interesting about this is that though the Chi-Rho would eventually become associated exclusively with Christianity, this appears to be the first time it was ever used as a Christian symbol. Before Constantine, it was used mostly by scholars to mark passages they wanted to return to, because Chi and Rho were also the first letters of a Greek word for good. So it was already a sort of well-known good luck symbol in the ancient world before Constantine was allegedly commanded to paint it on the shield of his soldiers, which, I think, hints at how much Constantine's political savvy was also coming into play. The dual meaning of Chi-Rho meant that Christians could see what they wanted to see, and pagans could see what they wanted to see, without stepping on each other's toes. And this was very helpful when it came to building a broad coalition of forces.

The other version of the story we have comes from Eusebius, who would later drift in and out of Constantine's court, and in addition to many other scholarly works, including a very famous history of the early church, he would write the emperor's first official biography. In that biography, Eusebius relays a version of events that he swears came straight from Constantine himself. At some point prior to the battle, the future emperor was marching along with his men, when he suddenly saw a vision above the sun, a cross of light, with the Greek words, In this sign conquer, written alongside. By the time Constantine was relaying the story to Eusebius, the emperor added the further embellishment that he was not the only one to see it, and that in fact his whole army shared in the vision. Eusebius then continues with his version of the Lactantius story, that on the night before the battle, Constantine was visited by Christ himself, who told Constantine to use the Chi-Rho as a symbol of power against his enemies. This prompted Constantine to create the Lebarum, a military standard that featured the Chi-Rho atop a more traditional cross, of which there is also a picture at thehistoryofrealm.tipad.com.

So what are we to make of all this? Just to dispense with, modern scholars put almost no stock in the vision in the Sky Story, and certainly no stock in the bit about the whole army sharing the vision. Instead, they mark it down as a later bit of useful fiction, probably designed to continue the conflation between the old god Sol Invictus and Constantine's new powerful Christian god. The dream on the night before the battle, on the other hand, is at least plausible. Men do dream powerful dreams, after all. But what Constantine did with the information, Jesus or whoever had given him, is still unknown. Did he really paint a Chi-Rho on the shields of all 40,000 of his men? This seems a bit cumbersome for the morning of a great battle. So maybe he just painted the shields of his bodyguard? Or maybe the shield painting never happened at all, and his army simply took the field behind a hastily cobbled together labarum? Or maybe the whole business about the Chi-Rho is an anachronism. Though the labarum would, by Eusebius' time, be one of Constantine's most powerful symbols, there is no actual proof that it was employed as early as 312, and the fact that it appears nowhere on Constantine's triumphal arch does seem a bit odd, given the central place in the narrative it later enjoyed. Nor for that matter is there any proof that at this point Constantine was openly advertising a direct connection with the Christian god, which you'd think would be pretty unequivocal at this point.

So I think what we're dealing with here is a case where Constantine wanted to leave himself room to maneuver as events unfolded, but then wanted to cement one particular version of the story, a very Christian version of the story, once it was all over. That's why it's difficult to make hard judgments about how and when he became a Christian, and how sincere he was and how much he attributed his success to the Christian god at the time. We know that down the road, he definitely stated that he had been serving the Christian god all along, but at the time, Constantine used vague enough symbols and vague enough language that his meaning could be interpreted multiple ways. I am sure that Constantine's religious dissimulation was good politics at the time, but it sure makes it hard to untangle what really happened and why.

Okay, now that that's all out of the way, we need to turn our attention back to worldly events in order to fully set the stage for Constantine's showdown with Maxentius, which I thought we were going to get to this week, but because of time constraints, we won't get to the actual battle of the Milvian Bridge until next week. Counterintuitively, the first thing we need to cover is the political situation in the East. Following Galerius' death in May 311, Maximinus Dio wasted no time ensuring that his days of being passed over were over. He was likely in Antioch when word came that Galerius was dead, and right away Maximinus marched west, intent on grabbing the whole of Asia Minor before anyone else could react. The anyone else he had to worry about was Licinius, who, since his elevation to Augustus in 308, had been based in Pannonia. Licinius did indeed pack up and head east, but in the footrace to the Hellespont, he was beaten by Maximinus. The two emperors then met on a boat on that sliver of water separating Europe from Asia, and agreed to use the Hellespont as the dividing line between their respective spheres of influence. Maximinus would control the whole of the east, while Licinius would control Greece, Pannonia, and the Danube frontier. For about twelve seconds then, Maximinus and Licinius were in alliance.

At about this same time back in Italy, Maxentius decided that with Galerius out of the picture, it was time to once again assert his right to power, only this time, even more aggressively than before. To this end, he decided that if he controlled the whole western empire, that Licinius and Maximinus would be forced to recognize him, which meant bumping off Constantine. Embracing that whole dutiful son angle, Maxentius used Constantine's mistreatment of his father and his father's legacy as a causus belli and declared war on his brother-in-law in mid-311. That, at least, is the version of history Constantine promoted immediately following his victory over Maxentius. Whether or not this version is true, however, is an open question, and it certainly doesn't help that later in life, Constantine would change his story and promote a different version of events that has him initiating the war as a noble, and divinely inspired, mission to free Rome from the evil pagan tyrant Maxentius. So it is tough to say for sure who fired the first shot and why, but whoever did what when, in the spring of 312, Constantine and Maxentius would be at war.

In preparation for the conflict, either because he had just declared war or because Maxentius had just declared war on him, Constantine reached out to Licinius to secure an alliance. This alliance, which would isolate Italy and ensure Constantine would not be jumped from behind while he dealt with Maxentius, was cemented by the engagement of Constantine's sister to Licinius, a marriage that would eventually take place in early 313 AD. When Maxiministia and Maxentius received word that Licinius and Constantine were now in cahoots, it did not take long for either man to recognize how much this shifted the balance of power away from them. So Maxiministia, now technically the longest serving of the emperors, sent envoys to Maxentius in Rome, promising political recognition and full legitimacy in exchange for a military alliance. Since this is what Maxentius had wanted all along, he readily agreed to the pact, and so the battle lines were drawn, Constantine and Licinius vs. Maxentius and Maxiministia.

Over the course of the winter 311-312, a winter, I should remind you, that saw Diocletian finally die, Constantine and his advisors mulled over what to do next. For most of Constantine's inner circle, there were two paths to victory. 1. Remain in Gaul and wait for Maxentius to come to them, which will leave him outnumbered, fighting in enemy territory, ill-supplied, and constantly worrying about the political situation back in Italy. Or 2. Remain in Gaul and hope Maxentius stays in Italy, where, besieged from all sides and forced to raise ever more taxes and levy ever more troops to stay in power, his regime will eventually be toppled from within by angry Italians, who, Constantine's advisors had it on very good authority, had grown disenchanted with the men. Either way, the smart play, the safe play, and the winning play, was to remain in Gaul. Which is why Constantine announced his intention to invade Italy.

Wait, what? Next week, yes, you heard me right. Constantine will invade Italy. Whether he just thought it was good strategy, or whether he really thought God was on his side and would protect him, Constantine would set off in the spring of 312, on an audacious march on Rome. He had no good reason to think he would fare any better than Severus or Galerius, who had both found Rome impenetrable, but when he arrived at the Eternal City, he would find himself the benefactor of what could be described, if you were so inclined, as a miracle.