140 - My Three Sons

Hello, and welcome to the History of Rome, episode 140, My Three Sons. Well, live and in-person me is back. As you know, the History of Rome just spent the last five weeks bouncing back and forth between Italy and Turkey on the official History of Rome, Roman History Tour. It was an absolutely fantastic time, and the answer is yes, we are planning to do it again, and the sooner the better. That said, there's nothing I hate more than beating around the bush, so let's get back into this thing.

It's been six weeks since I last thought about the show, and I'm dying to find out what happens next. But there are two minor corrections I need to get out of the way before we can get on with it. The first, alert listener Anthony, caught me accidentally reversing syllables in episode 137, so the polarizing deacon who later became the polarizing bishop of Alexandria should have been Othonosius, not Onathosius. Sorry about that. The second mistake is from episode 138, and is quite a bit more embarrassing. See, what happened is that I had just gotten Mrs. The History of Rome into the reboot of Battlestar Galactica, so we were pretty much watching it non-stop. At the same time, I personally also happen to be watching a lot of the HBO Rome series. Do you see where this is going?

Unfortunately, despite my clear memory to the contrary, Saul Tai never did say, no one is a traitor until they are. Although, it really, really sounds like something he might say. In reality, Titus Pulo said it. He said it in Rome, season 2, episode 8, Unnecessary Fiction. Alert listener Nick mentioned in the comment thread that he remembered Pulo saying something just like that, and I immediately knew I had botched the reference. It was an honest mistake in a time of great stress, and I hope that you will all forgive me.

Okay, now that all the old business has been dispensed with, unless there are any objections, let's move on to new business. We left off last time with the death of Constantine on May 22, 337 AD. This week, I want to cover how his sons handled the fact that they were now in charge of the empire. As we will see, they will quickly prove that they are every bit their father's sons.

It is difficult to pinpoint exactly where the boys were at the moment of their father's death, but it appears that Constantine II, the eldest of the three at 21 years old, was in the far west, perhaps even as far off as Trier. Constance, the youngest of the three at somewhere between 14 and 17 years old, was likely in Pannonia or northern Italy, while the middle son, 20-year-old Constantius II, was in the far east, readying for a campaign against the Sassanids. Of the three sons, Constantius will prove to be the most cunning, decisive, and ruthless of them all, and this became apparent right from the very beginning. Dropping everything, he rushed back to Constantinople and took it upon himself to immediately oversee the funeral and burial of the dead emperor before either of his brothers could arrive and share in the prestige of presiding over an imperial funeral. Savvy play. And he was just getting warmed up.

Now as we discussed last week, Constantine had laid out a fairly detailed succession scheme that involved splitting up the empire between his three sons and two of his nephews, Dalmatius and Hannibalianus. The latter was to hold some vague authority over the eastern borderlands, while the former was to be granted control of Thrace, Macedonia, and Achaea, which is to say, Dalmatius was to be in charge of Constantinople itself. Others have surmised that Constantine was attempting to set up a sort of neutral zone around the capital, so that no one of his sons would be able to claim it as their own, and thus throw the balance of power out of whack. But boy, was that ever not what happened at all.

About ten minutes after Constantine was laid to rest, Constantius II initiated what has since been dubbed the Massacre of the Princes, which was, yeah, exactly what it sounds like it was, a massacre of princes. To fully appreciate what Constantius II is about to do, we must unfortunately turn for a second to the insanely convoluted Constantinian family tree, which I can assure you is every bit as confusing as the Julio-Claudian family tree. I'll admit that as I parsed my way through the twists and turns of Constantine's extended family, I secretly began to thank Constantius II for killing half of them off in May 337, just because of how much it simplifies everything.

As with the Julio-Claudians, there were two main branches to the family that were often at subtle odds with each other. On one side, there were the descendants of Constantius and Helena, which is to say, Constantine the Great and his children, and on the other were the descendants of Constantius and Maximian's daughter Theodora. Constantius's second marriage eventually produced three sons and three daughters, giving Constantine a raft of half-brothers and sisters to deal with. You'll no doubt recall that one of these half-sisters, Constantia, was married to Licinius, and another, Anastasia, was married to the ill-fated Bassianus, who Constantine executed on trumped-up treason charges as he was preparing a case for war against Licinius. The third sister, Eutropia, wound up giving birth to a boy named Napatianus, which is noteworthy for two reasons. First, he will show up briefly in 350 AD running a counter-usurpation against Magnentius, and second, that means that he survived the massacre of the princes, despite all the talk about how Constantius Gallus and Julian were the only males from the Theodora side of the family to make it out alive. Actually he is little noted because he was the son of one of Constantine's sisters rather than one of Constantine's brothers, so with patriarchal rules applying, he just isn't considered that relevant.

As for Constantine's half-brothers, the eldest, Flavius Dalmatius, had at least two sons that we know about, and, coincidentally enough, two sons that you know about too, the aforementioned Dalmatius and Hannibalianus, who were favored enough by Constantine to be brought into his succession scheme. The second brother, Julius Constantius, gave birth to two sons and a daughter with his first wife, and another son with his second wife. Now I normally wouldn't bother getting that deep into all of this, but the thing is that of all the males on the Theodora side of the family, not counting Napatianus of course, only the youngest sons of Julius Constantius will manage to survive the massacre of the princes, 11-year-old Constantius Gallus and 5 or 6-year-old Flavius Claudius Julianus, the future emperor Julian the Apostate. So sorry for throwing all of this mind-numbing lineage at you, but I wanted to at least introduce these boys so you know how exactly they come by their future imperial dignities.

The last of Constantine's half-brothers was an elder Hannibalianus, who was probably dead by this point, so just forget about him. He will not be on the test. Over the course of his reign, Constantine had brought in all of these half-brothers and sisters into his imperial system, doling out key assignments to the brothers and key marriages to the sisters. Constantius and Theodora had started up their family about 20 years after Constantine had been born, so when the emperor kicked the bucket in 337, all of these brothers and sisters were in their late thirties and early forties. In other words, entering the prime of their lives, ready, willing, and able to take on a greater role in government and help steer the fortunes of the next generation, the generation that had been granted formal authority by Constantine.

But Constantius II had no interest in playing nice with the other children. With the whole of Theodora's extended family present in Constantinople for the funeral, Constantius II saw an opportunity to secure undisputed power for himself and his brothers, and he took it. Though the details are sketchy, it appears that over the course of one or two bloody days, Constantius ordered his uncles and cousins seized and executed. Their alleged crime? Nothing less than the assassination of Constantine the Great. Some contrived evidence was put forth to support the charge, but other than that, there was nothing resembling due process.

All in all, nine men from Theodora's side of the family were killed, and this of course included Dalmatius and Hannibalianus, the young men who were supposed to share power with Constantius and his brothers. As I just said, not counting Napatianus, of course, young Constantius Gallus and Julian were the only ones spared, due entirely to the fact that they were merely children. But don't worry, Gallus II will eventually join his family by dying at Constantius's order in 354. In the end, only Julian will survive Constantius's wrath, and it's possible that that was only because Constantius died before he could get around to killing Julian.

So far as I can tell, Constantine's middle son faced no long-term repercussions for having ordered a purge of his extended family, and the Empire simply accepted that that was the way things went sometimes. That, and whoever might be inclined to dissent, just got put on notice that maybe criticizing the new emperor was bad for your health. Before we move off this though, I should mention that there is another version of all this, that depicts Constantius as merely allowing the massacre to happen, rather than ordering it himself. That is, the palace troops detested Theodora's side of the family so much that they were just itching to murder them all, and when Constantine died, Constantius II simply allowed their passions to run wild. But given every other paranoid and ruthless thing he did with his life, I am not at all opposed to laying blame squarely at the young prince's doorstep. It is in perfect keeping with all of Constantius's later tendencies.

His two brothers, for their part, did not seem at all concerned about the massacre, and when the three of them met a few months later in Sirmium, they did not engage in any hand-wringing over the murders, so much as focus intently on how best to divide the empire between them. The map they agreed to adhered mostly to their father's boundary lines, with Constantine II receiving the far western provinces of Gaul, Britannia, Hispania, and Mauritania, Constantius holding all of the eastern provinces plus Thrace, which means he gets Constantinople, another savvy play, and Constans holding Italy, Illyria, Macedonia, Achaea, and the middle African provinces. However, since he was no older than seventeen at this point, and possibly as young as fourteen, Constans was forced to accept that Constantine II would be his guardian and hold a super-authority over his territories until young Constans came of age. The youngest of Constantine's sons was no doubt annoyed by this, but he gave in, knowing that he would not have to wait long to be considered their equal. After all, his brothers were only twenty-one and twenty, respectively. In other words, not really much older than he was right then, so it's not like they were going to be bossing him around for long.

Emerging from the meeting, the three sons of Constantine were officially hailed as co-Augusti by the assembled troops, and then they marched off to govern their respective provinces. For Constantius, this meant heading straight for the Syrian border. You will recall from last week that in the final years of his reign, Constantine inexplicably began to provoke a war with the Sassanids, which, as you can imagine, they did not take kindly to. Now that some untested punks were in charge of the empire, the Persians decided that now was a pretty good time to punch the Romans in the nose and maybe remind them why détente in the east was far preferable to war. So they started attacking Roman positions, and off Constantius went to try to stop them.

We don't have a particularly good record of the subsequent campaign, but it appears that in the beginning at least, Constantius was repeatedly beaten and forced to scramble around a bit before he was able to find his sea legs, although nothing resembling a decisive encounter ever took place. Meanwhile, back in the west, Constantine II set up court in Trier and began surveying the territory that he now controlled. But when he surveyed the territory he now controlled, he quickly became convinced that he had been shortchanged. I'm not sure why he didn't just speak up during the meeting in Sirmium when this was all being hashed out to begin with, but he didn't, and so it's not until the winter of 337-338 that we begin to hear Constantine complaining that he deserved a bigger share of the empire because, after all, he was the oldest brother.

One possible explanation is that Constantine was under the impression that he would be able to dominate Constance forever, and so he had mentally lumped his youngest brother's territory in with his own. But after learning that Constance had no intention of being dominated by anyone, Constantine suddenly decided he wanted more territory to call explicitly his own. So he demanded that Constance immediately cede all the African provinces. This request was naturally met with some pushback by young Constance, but not so much at this point that war between the two brothers was inevitable. They agreed to meet later in 338 to discuss the situation.

In between coming to power and the summit with Constance, there was one matter of consequence that Constantine II weighed in on, and it has to do with our old friend, Athanasius. After bursting onto the scene as a fierce anti-Aryan deacon during the run-up to the Council of Nicaea, Athanasius had since succeeded Alexander to the bishopric of Alexandria, ignoring age requirements and proper electoral procedure to get there, by the way, and then he used his new powers to come down hard on those who strayed from the Nicaean orthodoxy. His methods were often denounced by his enemies within the church, and by 335 he was more or less dragged in front of Constantine the Great to answer a laundry list of charges, including destruction of church property and the murder of a rival bishop. Athanasius wound up being cleared of all the charges, except for an alleged threat he had made to cut off the Egyptian grain supply to Constantinople. You can do a lot of things in this life, but you do not even hint that you are going to mess with the grain supply from Egypt. Constantine ordered the polarizing bishop banished to Gaul.

After Constantine's death, the pro-orthodoxy western bishops began to petition Constantine to allow Athanasius to return to his post in Alexandria. Seeing a golden opportunity to establish friendly relations with the Christian leadership in his provinces, Constantine II canceled Athanasius' exile and granted his request for a return passage to Egypt. Now, the various exiles and returns from exile that this controversial bishop endured during his life, I think there were like 5 total rounds in all, would be important to document for a comprehensive history of the church, but that's not exactly what we're doing here. So the big takeaway from all of this is that we must understand how much Constantine II's decision to free Athanasius annoyed his brother Constantius II. Because Constantius was, wait for it, a staunch Arian.

So just over a decade had passed since Constantine had made Christianity the religion of the emperors, and already doctrinal disputes were percolating their way up into the imperial court. Almost from the start then, Constantine's dream of one church supporting one emperor turned out to be something of a pipe dream, as rival factions within the church were now supporting rival factions within the imperial family. Each side was playing for keeps, and one side had just convinced Constantine II to let an almost certainly seditious leader loose in Constantius's, their enemy's, domain. Constantius was not at all happy about this. It's an issue that likely would have come to a head eventually, but at that particular moment Constantius was bogged down fighting an inconclusive war against the Sassanids, and Constantine II was about to find out just how little Constance was willing to be pushed around. So they didn't have time to have it out over Athanasius.

In 338, the eldest and youngest of the three brothers met in Moesia to reassess their respective borders, and it appears that Constance, at least face to face, was willing to concede the issue. His older brother's rhetoric was getting mighty bellicose, so Constance agreed to hand over the African provinces to Constantine in the interest of imperial unity. At least, that's what he said. In practice, he was not going to go down that easy. For all of the rest of 338, the two brothers went off and defended their frontiers. Constance campaigned along the Danube against the Sarmatians, and Constantine campaigned against the Alamanni along the Rhine. But as 338 gave way to 339, the African provinces had still not been handed over to Constantine as per the agreement.

Constantine complained, which prompted Constance to finally begin the administrative handover. But even then, he told his brother that the city of Carthage and most of its surrounding territory was not going to be handed over. That land, Constance announced, was henceforth to be considered a part of Italia. Now of course, on the one hand, that makes no kind of sense. But on the other hand, it makes perfect sense. That part of the North African coast was the key supplier of grain to Italy. Giving up control of it meant giving up any hope of self-sufficiency. From a geographic point of view, arguing that Carthage was a part of Italy was and is insane. But from a military and political point of view, that section of the North African coast had to be considered a part of Italy.

In the ensuing back and forth, Constantine pointed out that arguing Carthage wasn't a part of Africa was insane, and Constance pointed out that he didn't really care, because he wasn't going to give up Carthage. Constantine tried to play the I am technically still your guardian, so do what I say card, and Constance countered with his, you know, I'm an adult now and you can't tell me what to do card. As 339 gave way to 340, the issue had still not been resolved, and tensions were rising. Constantine eventually became so angry over Constance's stonewalling that he decided to take the ultimate step. As the eldest brother, he could only allow so much disrespect before honor and dignity required that he do something about it. With Constance busy on the Danube campaigning once again against the Sarmatians, Constantine II was ordered by dignity and honor to invade Italy.

Word of the invasion reached Constance at his Dacian headquarters, and he immediately dispatched a company of his best troops to keep Constantine busy until Constance could extract himself safely from his northern campaign and come have it out with his brother in person. But there never would be any need for him to come. Shortly after invading, Constantine was running an operation near Aquileia when he was ambushed by enemy forces. In the ensuing fight, Constantine II was killed. He was 24 years old and had been in Augustus for just about three years.

It is probably too strained an analogy to call Constantine II the Fredo of the family, but between his failure to take charge after the death of his father, to his acquiescing to a power-sharing agreement that didn't favor him, to his whining about said power-sharing agreement after the fact, and finally to his botched invasion that led to his death, Constantine II does not really jump out and say, I was a great leader cut down before my time. More like, I'm not really the equal of my brothers politically or militarily, and it was just a matter of time before something like this happened to me. Dead on the battlefield or dead in a rowboat, I think that's where Constantine II was headed from day one.

In a mirror to the reaction of his brothers following the massacre of the princes, this time it was Constantius who found himself taking the news of a family member being killed off in stride. In the brutally unsentimental world Constantine's sons had been raised in, the loss of a brother was not seen as the loss of a brother, so much as the elimination of a rival. Now the empire was neatly divided in two between Constantius and Constance, a much more satisfying state of affairs for both of them, than the unwieldy five-way split that their father had left him with, and the three-way split that they had just dealt with. I have no doubt that each harbored dreams of winning sole control of the empire. But for now, each was fine to let the other have his half. Constance ruled the west, and Constantius the east. It was a power-sharing agreement that would last for a full decade, and though they came close, it was also a power-sharing agreement that never devolved into open war. In the end, it was Constance's loss of support amongst the men of the Rhine legions that did him in, rather than the machinations of his Machiavellian brother.

Next week, we will push on to that fateful year of 350 AD, and watch as Constance falls, Magnentius rises, and Napatianus makes his adorable little bid for power.