God Against the Gods (22 page)

Constantine claimed to have been divinely inspired to build the city that turned out to be his most enduring monument, and he thus inspired the chroniclers to supply the colorful and evocative details that he neglected to mention. One tale reports that Constantine dreamed of an old crone who changed into a beautiful young woman, “so charming to his eye . . . that he could not refrain from kissing her.” The dream supposedly baffled him until the late bishop of Rome, Pope Sylvester I, appeared to him in a second dream and explained that he was being instructed to build a new city: “You should make it famous with your own name,” the pope tells the emperor, “and your descendants shall reign here forever.”
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Another story proposes that as Constantine was marking out the future city limits, one of his courtiers ventured to observe that the site was surely large enough and to ask when the emperor would finally stop. “Not until He who walks before me stops.” So Constantine walked on, dragging the spear behind him. Constantine himself was never specific about what deity, if any, he had in mind; it is Christian tradition that supplies the capital H in the word “he,” suggesting that the invisible guide was the Only True God.
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History tells a rather different story. The city was not built on virgin soil—the site was already occupied by the ancient city of Byzantium, a place that had long figured in pagan myth and legend and, since it marked the place where Europe ends and Asia begins, provided both symbolic and strategic advantages. Nor was Constantine’s new city untainted by paganism. The emperor sought the advice of pagan astrologers and augurs in choosing an auspicious day for the ancient pagan ritual of marking the boundaries. The dedication of the completed city, which took place only two years after the ground-breaking, was celebrated with “ancestral rites” of pagan origin that lasted forty days, including public feasts, games and processions.
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Among the
prominenti
who were invited by Constantine to participate in the festivities were Sopater, a leading practitioner of the mystic pagan philosophy called Neoplatonism, and Praetextatus, a man who was famous for multiplying his various priesthoods, including those of
Sol Invictus
, Isis, Cybele and Mithra.

To symbolize the fact that the city of Constantine was now the “New Rome,” wholly replacing the old capital as the seat of the empire, Constantine ordered the statue of the goddess Athena to be seized and carried from Rome to Constantinople. At least two pagan temples were erected in Constantinople while Constantine himself was yet alive—one was dedicated to the demigods Castor and Pollux, patrons of horsemanship in general and cavalry in particular, and another to Fortuna, the goddess who was believed to determine one’s fortune, good or ill. A third shrine, dedicated to the spirit of “Holy Peace,” was also associated with pagan tradition, and a fourth was devoted to Constantine himself.

“So much for Eusebius’ assertion, in his
Life of Constantine
,” declares Diana Bowder, “that Constantinople was a wholly Christian city, without a single pagan temple!”
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According to Eusebius of Caesarea, Constantine ordered that idols in pagan temples throughout the empire be seized and stripped of their gold and silver shells so that the wooden armatures and straw stuffing would be revealed—the pagans would be confronted with the fact that the idols were not gods at all. But Constantine’s real motive in looting the pagan treasures had less to do with Christian idealism than with raising money to pay for the construction of his new city. After all, even the pagan emperors had been willing to melt down statues fashioned out of precious metals in order to pay for armies or palaces. Significantly, Constantine destroyed the pagan statuary that could be melted down into gold or silver ingots while preserving those fashioned out of brass, wood or marble: “For the decoration of his new capital,” writes the nineteenth-century historian Jacob Burckhardt, “Constantine was very willing to use images whose material was of no great value.”
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Even the gargantuan statue of Constantine, fashioned out of gilded bronze and set atop a column of stone, was free of Christian iconography of any kind. He was depicted in a manner that was strongly suggestive of a pagan god—the head was adorned with the radiate crown that was an attribute of
Sol Invictus
, the sun god, and the right hand carried the figure of Victory, one of the most cherished pagan goddesses of ancient Rome. The figure itself, in fact, was a statue of Apollo from the site of ancient Troy whose face was reworked to resemble Constantine. And the whole elaborate display was artfully designed to invoke the loyalties of both pagans
and
Christians. The installation incorporated the most precious artifact of the pagan world—the statue (or “Palladium”) of Athena, reputedly brought from Troy by Aeneas in distant antiquity—and the most precious artifact of the Christian world, a supposed fragment of the True Cross that Helena brought back from her expedition to Palestine.

“The foundation of [Constantinople] was a careful piece of symbolic and spiritual engineering, conducted according to the age-old techniques of Pagan magical technology,” insist historians Prudence Jones and Nigel Pennick.
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But Jacob Burckhardt offers quite another way of understanding Constantine’s motives in founding and adorning the city he named after himself: “Here Constantine is neither pagan nor Christian—for he affronted both religions by carrying images of the gods off to Byzantium—but a self-seeking plunderer for the sake of glorifying his own name.”
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The Tinted Wig

According to a charming tale that is preserved in the ancient sources, Diocletian was invited by Maximian to resume the rank of Augustus at a particularly tumultuous moment in the struggle that followed his retirement. Now living in obscurity at his villa on the Dalmatian coast, Diocletian was offered the opportunity to once again wear the diadem and the purple mantle, to take up residence in the imperial palace and to rule the Roman empire as its lord and master. All these blandishments, however, left the old emperor unmoved.

“He rejected the temptation with a smile of pity,” writes Gibbon, “calmly observing that, if he could show Maximian the cabbages which he had planted with his own hands at Salona, he should no longer be urged to relinquish the enjoyment of happiness for the pursuit of power.”
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No such scene was ever played out in the life of Constantine. He reigned for more than thirty years, and as he aged, he only grew more attached to absolute power and its trappings: “He wore the garb of kings adorned with jewels,” reports the ancient historian Zosimus, “and on his head a diadem constantly.”
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Indeed, his harshest critics depict him as a ludicrous and even laughable figure toward the end of his reign, given to wearing tinted wigs in a rainbow of colors and draping himself in garish silks. No longer the handsome, fit and forceful young man who is depicted in the statuary that he left behind, Constantine was now thickset and gone to fat. Zosimus notes that “in common parlance he was called ‘Bullneck.’ ”
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Even Eusebius of Caesarea, his mostly worshipful biographer, finds himself forced to concede that the old emperor was an odd sight, although he insists that Constantine was only seeking to please the plebs. “He smiles at his dress,” writes Eusebius of the occasion of Constantine’s
tricennalia
, “with its embroideries of gold and flowers, and at his imperial purple and diadem, when he sees the crowds staring like children in wonderment.”
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But, quite unlike the more notorious pagan emperors, Constantine could not be fairly accused of the sins of carnality. “[F]rom his earliest youth to a very advanced season of life,” allows Gibbon, “he preserved the vigour of his constitution by a strict adherence to the domestic virtues of chastity and temperance.”
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He was, in fact, “a puritan of sorts,” according to John Holland Smith.
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Among his decrees and edicts were laws that were designed to discourage concubinage, the prostitution of inn-servants and the seduction of slaves, all of which may have been prompted by the fact that his own mother was reputed to have been the victim of one or two of these offenses against public morality.

The crowning moment of his reign was the
tricennalia
, a public celebration of the supreme power that he had achieved by force of arms and preserved by force of will for more than thirty years. Ambassadors from all over the ancient world presented themselves at court to honor the old emperor, including a delegation from Persia, the once and future enemy of the Roman empire. Yet Rome was no less troubled at the end of Constantine’s reign than it had been at the beginning, and history would reveal that nothing Constantine had accomplished as the all-powerful Augustus would halt its decline and fall.

The construction of Constantinople had exhausted the royal treasury. The barbarian tribes along the Danube continued to threaten the
Pax Romana
. Plague had broken out in the provinces of Asia Minor, famine in the villages of Syria, bread riots in the streets of Antioch. Now and then, the more militant Jews in Palestine rose up in protest against the Roman occupation of their homeland. A usurper set himself up in Cyprus as a rival for the imperial crown. The emperor of Persia was engaging in provocative acts of persecution against his own Christian population, perhaps as a prelude to war against Rome. By 337, the last year of his long life and reign, Constantine bestirred himself yet again to lead his army into battle—a battle that he would not live to fight.

Was Constantine a Christian?

One question remained unanswered even at the very end of his long reign: Was Constantine an earnest convert to Christianity, or merely a cunning politician who saw in Christianity a tool for his own self-aggrandizement? For the pious chroniclers of Christianity, the
bona fides
of Constantine are beyond dispute—that is why he is hailed as “Constantine the Great” in Catholic tradition and even as “St. Constantine” in Orthodox tradition. “What is really remarkable and astonishing,” insists historian Andrew Alfoldi, “is the fact that Constantine succeeded, in one short decade, in shedding his last vestiges of polytheism.”
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But secular historians are a bit more guarded in their judgments about the so-called conversion of Constantine.

Some historians suspect Constantine of being a halfhearted Christian at best, a man who was motivated by political calculation rather than true belief. “His religion, if he had any, would seem to have been purely nominal,” argues John Holland Smith. “Constantine neither persecuted Christians nor, apparently, favoured them until it became expedient for him to do so, when he needed them as allies in the war for Rome.”
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Other historians are willing to credit Constantine with sincerity if not purity of motive in his embrace of Christianity. “It was no cynical calculation that made Constantine a Christian, and at the date of his conversion, Christianity was far too unimportant, especially in the West, to justify an appeal to its adherents,” insists Diana Bowder. “It is clear from our sources that Constantine was a deeply religious man, quite incapable of any self-interested pretence in this sphere. . . . [T]o the end of his life, he acted out of his conviction that he had been chosen by the God of the Christians to inaugurate a Christian Roman Empire.”
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Constantine was surely a visionary and a revolutionary, no less so than Akhenaton or Josiah—“a man of action,” according to a modern historian who sums up the testimony of the Christian chronicler Philostorgios, “just as brutal and decided as he is farsighted and intelligent.”
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Like them, Constantine claimed to have been on a divinely ordained mission: “This was my glorious task,” he says of himself, “God’s gracious gift to me.”
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From the pagan perspective, of course, he was “a wicked innovator and tamperer with the time-hallowed laws,” as Julian sees it, “and the sacred ethical traditions of our fathers.”
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But an argument can be made that Constantine remained open-minded on the subject of religion even after he embraced a high god whose name and identity he often neglected to mention, referring instead to a kind of all-purpose deity that he called the “Highest God” or “Supreme God.”

“He seems in fact to have been a normal polytheist, and he both permitted and founded shrines to other divinities,” insist Jones and Pennick. “What Constantine actually did was to grant freedom of religion to all within the Empire, [and] he was personally inclined to the worship of a supreme and nameless deity, as the philosophers had been before him.”
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No historian, pious or secular, can dispute the simple and compelling fact that Constantine was not formally admitted to the Christian church until he fell ill in 327 and called a priest to his sickbed to baptize him only hours before his death. Until that moment, he was never more than a “hearer” in the Christian church, a term that was reserved for those who were preparing for conversion, and he had never tasted the wafer or sipped the wine of Holy Communion. At one moment of candor, in fact, he revealed to a council of Christian clergy that he regarded himself as “the bishop of those outside the church.”
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