When Diocletian and Maximian abdicated Diocletian’s carefully structured system of succession was put into operation with Constantius and Galerius being appointed Augusti and they in their turn naming two new Caesars. However, the system fell apart almost immediately. Constantius died in 306, but, instead of one of the Caesars succeeding him, he had arranged for the troops of Britain and Gaul to acclaim his son Constantine as Caesar. Meanwhile in Rome the son of Maximian, Maxen-tius, also had himself proclaimed emperor, benefiting from the unrest caused by Diocletian’s implementation of heavier taxation. By 308 there were no less than seven rival emperors contending for power. Diocletian’s hope that the Augusti might appoint their successors on the grounds of ability had already been replaced by a return to dynasticism.
The winner was to be Constantine, an intensely ambitious and determined man with little time for power sharing. He had to create an artificial lineage for himself that took him back beyond his father to Claudius, the great victor over the Goths. None of this would have meant much if he had not been a superb general. By 312 he was in Italy where he defeated the armies sent to meet him and advanced towards Rome, which was defended by Maxentius. The rival contenders for the western empire met at the Milvian Bridge, which ran across the Tiber just north of the city. It was a decisive battle. Maxentius and his men were trapped against the Tiber and forced into headlong retreat across the river where many, Maxentius among them, were crushed to death or drowned.
Constantine now entered Rome as victor and the senators soon voted him a triumphal arch that still stands near the Colosseum. Its decoration is a mixture of styles with much of the material reused from earlier imperial monuments. The reused material seems to have been picked specifically from monuments to ‘good’ emperors, notably Trajan, Hadrian, and Marcus Aurelius, presumably so as to associate Constantine with them. The contrast between these older reliefs and those created specifically for the arch is significant. A panel from an arch of Marcus Aurelius (see earlier, pp. 491-2) shows this emperor in his role as dispenser of justice and largesse, informally surrounded by petitioners. A newly carved panel shows Constantine in the same role but now represented sitting formally and staring to the front with the gathered petitioners carved at only half his size and gazing up at him. It is the pose of Septimius Severus at Leptis taken a stage further. The arch marks the appearance in art of the new imperial ethos, the emperor as demigod, removed from his people.
Map 17 Rome at the death of Constantine, ad 337. Note how Constantine had added traditional buildings such as a complex of baths, his triumphal arch, the basilica of Maxentius, which he completed, in the historic centre while his churches such as the Lateran Basilica (later St John Lateran) and Santa Croce were placed on the edges of Rome on sites already owned by the imperial family. This suggests Constantines determination to exercise his Christian patronage without offending pagan traditionalists. Other early churches (St Peters, San Lorenzo) were built on the burial places of martyrs.
The inscription on Constantine’s arch attributes his victory to ‘the inspiration of the divinity and the nobility of his own mind’. It appears that the emperor is being associated with a single god as his third-century predecessors, Elagabalus, Aur-elian, Diocletian (Jupiter), had been. The senate did not specify which divinity. On the arch Constantine is shown making a sacrifice to the goddess Diana but there is also a representation of the sun god shown alongside his head. In fact, from about 310, the sun god seems to have been Constantine’s favoured divinity, perhaps partly
Because the cult of Sol Invictus, the Unconquered Sun, was especially popular among the Balkan troops and their officers. Constantine was to issue coins with Sol Invictus portrayed on them as late as 321.
Yet the most remarkable legacy of the victory at the Milvian Bridge was the vision, or dream—the accounts are confused—that Constantine claimed to have experienced that linked his victory with the support of the god of the Christians. There followed an extraordinary reversal of policy towards Christians. In the so-called ‘Edict of Milan’ of 313, Licinius, Augustus in the east since 308, joined Constantine in proclaiming ‘that no one whatsoever should be denied freedom to devote himself either to the cult of the Christians or to such religion as he deems best suited to himself, so that the highest divinity, to whose worship we pay allegiance with free minds, may grant us in all things his wonted favour and benevolence’. It was a remarkable proclamation and can be interpreted as the culmination of the traditional Roman tolerance of religious cults, now extended even to Christianity. In this sense the Edict of Milan marks a significant turning point in western history. To understand its importance, the earlier history of Christianity itself needs to be explored.
World History
