A year after the Council Constantine dedicated, amid the desolation of Byzantium, a new city which he termed Nova Roma, and which posterity called by his name. In 330 he turned his back upon both Rome and Nicomedia, and made Constantinople his capital. There he surrounded himself with the impressive pomp of an Oriental court, feeling that its psychological influence upon army and people would make its expensive pageantry a subtle economy in government. He protected the army with able diplomacy and arms, tempered despotism with humane decrees, and lent his aid to letters and the arts. He encouraged the schools at Athens, and founded at Constantinople a new university where state-paid professors taught Greek and Latin, literature and philosophy, rhetoric and law, and trained officials for the Empire.52 He confirmed and extended the privileges of physicians and teachers in all provinces. Provincial governors were instructed to establish schools of architecture, and to draw students to them with divers privileges and rewards. Artists were exempted from civic obligations, so that they might have time to learn their art thoroughly and transmit it to their sons. The art treasures of the Empire were drawn upon to make Constantinople an elegant capital.
In Rome the architectural works of this period were inaugurated by Maxentius. He began (306), and Constantine finished, an immense basilica that marked the climax of classical architecture in the West. Adapting the structure of the great baths, this edifice covered an area 330 by 250 feet. Its central hall, 114 by 82 feet, was roofed by three cross vaults of concrete 120 feet high, partly supported by eight broad piers faced with fluted Corinthian columns sixty feet tall. Its pavement was of colored marble; its bays were peopled with statuary; and the walls of these bays were prolonged above their roofs to serve as elevated buttresses for the central vaults. Gothic and Renaissance architects found much instruction in these vaults and buttresses. Bramante, designing St. Peter’s, planned to “raise the Pantheon over the Basilica of Constantine”53—i.e., to crown a spacious nave with a massive dome.
The first Christian emperor built many churches in Rome, probably including the original form of San Lorenzo outside the Walls. To celebrate his victory at the Mulvian Bridge he raised in 315 the arch that still towers over the Via dei Trionfi. It is one of the best preserved of Rome’s remains; and its majesty is not visibly injured by the diverse pilferage of its parts. Four finely proportioned shafts, rising from sculptured bases, divide the three arches, and support an ornate entablature. The attic story bears reliefs and statues taken from monuments of Trajan and Aurelius; while the medallions between the columns are from some building of Hadrian’s reign. Two of the reliefs appear to be the work of Constantine’s artists. The crude squat figures, the awkward quarrel of profile faces with frontal legs, the rude piling of heads upon heads as a substitute for perspective, betray a coarsening of technique and taste; but the deep drilling produces, in the play of light and shade, an impressive effect of depth and space; and the episodes are presented with a rough vitality as if Italian art had resolved to return to its source. The colossal figure of Constantine in the Palazzo dei Conservatori carries this primitiveness to a repellent extreme; it seems incredible that the man who presided so graciously over the Council of Nicaea should have resembled this dour barbarian—unless the artist had a mind to illustrate in advance the cynical summary of Gibbon: “I have described the triumph of barbarism and religion.”54
Early in this fourth century a new art took form—the “illumination” of manuscripts with miniature paintings. Literature itself was now predominantly Christian. Lucius Firmianus Lactantius expounded Christianity eloquently in Divinae Institutiones (307), and in De Mortibus Persecutorum (314) described the final agonies of the persecuting emperors with Ciceronian elegance and venom. “Religion,” wrote Lactantius, “must by its very nature be untrammeled, unforced, free”55—a heresy which he did not live to expiate. More famous was Eusebius Pamphili, bishop of Caesarea. He began his literary career as a priestly scribe and librarian for his episcopal predecessor, Pamphilus, whom he loved so well that he adopted his name. Pamphilus had acquired Origen’s library, and had built around it the largest Christian collection of books yet known. Living among these volumes, Eusebius became the most erudite cleric of his time. Pamphilus lost his life in the Galerian persecution (310), and Eusebius was much plagued by later queries as to how he himself had survived. He made diverse enemies by taking a middle position between Arius and Alexander; nevertheless, he became the Bossuet of Constantine’s court, and was commissioned to write the imperial biography. Part of his scholastic harvest was gathered into a Universal History—the most complete of ancient chronologies. Eusebius arranged sacred and profane history in parallel columns divided by a synchronizing row of dates, and tried to fix the time of every important event from Abraham to Constantine. All later chronologies rested on this “canon.”
Putting flesh upon these bones, Eusebius issued in 325 an Ecclesiastical History describing the development of the Church from its beginnings to the Council of Nicaea. Here in the first chapter, again serving as a model for Bossuet, was the earliest philosophy of history—portraying time as the battleground of God and Satan, and all events as advancing the triumph of Christ. The book was poorly arranged but well written. The sources were critically and conscientiously examined, the statements are as accurate as in any ancient work of history; and at every turn Eusebius put posterity in his debt by quoting important documents that would otherwise have been lost. The bishop’s learning is enormous, his style is warmed with feeling and rises to eloquence in moments of theological odium. He frankly excludes such matters as might not edify his Christian readers or support his philosophy, and he manages to write a history of the great Council without mentioning either Arius or Athanasius. The same honest dishonesty makes his Life of Constantine a panegyric rather than a biography. It begins with eight inspiring chapters on the Emperor’s piety and good works, and tells how he “governed his empire in a godly manner for more than thirty years.” One would never guess from this book that Constantine had killed his son, his nephew, and his wife.
For like Augustus, Constantine had managed well everything but his family. His relations with his mother were generally happy. Apparently by his commission she went to Jerusalem, and leveled to the ground the scandalous Temple of Aphrodite that had been built, it was said, over the Saviour’s tomb. According to Eusebius the Holy Sepulcher thereupon came to light, with the very cross on which Christ had died. Constantine ordered a Church of the Holy Sepulcher to be built over the tomb, and the revered relics were preserved in a special shrine. As in classical days the pagan world had cherished and adored the relics of the Trojan War, and even Rome had boasted the Palladium of Troy’s Athene, so now the Christian world, changing its surface and renewing its essence in the immemorial manner of human life, began to collect and worship relics of Christ and the saints. Helena raised a chapel over the traditional site of Jesus’ birth at Bethlehem, modestly served the nuns who ministered there, and then returned to Constantinople to die in the arms of her son.
Constantine had been twice married: first to Minervina, who had borne him a son Crispus; then to Maximian’s daughter Fausta, by whom he had three daughters and three sons. Crispus became an excellent soldier, and rendered vital aid to his father in the campaigns against Licinius. In 326 Crispus was put to death by Constantine’s order; about the same time the Emperor decreed the execution of Licinianus, son of Licinius by Constantine’s sister Constantia; and shortly thereafter Fausta was slain by her husband’s command. We do not know the reasons for this triple execution. Zosimus assures us that Crispus had made love to Fausta, who accused him to the Emperor; and that Helena, who loved Crispus dearly, had avenged him by persuading Constantine that his wife had yielded to his son.57 Possibly Fausta had schemed to remove Crispus from the path of her sons’ rise to imperial power, and Licinianus may have been killed for plotting to claim his father’s share of the realm.
Fausta achieved her aim after her death, for in 335 Constantine bequeathed the Empire to his surviving sons and nephews. Two years later, at Easter, he celebrated with festival ceremonies the thirtieth year of his reign. Then, feeling the nearness of death, he went to take the warm baths at near-by Aquyrion. As his illness increased, he called for a priest to administer to him that sacrament of baptism which he had purposely deferred to this moment, hoping to be cleansed by it from all the sins of his crowded life. Then the tired ruler, aged sixty-four, laid aside the purple robes of royalty, put on the white garb of a Christian neophyte, and passed away.
He was a masterly general, a remarkable administrator, a superlative statesman. He inherited and completed the restorative work of Diocletian; through them the Empire lived 1150 years more. He continued the monarchical forms of Aurelian and Diocletian, partly out of ambition and vanity, partly, no doubt, because he believed that absolute rule was demanded by the chaos of the times. His greatest error lay in dividing the Empire among his sons; presumably he foresaw that they would fight for sole supremacy as he had done, but surmised that they would fight even more certainly if he chose another heir; this, too, is a price of monarchy. His executions we cannot judge, not knowing their provocation; burdened with the problems of rule, he may have allowed fear and jealousy to dethrone his reason for a while; and there are signs that remorse weighed heavily upon his declining years. His Christianity, beginning as policy, appears to have graduated into sincere conviction. He became the most persistent preacher in his realm, persecuted heretics faithfully, and took God into partnership at every step. Wiser than Diocletian, he gave new life to an aging Empire by associating it with a young religion, a vigorous organization, a fresh morality. By his aid Christianity became a state as well as a church, and the mold, for fourteen centuries, of European life and thought. Perhaps, if we except Augustus, the grateful Church was right in naming him the greatest of the emperors.
I Our knowledge of the Lyons persecutions comes from a letter of “the servants of Christ at Lugdunum and Vienna in Gaul, to the brethren in Asia and Phrygia,” preserved in Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History, V, 1. Some exaggeration may have crept into the report.
II Usually handed down by tradition in a Latin form: in hoc vince, or in hoc signo vinces—“in this sign thou shalt conquer.” Eusebius, our sole authority for this vision, is confessedly 29 prone to edification; “but seeing,” he pleads, “that the Emperor did with an oath confirm it to be true when he related it to me who intended to write his history . . . who can doubt his relation?”30
III This differs from the “Nicene Creed” now in use, which is a revision made in 362.
IV The Council also decreed that all churches should celebrate Easter on the same day, to be named in each year by the Bishop of Alexandria according to an astronomical rule, and to be promulgated by the Bishop of Rome. On the question of clerical celibacy the Council inclined to require continence of married priests; but Paphnutius, Bishop of Upper Thebes, persuaded his peers to leave unchanged the prevailing custom, which forbade marriage after ordination, but permitted a priest to cohabit with a wife whom he had married before ordination.50