Defending Constantine: The Twilight of an Empire and the Dawn of Christendom (9 page)

Galerius may have been reluctant to accept Constantine's elevation, but he could not oppose the decision of Constantius. Accepting Maxentius's seizure of power was impossible. Maxentius had gained support by directly opposing Galerius's policies in Italy, and he had sought legitimation not from the existing senior Augustus but from his retired father. Galerius dispatched Severus, the Western Caesar, to dislodge Maxentius. Many of the soldiers in Severus's army, however, had served under Maximian and were loath to attack their former commander. Faced with mounting desertions, Severus retreated to Ravenna, where Maximian laid siege. Unable to take the city, Maximian worked out terms and took Severus captive to the camp Tres Tabernae outside Rome, where he was later executed or committed suicide during the summer of 307.33

Galerius decided he would have to extricate Maxentius himself, and in the autumn of 307 he marched into Italy toward Rome. His tax policies had made him unpopular in Italy, and his campaign foundered. Despite his huge army, he lacked the manpower to mount a thorough siege of Rome itself, and Maxentius rebuffed the ambassadors he sent into the city to negotiate. Like Severus, Galerius began to lose troops to old Maximian. Fearing that remaining near Rome would be disastrous, Galerius retreated, leaving behind a wake of vindictive destruction.

Constantine waited and watched from Gaul. Observing first Severus and then Galerius retreat from Italy, Constantine realized that Galerius's recognition of his position was a precarious basis for future power. He needed a firmer tie to the Western power network, and bolstered his power with one of the oldest of political tools-marriage. Constantine had been married before, to Minervina, and had a son, Crispus, by that first marriage. Minervina was dead, and now Constantine took a second wife. To shore up his own position, and perhaps betting that the Western emperors were the winning horse, he entered an alliance with Maximian and Maxentius, sealed by his marriage to Maximian's daughter Fausta late in the summer of 307.34
Inscriptions and panegyrics highlighted the family connection, addressing him as "grandson of Marcus Aurelius Valerius Max
imian Augustus" (Marci Aureli Valeri Maximiani Augusti nepos).35
Maximian and Maxentius had their own reasons for the alliance. Getting rid of Severus was not going to endear them to Galerius, and they needed Constantine and his army to stare down the Eastern Augustus or to repel another invasion.36
Constantine needed them too. He had appointed his own consuls in Gaul, defying Galerius's seniority in the imperial college. In retaliation, Galerius dropped Constantine from his coinage during the autumn of 307, a signal that he no longer considered him a member of the imperial college. For Galerius, there were only two legitimate members left-Maximian Daia and himself.37

The Tetrarchy was in disarray, and something had to be done about Maxentius too. On November 11, 308, Diocletian returned one last time to public life to meet with Galerius and Maximian at the Augustan military base at Carnuntum, near the Danube in what is now Austria. There the Tetrarchy was patched together. Maximian again agreed to step down, and Licinius, an old friend and ally of Galerius, leaped to the position of Western Augustus, while Constantine and Daia were confirmed as legitimate Caesars and adopted as filii Augustorum.38
The Tetrarchan principle that emperors choose emperors, with the confirmation of the army, was restored.39

For a few years, the empire enjoyed internal calm and stability. Constantine kept himself busy with campaigns against the Franks and with building a bridge across the Rhine at Cologne. Galerius and Licinius fought the Carpi in the Balkans.40
Maxentius remained in Rome, but Licinius had been assigned to finish him off.

For a time Maxentius had been the wild card, but his father proved difficult to handle as well. In spring 308 Maximian had attempted to depose his son. Standing before the army that he had once led, he asked the men to choose between father and son. They chose Maxentius, and Maximian, fearing his life, fled to the protection of his son-in-law, Constantine. But he was no more submissive to his son-in-law than he had been to his son.
When Constantine deployed him south on a military expedition two years later, he went to Arles, announced that Constantine was dead, and proclaimed himself emperor-again. Fearing Constantine's retribution, he fled to Marseilles, but when Constantine arrived after a forced march, the citizens opened the gates to him. Maximian was caught and allowed, or ordered, to commit suicide.4'
Later propaganda mentions a more direct plot, in which Maximian planned to kill Constantine in his sleep. Constantine's wife Fausta caught wind of the conspiracy and warned her husband, who placed a eunuch in the bed in his place. Maximian sneaked in, killed the man he thought was the sleeping Caesar, and ran out the door only to find Constantine waiting, sword drawn, to intercept him.42
Whatever happened, Constantine had had enough of his relations and broke off the alliance he had with Maxentius to join hands with the Eastern Augustus, Licinius. The alliance was sealed, like most alliances of the time, with a promise of marriage: Licinius was to marry Constantine's sister Constantia. In this way Constantine acquired another brother-in-law with whom he would eventually be at odds.

All was not well in Rome. Maxentius ruled Rome for six years and must have had some ability to win and retain loyalty. Like most emperors, he bolstered his popularity by extensive euergetism, bestowing gifts of bread, circuses, and baths.43
He was a busy builder. His "most extensive construction projects at Rome were just beyond the east end of the old Forum, on the north side of the Sacred Way." In that area of the city he "completely rebuilt the burned-out Temple of Venus and Roma, the largest temple in the city, which commemorated the eternity of Rome and its venerated status in the divine order," and next door went "an enormous basilica, the Basilica Nova. At one corner of the basilica he constructed a rotunda on the Sacred Way that probably was a temple dedicated in part to a cult in honor of his young son Romulus." Finally, "he may have had the colossal bronze statue (originally of Nero) that still stood next to the Colosseum rededicated in honor of his son."44

Over time, however, the Romans found him dangerous, and lecherous to boot. When the North African rebel Alexander stopped grain shipments to the capital in 309, riots broke out, which Maxentius brutally suppressed. Six thousand citizens "were slaughtered in the streets."45
He made himself odious to the senatorial class, whose support he needed to maintain power. He imprisoned senators and took other men's wives for himself and for his favorites.46
In February 312, the prefect Junius Flavi- anus resigned in disgrace following his wife's suicide, which reportedly was her typically Roman way of staving off Maxentius's seductions. At public events Maxentius was shouted down by Roman crowds, perhaps incited by Constantine's agents.47
Even pagan writers who deploy every weapon they can against Constantine find nothing good to say about Maxentius. Stories of Maxentius's "tyranny" had come to Constantine, and, recognizing an opportunity to realize his own ambitions, Constantine set out toward the capital on the convenient pretext of liberating the city. Constantine and Maxentius were moving inexorably toward a showdown.

Alliances and strategies shifted again in spring 311, when Galerius died of a wasting disease. Daia moved quickly to seize Galerius's territories in Asia Minor and secured a peace with Licinius, the other remaining emperor of the east. Far from renouncing Diocletian's persecution edict, Daia set about to reform paganism.48
Maxentius and Daia also grew close, or at least so the rumors went. The alliance was fateful for Maxentius. He had hoped to gain Christian support in Rome and Italy by canceling the persecution edict, but when he allied with the arch-persecutor Daia, he lost that constituency: "In a stroke," H. A. Drake writes, "Constantine became the true champion [of the church], Maxentius an unworthy pretender."49
As part of his agreement with Daia, Maxentius declared war on Constan tine. His pretext was to avenge his father's death, which he blamed on Constantine, but his treatment of his father was hardly a model of filial pietas. Given Maxentius's treachery toward the church, Christians viewed war between Constantine and Maxentius as a crusade for the liberation not only of the city but also of the church at Rome.

By late 311, the imperial alliances stood as follows. Constantine was allied with Licinius, who had temporarily made peace with Daia. Maxentius and Daia were allied as well. Diocletian, even in retirement, had curbed the ambitions of the other men to some degree, but the jockeying and alignments and realignments meant that the fuse was burning short. With Diocletian's death on December 3, restraint evaporated. Over the following year and a half, open war broke out between the claimants to the empire, and when all was done Constantine was emperor of the West.

It happened this way: in summer 312, with a small army of forty thousand soldiers, Constantine crossed into Italy and began moving toward Rome. He met Maxentius's forces at Susa, Turin, and Verona and was victorious in each encounter.50
By October he was camped within sight of Rome, on the Tiber, near Milvian Bridge.

October 28 marked the sixth anniversary of Maxentius's elevation as Augustus. It seemed a propitious moment for him to confront his enemy, and his confidence was buoyed by an oracle that reported, with the ambiguity characteristic of all oracles, that "the enemy of Rome" would soon be defeated. He believed he was engaged in a battle of gods, a religious war, one in which he upheld the traditional worship of the empire."
Encouraged by the oracle, Maxentius decided not to wait until his anniversary festivities were finished but marched out of the impregnable city to meet Constantine by the river. It was an imprudent military decision.

By that time the Milvian bridge had been destroyed, and Maxentius had constructed in its place a pontoon bridge as a trap for Constantine's troops. He hoped that they would try to cross the bridge, which could then be cut, leaving Constantine's soldiers flailing in the deadly waters of the Tiber.52
As it happened, Maxentius's forces were pushed back, and, caught
between Constantine's forces and the river, they fled across the bridge. In their eagerness to escape, they broke the bridge, and many drowned. Maxentius's own body was found downstream. A panegyrist found it significant that he had not reached his seventh year of rule: "The divine spirit and the eternal majesty of the city itself robbed the cursed man of good sense, and made him rush out, after his inveterate sloth and shameful hiding, and after the passing of six indolent years to mark the very day of his accession by his final destruction, that he did not violate the sacred and holy number seven even by commencing upon it."53

The following day Constantine entered the city of Rome in triumph, accompanied by a soldier who displayed Maxentius's head on a pike. Tyranny had been decapitated, and the Senate proclaimed Constantine the "liberator of the city" (liberator urbis).54
It was possibly his first visit to the capital, and the people received him enthusiastically. "Without a thought of resistance, crowds jammed the streets to catch a glimpse of the victor," Ramsay MacMullen writes, "cheered themselves hoarse, and were rewarded with scattered largesses and a good show." It was a show not unlike "our modern theater-in-the-round, a parade fairly bursting with drama that all could be a part of." On this day "the welcome of his adventus carried him through the Porta Triumphalis [Gate of Triumph] in a coachand-four, by winding progress to the start of the Via Sacra, into the Forum Romanum, and so to his palace."55

Constantine's victory marked the end of the entire system of the Tetrarchy and the beginning of a new political theology. The change showed itself almost immediately. The rules of the triumph required Constantine to enter the Capitolium and offer sacrifice to Jupiter; Constantine re- fused.56
Diocletian's empire was built on sacrifice, his persecutions in
spired by a failed sacrifice. As soon as he defeated Maxentius, Constantine made it clear that a new political theology was coming to be, a political theology without sacrifice. It was a signal of the "opposition to sacrifice" that he would hold to "consistently for the rest of his life."57

Diocletian's divine patrons were also being dethroned. Years before, the second Tetrarchy had been announced in Nicomedia in the shadow of a statue of Jupiter, and in Rome statues of the four original Tetrarchs were arranged around a statue of Jupiter. When Constantine's Arch was unveiled three years after he took Rome, the emperor was depicted not facing Jupiter but with his back to the god."

In the contest of the gods, Jupiter had not won. It was not yet clear to everyone who had.