God Against the Gods (23 page)

If Constantine was an early and enthusiastic convert to Christianity, as conventional Christian sources have always claimed, why did he delay his own baptism for so many years? All three of his surviving sons had been baptized and raised as Christians, but Constantine himself never joined them at the baptismal font.
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The conventional explanation is that deathbed baptism was a common practice in early Christianity—since baptism was believed to cleanse the soul of all sin, some Christians preferred to wait until all opportunity to sin was over. Indeed, Tertullian was distressed at what he called “the cunning postponement of baptism,”
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and complained that it actually encouraged some men and women to take advantage of the delay by indulging in as much sinning as possible before the baptism.

Some historians speculate that Constantine sought to be baptized, ardently and repeatedly, but he was denied admission into the church by the bishops because of some ghastly but undisclosed moral offense, perhaps the cold-blooded decision to murder his wife and son. The story was plausible to the ancient pagan chroniclers, who insisted that Constantine embraced Christianity only after he was first told by stern and high-minded pagan priests that his crimes could not be forgiven and then turned to a Christian priest “who offered him the free forgiveness of Christ.”
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Indeed, the orthodox bishop who served as Constantine’s confessor and counselor, Hosius of Córdovba, may have “used Constantine’s guilty conscience,” as Diana Bowder puts it, “as a means of tightening [Christianity’s] hold upon him.”
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Still, even if Constantine can be said to have “converted” to Christianity as early as 312, when he was granted a vision (or a dream) of the cross (or the
chi-rho
) on the eve of battle, the fact remains that he was never a rigorist or a true believer. To be sure, he clearly favored the Christian god and those who worshiped him, and he issued a series of decrees that were meant to make it easier to practice the faith. Sunday, the holy day of the Christians, was declared a legal holiday. Crucifixion was abolished, and displays of gladiatorial combat, which had been the occasion for so much carnage against the Christian martyrs, were discouraged if not outrightly prohibited. Christian clergy were granted the same rights and privileges that had long been afforded to the priests of pagan cults, and Christian churches were permitted to receive bequests. Constantine bestowed gifts of money and property on the church, including basilicas, palaces and a shrine of Apollo that was converted into the Church of St. Peter.

Constantine deferred to the church on matters of ritual purity among Christians. Thus, he did not confine himself to a decree that prohibited magistrates from
compelling
a Christian to offer sacrifice to the pagan gods; rather, he went one step further by issuing a second decree that prohibited Christians from
willingly
participating in pagan sacrifice. The same sensitivity was at work when it came to a syncretistic cult that worshiped at a shrine in a grove of trees near Hebron where, according to the Book of Genesis, God and two angels appeared to Abraham and Sarah. The visitation of the three divine figures was regarded as an early manifestation of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, but the whole nasty debate over Arianism cautioned the church against anything that seemed to link the Trinity to the practices of polytheism. So Constantine ordered the altar to be torn down and the figures that decorated its shrine to be burned.

But the fact remains that Constantine never criminalized the beliefs and practices of paganism itself. He may have ordered the closure of one or two pagan temples, but his decrees had more to do with his own sexual puritanism than a policy of antipaganism. One temple of Aphrodite in Lebanon was razed, for example, but only because it was reputedly a gathering place for transvestites and prostitutes of both sexes. At another shrine of Aphrodite in the same distant province, where only female prostitutes plied their trade, the emperor left the temple intact and contented himself with urging the populace to show “greater restraint.”
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And Constantine may have condemned the practice of priestly castration in Egypt, but he did not prohibit the priests from conducting the pagan ceremonies that were thought to ensure the annual flooding of the Nile that was crucial to Rome’s food supplies—why take the risk of drought and famine by offending the old gods and goddesses?

Even the city that carried his name was a showplace of pagan art and statuary, much of it seized from shrines and temples around the empire and shipped to Constantinople to adorn the new capital. Eusebius of Caesarea insists that the pagan art works were put on display to show the populace that they were false and detestable things, but the emperor’s real motives may have been less pure—Constantine may have hoped that the “magical power” of the gods and goddesses would sanctify his new capital.
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Thus, for example, Constantine held a gold statuette of Fortuna in his hand on the day of its dedication, and he ordered that an ancient wooden statue of the goddess Cybele, the Great Mother of the Gods, be set up in a portico where she looked out protectively over the city, her hands outstretched in a gesture of prayer.

“Constantine, it has been well said, might have entered on Christianity as a man embarks on marriage,” observes Robin Lane Fox, “not realizing at first that it required him to give up his former, disreputable friends.”
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Still, it is undisputed that Constantine died a Christian. He fell ill on Easter Sunday, 337. Seeking a cure, he visited a hot springs, and then, despairing of a cure, he visited a church, offering prayers for his own healing and vowing to live as an ascetic if his prayers were answered. At last, convinced that death was fast approaching, he summoned the bishops who served him at the imperial court in Constantinople and asked to be baptized. “The moment I have been awaiting for so long has come at last,” declared the dying emperor, or so says Eusebius. “Now I, too, may have the blessing of that seal which confers immortality. So be it, then. Let there be no further delay.”

On May 22, 337, at the age of sixty-six,
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after more than thirty years on the throne, Constantine was dead and gone at last. A majority of his subjects were still pagans, and paganism still served as the state religion of Rome. The Christian revolution that he set into motion was only beginning, and its success was far from assured.

CHAPTER EIGHT

THE ORPHANS OF MACELLUM

The Christian Prince Who Survived a Blood Purge and Struggled for the Restoration of Paganism

Only a little more effort and the Devil will be completely overthrown by your laws.

—Firmicus Maternus, On the Error of Profane Religions

No miracle is required to explain how Constantine continued to reign long after his death. The Chief Eunuch and Master of the Sacred Bedchamber greeted the corpse at dawn and bid it a good night’s sleep at nightfall. Ministers and generals kneeled before the body, which was displayed on a golden bed and adorned with the diadem and the purple robe, and offered their customary reports. Petitions were read aloud to him, and edicts were issued in his name. The imperial courtiers who had served the Augustus during his long reign feared the chaos and conspiracy that might ensue if the Roman empire found out that the emperor was gone before his sons had secured the crown for themselves. Not until all three of his surviving sons reached Constantinople in the late summer of 337 did they announce the momentous passing and send the corpse to its final rest in the Church of the Holy Apostles.

The solemn rituals that attended the belated imperial funeral offered a glimpse into a brave new world that Constantine had never seen. Constantine may have distanced himself from some pagan traditions—he discouraged blood sacrifices, as we have seen, and he closed down a few of the most provocative pagan shrines—but he tolerated and even participated in the more sedate rituals of paganism. When selecting men of rank and skill to serve in his army and his imperial administration, Constantine favored Christians but did not exclude pagans. Now, however, an unmistakable sign was given by the new regime that Christianity was to be granted an even more intimate and influential role in the governance of the Roman empire.

A public procession and a military funeral were conducted, and the coffin of the dead emperor was placed atop an ornate catafalque, fashioned of gold, decorated with gemstones and surrounded by the supposed relics of the apostles. The final interment of Constantine’s mortal remains was a moment of innovation in Christian history—countless thousands of Christians had been buried in tombs and catacombs throughout the Roman empire according to the prescribed rites of the church, but never before had a Christian emperor been laid to rest.

All pagans, even those of the highest rank, were wholly excluded from the sanctuary when the burial actually took place. The respect and tolerance that Constantine had extended to paganism, if sometimes only grudgingly, was now withdrawn, and only those who had been admitted to communion in the Christian church were permitted to witness the interment. Even so, out of long habit, the pagans of Rome afforded Constantine the same honor that pagan emperors had enjoyed ever since Octavian: they solemnly declared him to be a god.

The Blood Purge

On the death of Constantine, a remarkable document was found in the cold hand of the corpse—the last will and testament of the dead emperor. The will had been entrusted to Bishop Eusebius of Nicomedia, the man who had baptized him on his deathbed, and it was Eusebius who arranged for it to be found in the deathbed. The dying emperor, according to an account provided by the ancient chronicler Philostorgios, declared in the will that he had been the victim of murder by slow poisoning. He named the culprits as his own half brothers, Dalmatius and Julius Constantius—the sons of his father, Constantius the Pale, and his stepmother, Theodora—and he called on his sons to revenge themselves against his faithless siblings.

The accuracy of the charge against Constantine’s half brothers and, indeed, the authenticity of the document in which it was made were called into question even in antiquity. Dalmatius and Julius Constantius almost certainly had nothing to do with Constantine’s death; they had both been granted rank and title by Constantine, and they were occasionally entrusted by their half brother with political and diplomatic missions so sensitive that he clearly assumed they were both loyal and discreet.

But the phony will provided both an explanation and an excuse for the blood purge that the sons of Constantine—Constantine II (c. 316-340), Constantius II (317-361) and Constans (c. 323-350)—now carried out. The sons of Constantine were apparently convinced that someone would challenge their claim to rule in their father’s place, whether it was an uncle, a cousin or a courtier. When the killing was over, all of the potential rivals for the imperial crown were gone: “The sun of the sons of Constantine rose blood-red,” puns the nineteenth-century historian Gerald Henry Rendall, “with the slaughter of their kin.”
¹

Dalmatius and Julius Constantius were arrested, hastily tried and convicted, and promptly put to death. Constantine’s nephew Hannibalianus, to whom Constantine had granted the lofty title of “King of Kings” and the hand of his daughter, Constantina, in marriage, was seized in his little kingdom on the Black Sea in Asia Minor and murdered without judicial formalities by some of the troops under his command, supposedly on their own initiative but more likely at the instigation of Constantius II. The same fate befell another nephew, also called Dalmatius, who held the rank of Caesar and served on the troubled frontier along the Danube.

Clearly, a family relationship with Constantine and his sons, whether by blood or marriage, offered no security at all. Indeed, the men and women who were closest to the throne seem to have come under the sharpest suspicion. Julius Constantius was both the uncle and father-in-law of Constantius II. A man who had served as praetorian prefect under Constantine was arrested and executed, even though Constans was betrothed to his infant daughter. The husband of Anastasia, Constantine’s half sister, suffered the same fate. In sum, two brothers and seven nephews of Constantine were put to death, according to Julian’s count, and once the denunciations and executions began, the purge reached far beyond the imperial family.
²

Constantine’s sons, as we shall see, proved to be far less adept than their father at seizing and holding imperial authority, but they followed his example of ruthlessness in their attempts to do so. Ironically, Constantine had supplied them with a memorable display of these qualities when he had arranged for the murder of his firstborn son, Crispus, and his second wife, Fausta.
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Now they followed his example by arranging for the death of the potential rivals among
their
blood relations. Although all three brothers may have conspired in carrying out the blood purge, Constantius II is generally regarded as its principal author.

Only two other male members of Constantine’s intimate family circle survived the slaughter. The eldest of the three sons of Julius Constantius was slain, but the two younger boys were spared. One fanciful story preserved by Christian sources proposes that one or both of them were spirited away by a sympathetic priest through a secret passage in the palace and sheltered from the death squads in a church. A more plausible explanation is that the two young boys, suddenly orphaned by the murder of their father, were so frail and young that neither was regarded as a serious threat—the older child was twelve years old, ailing and expected to die, and the younger was only six years old. Their lives were spared, and they were raised as virtual prisoners of Constantius II, the cousin who had ordered the death of their father. The names of the young wards were Gallus (c. 325-354) and Julian (c. 331-363).
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Brothers and Emperors

The same forged will that prompted Constantine’s sons to murder their uncles, cousins and in-laws also provided for the division of the Roman empire among the three of them. After some bickering and bargaining, they agreed on how the spoils were to be shared out. The eastern empire went to Constantius II; the western empire was divided between Constantine II and Constans. Following the example of Diocletian rather than that of Constantine, they reigned as coemperors, each one formally acclaimed by the army and confirmed by the Roman Senate as an Augustus.

None of the three sons of Constantine inspired much admiration among historians, pagan or Christian. Constantine II, they suggest, may have been born out of wedlock to one of his father’s imperial concubines. Constans, only fifteen when he ascended the throne, is recalled as a pious hypocrite—he issued a decree that made homosexuality a capital crime, but he recruited his bedmates from among the “handsome barbarian hostages” taken in battle, according to Zosimus, and allowed them “to perpetrate any such misdeeds against his subjects as served him with occasion for sexual depravity.”
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And Constantius II is regarded as a murderous but weak-willed monarch who permitted himself to be manipulated by the men and women in his intimate circle, his wives as well as his courtiers.

“With his chamberlain,” cracks the pagan historian Ammianus Marcellinus in a sarcastic aside, “he possessed considerable influence.”
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The three siblings reigned as fellow Christians and, quite literally, as “brother emperors,” but the harmony among them was brief and mostly illusory. Indeed, the purge of imagined enemies within their own family and the division of the empire did nothing to ensure a peaceful reign. While their pagan subjects watched, waited and wondered what life would be like under the rule of three unambiguously Christian monarchs, the brothers went to war against one another.

An Enemy of the People

Perhaps because they had been entrusted in childhood to Christian tutors, the sons of Constantine tended to express their rivalries—both as siblings and as Augusti—in theological terms. On the vexing question of whether Jesus was God himself or only the Son of God, for example, Constantius II sided with the Arians while Constantine II and Constans sided with the orthodox church. Even so, politics and religion were so intertwined in the dealings of the three brothers that they cannot be readily or completely untangled.

Constantius II embraced a watered-down version of the teachings of Arius that came to be known as semi-Arianism—and, tellingly, so did Bishop Eusebius of Nicomedia, the man who came up with the will that bestowed upon Constantius II the richest portion of the Roman empire. By contrast, Constantine II and Constans, who were forced to share sovereignty in the western empire under the terms of the same will, denounced all shades of Arianism as heresy and embraced the orthodox theology of Bishop Athanasius (c. 293-373), the bitter adversary of Arius. Conveniently, and not incidentally, each of the three emperors followed the apparent preferences of the majority of Christians in his realm—Arianism was dominant in the eastern empire where Constantius II reigned, and orthodoxy was dominant in the western empire, where Constantine II and Constans reigned.

One example of how religion mirrored politics under the reign of the three sons of Constantine can be found in the curious fate of Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria, champion of orthodoxy and bitter enemy of the Arians, whom he dismissed as “Ariomaniacs.”
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Over his long and troubled tenure, Athanasius was sent into exile on five separate occasions by various emperors. But Constantine II befriended Athanasius, sheltered him at his court in Gaul, and even purported to authorize his return to Alexandria, all in defiance of both the political authority and religious affiliation of his brother and fellow emperor.

Constans, who shared Constantine II’s commitment to orthodoxy, joined in championing the cause of Athanasius. He sent letters of entreaty to Constantius II in an earnest and even frantic effort to persuade him to permit Athanasius and other orthodox bishops to return to their old sees. When letters were unavailing, Constans sent emissaries, and when the emissaries failed in their mission, he threatened to send an army and a fleet against his Arian brother in the name of orthodoxy. And yet his faith ultimately mattered less than his ambition—when Constans eventually took up arms, it was against his orthodox brother, Constantine II, rather than his Arian brother, Constantius II.

Indeed, the conflict between Constantine II and Constans had nothing to do with matters of theology. As orthodox believers, they both professed that God and Jesus were
homoousion
—made of the same stuff—and they both sided with Bishop Athanasius against the Arian “heretics” who held that God and Jesus were made of similar stuff. But they were also both aggrieved over their respective shares of the western empire. “[T]hey were incapable of contenting themselves,” notes Edward Gibbon, “with the dominions which they were unqualified to govern.”
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In 340, Constantine II crossed the Alps at the head of an army in an effort to take Italy away from Constans. Young Constans did more than merely defend the territory that had been awarded to him on the death of their father: an advance guard of Constans’s army lured Constantine II into a fatal ambush, the battered body of the dead emperor was dumped into the Alsa River, and the whole of his realm passed under the sovereignty of Constans. The common faith of the two brothers did nothing to soften the heart of the victorious Constans—he declared his fellow believer in orthodoxy to have been an enemy of the people, annulled his decrees and edicts, and seized his holdings. At seventeen, Constans was the sole emperor of the western empire.

Ironically, the two sons of Constantine who both embraced orthodox Christianity fell out with each other, and yet Constans managed to live in concord with his Arian brother, Constantius II, for a full decade. When Constans met an early and violent death, the blow was struck by an ambitious pagan general who saw an opportunity to claim the imperial crown and restore the old gods and goddesses to the place of honor they had so long enjoyed in Rome.