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great pain, to the satisfaction of Lactantius and other Christian writers. Maximin (Maximinus Daia, nephew of Galerius), who had been declared Augustus by his own troops, now seized Asia Minor from Licinius, who had been appointed Augustus at the Conference of Carnuntum in AD 308. Constantine had now to protect his position; in 312 he marched down through Italy, besieging Segusio, entering Turin and Milan and taking Verona. Maxentius came out from Rome to meet his army and Constantine inflicted a heavy defeat on his troops at the Milvian Bridge over the Tiber on 28 October, AD 312. Many of Maxentius’s soldiers drowned in the river and his own head was carried on a pike through Rome. Constantine entered Rome in triumph and addressed the anxious senators, many of whom had supported Maxentius, promising clemency. The battle was depicted as a great defeat of tyranny by justice, as is recorded on the inscription on the the Arch of Constantine, still standing near the Colosseum in Rome and erected for Constantine’s decennalia (tenth anniversary) in AD 315. Dedicated in honour of Constantine by the senate and people of Rome, the inscription reads:

      by the inspiration of the divinity and by the nobility of his own mind, with his army he avenged the republic by a just war at one and the same time both from the tyrant and from all his faction.

      The Arch is decorated with reliefs depicting the campaign and the entry to Rome: the siege of Verona, the defeat of Maxentius, with his soldiers drowning in the Tiber, Constantine’s address to the Senate and his bestowing of largess.

      The defeat of Maxentius left Constantine in control of the west. In February, AD 313, he and Licinius met at Milan, where Licinius married Constantine’s sister Constantia; a few months later Licinius defeated Maximin, leaving himself and Constantine as sole Augusti, based in the east and west respectively. Maximin had renewed persecution in AD 312 (Eusebius, Church History IX.9), but like Galerius is alleged by Christian writers to have called it off again before his death (IX.10). The so-called ‘Edict of Milan’ (X.5; Lactantius, DMP 48), confirming religious toleration, is often attributed to Constantine alone, but is in fact an imperial letter sent out by Licinius in the east and issued by convention in joint names.

      Not until AD 324, therefore, when he finally defeated Licinius at Chrysopolis, did Constantine become sole emperor. A preliminary and inconclusive clash took place at Cibalae in AD 316, after which the two Augusti patched up their alliance, declaring their three sons Caesars on 1 March, AD 317. Since Lactantius wrote his pamphlet On the Deaths of the Persecutors before the battle of Cibalae, and since Eusebius was living in the east under Licinius, his coverage for this period is thin; moreover, in Eusebius’s account of the campaign of AD 324 in the Life of Constantine biblical allusion and tendentious rhetoric take the place of factual detail. In AD 324 he hastily touched up his Church History, removed or altered as many of the favourable references to Licinius as possible and added a brief description of the final victory. For the rest of the reign the main source is the Life of Constantine, written much later and completed only after Constantine’s death in May, AD 337, which it describes. The character of the Life itself also changes when it reached this point in the narrative: so far it has followed, supplemented and subtly reshaped the narrative in Book IX of the Church History, but from now on the work (which is expressly described as a portrait of Constantine as a Christian emperor rather than a complete history of the reign) becomes a repository of information of very varied type and origin, all of which needs careful and detailed analysis.

      Before turning to the subject of Constantine and Christianity, however, the extent of continuity between this period and the previous one first needs to be stressed. We are badly informed about Constantine’s secular policies; here too the evidence is more readily available for the period between AD 324 and 337. As we have seen, on the military front Constantine was blamed by pagan authors, especially Zosimus (II.34), for having weakened the frontier defences by taking troops away to serve in the field army. Clearly the military needs of the years AD 306–24 did imply the development of strong mobile forces, but this was in fact no innovation. In other respects too, for instance in the idea of a Persian campaign that he entertained in his last years, Constantine followed precedent. He also continued and consolidated Diocletian’s provincial and administrative arrangements, with the significant alteration that the praetorian prefects now lost their military functions. The reasons for, and the details of the change, which did not take place until the end of the reign, have been much disputed; it is probably attributable to the assignment of territorial areas to Constantine’s remaining sons and to two sons of his half-brothers in AD 335, but in any case it was a perfectly logical extension of Diocletian’s reforms. Similarly, the chief treasury minister henceforth, the comes sacrarum largitionum (literally ‘Count of the Sacred Largesses’), is first attested only in the latter part of the reign, and probably evolved in a similarly ad hoc fashion. Inflation continued under Constantine just as it had earlier. He was able to issue a new gold coin, the solidus, which was never debased and which remained standard until late in the Byzantine period; however, this does not indicate any fundamentally new economic measures so much as the fact that he had the necessary gold at his disposal. In part this came from the treasures of the pagan temples, which Eusebius tells us were confiscated, but it also derived from new taxes in gold and silver which were imposed on senators (the follis) and merchants (the chrysargyron, ‘gold-and-silver tax’):

      he did not even allow poor prostitutes to escape. The result was that as each fourth year came round when this tax had to be paid, weeping and wailing were heard throughout the city, because beatings and tortures were in store for those who could not pay owing to extreme poverty. Indeed mothers sold their children and fathers prostituted their daughters under compulsion to pay the exactors of the chrysargyron. (Zos. II.38, writing after the tax had been abolished in AD 499)

      The recent reforms were still working themselves through during the reign of Constantine, and if there was some sense of recovery, it was doubtless partly because the changes then introduced were now gradually being felt. The wars of Constantine’s early years also eventually gave way to his sole rule, which in itself brought respite and consolidation. One way however in which he seems at first sight to have dramatically departed from Diocletian’s precedent is in his use of senators in high office. According to Eusebius (VC IV. 1), Constantine greatly expanded the senatorial order, bestowing senatorial rank without the obligation to reside in Rome and attend meetings of the Senate itself. Later, a second Senate was founded at Constantinople, which had to be filled largely by new appointments. The role played by the new senators was however significantly different from that of senators in the early empire (see Chapter I). Interestingly, in view of their eclipse during the third century, Constantine used members of the great Roman families in his administration, as senatorial governors (consulares), as correctores, governors of provinces in Italy, as prefects of the city of Rome, and in the now largely honorific office of consul. Emulating their early imperial predecessors, these men were proud to record their offices on inscriptions, though the offices themselves were often different. The consul of AD 337, the year of Constantine’s death, was Fabius Titianus, who had been corrector of Flaminia and Picenum, consularis of Sicily, proconsul of Asia, comes primi ordinis (in Constantine’s comitatus), and was prefect of the city from AD 339–41 (ILS 1227, see Barnes, New Empire, 109). One of the consuls of AD 335 was Ceionius Rufius Albinus, son of Rufius Volusianus, who was himself consul in 311 and 314; the son survived exile for magic and adultery by Constantine in the fateful year 326 to become consularis of Campania, proconsul of Achaea and Asia, consul and prefect of the city (Barnes, New Empire, 108; for his father’s career, see 100).

      This development gives the lie, incidentally, to the commonly held theory of estrangement between Constantine and the Roman Senate. It would be natural to suppose that Constantine surrounded himself with Christians, but few of his appointees, to these posts at least, are provably Christian. An exception is the famous Ablabius (cos. AD 331), a Cretan of humble birth who came to Constantine’s attention, rose to become praetorian prefect and had the honour of having his daughter betrothed to the emperor’s son Constans (see Barnes, New Empire, 104); but most were from the new aristocracy which emerged in Rome out of the third-century confusion. Constantine’s expansion of the senatorial order was extremely important; it was to provide the foundation of a further enlargement over the next two centuries, in the course of which

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