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II The Sources

      IN SHARP CONTRAST with that for the third century, the available source material for the period starting with Diocletian’s reign, and more especially for the late fourth century onwards, is extremely rich and varied. This is attributable not only to the large amount of Christian writing but also to the sheer quantity of secular writing in both Latin and Greek. The amount of Latin writing surviving from the late fourth century in particular is such as to surpass even the age of Cicero, and to make this one of the best-documented periods in Roman history. Ammianus Marcellinus, the one great Latin historian after Tacitus, completed his Res Gestae in Rome in the early 390s, while the voluminous letters of Q. Aurelius Symmachus, a latter-day Pliny, give us an idea of the priorities and the constraints on a pagan senator of wealth and position, even if not one of the superrich who are unforgettably described by Ammianus (see below). In addition, this is the age of the great Christian writers, men such as Jerome, Ambrose and, above all, Augustine, whose Greek counterparts were Basil of Caesarea, his brother Gregory of Nyssa, Gregory of Nazianzus, and John Chrysostom, the twiceexiled bishop of Constantinople. All bishops, and all highly educated in the traditional secular style, these men carried on the great tradition of classical rhetoric, which they turned to Christian purpose in speeches such as the funeral oration which Ambrose delivered in honour of the Emperor Theodosius I (AD 395). Another example, the funeral speech on Basil, bishop of Caesarea, by Gregory of Nazianzus (AD 379) has been described as probably the greatest piece of Greek rhetoric since the death of Demosthenes. The fourth and fifth centuries represent the golden age of what is termed ‘patristic’ literature, works written by the great Fathers of the Church, men who, released from persecution during the reign of Constantine, now often took on the public role of statesman as well as that of bishop.

      This is just to give a preliminary idea of the richness of the available literary material. Not surprisingly, it took some time to flower, given the apparent dearth of writing in the third century and the degree of social change which took place under Diocletian and Constantine. From the middle of the fourth century, however, we begin to see an upsurge of writing of several different kinds under the stimulus of a more settled social order which offered great opportunities to those with literary talent. Ausonius, a poet and rhetor from Bordeaux, rose to the very top and became praetorian prefect and consul after gaining the post of tutor to the future Emperor Gratian, while Claudian, a Greek-speaking Alexandrian, made his fame and fortune in Rome writing Latin panegyrics, highly elaborate and rhetorical poems in praise of the Vandal general, Stilicho, and Honorius, who succeeded his father Theodosius I as emperor in the west. The fourth-century emperors tried to curb social mobility by legislation, in the interests of securing the tax revenue; but a rhetorical, that is a classical, education was a path by which one could readily climb the social ladder.

      In most cases the great churchmen of the day had also had a training in classical rhetoric. Accordingly, the relation of secular to Christian culture is not easy to define (see in particular Chapter X below), and sometimes the two came very close. The pagan philosopher and rhetor Themistius, for instance, served Christian emperors apparently without difficulty, and was actually out of favour during the reign of the pagan Julian (AD 361–3). The Emperor Julian, the only pagan emperor after Constantine and an interesting writer himself, had been brought up in early youth as a Christian. He became a pagan when he was effectively exiled as a boy after his older male relatives had been murdered by their rivals, the sons of Constantine, and when he was, rather surprisingly, allowed to come under the influence of Athenian Neoplatonism. Once emperor, he produced a number of offbeat works, all in Greek, including a satire called The Caesars, partly directed at Constantine, an invective against ‘the Galilaeans’, as he called the Christians (mostly in fact concerned with Moses and the Old Testament), a hymn to the sun-god (‘King Helios’) and a lampoon called ‘The Beard-Hater’ in which he defended himself against his unpopularity with the citizens of Antioch. Earlier, he had composed a panegyric on his hated Christian patron and predecessor, Constantius II (AD 337–61) in which he still kept his paganism concealed.

      We must look at certain writers in more detail before turning to the non-literary sources. For the reign of Diocletian we are badly served by contemporaries, for no connected history survives, and it is necessary to rely to a large extent on the venomous Latin pamphlet On the Deaths of the Persecutors by Lactantius, a Christian convert and formerly a rhetor at the court of Nicomedia. Writing probably about AD 314, shortly after Licinius and Constantine had declared toleration for all religions in the so-called Edict of Milan, Lactantius’s object was to make an example of the horrible deaths that had befallen the persecutors of Christians, which he does in great detail, especially in the case of Galerius. This of course makes him a highly unreliable witness to the secular aims of Diocletian, who had initiated the persecution in AD 303; unfortunately the chapter which he devotes to Diocletian’s administrative and military reforms (De mortibus persecutorum 7) is too often taken at face value. The relevant part of the Greek New History by Zosimus, the late fifth or early sixth-century pagan writer from Constantinople, is missing, but had it survived, it would of course have been equally misleading, since in direct contrast to Lactantius the pagan Zosimus praised Diocletian and blamed Constantine for every ill the empire had subsequently suffered.

      For Constantine, it is a somewhat different story, for we have a number of important works by Eusebius, Bishop of Caesarea in Palestine, a great Christian writer and scholar. Eusebius established the new Christian genres of church history and chronicles, and still more important, is the major source for our understanding of Constantine. He did not suffer himself in the persecution of Christians, but knew and visited many senior clergy who did, and his later work was coloured by that experience. His Ecclesiastical or Church History, now in ten books, may have been begun before persecution broke out again in AD 303, though this is controversial; either way, it went through several rewritings as the situation literally changed all around him. The first change was when persecution was called off in AD 311, the next when Constantine defeated Maxentius in the name of Christianity at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge in AD 312; Constantine then went on to fight two further campaigns against Licinius, culminating in his victory in AD 324. The Church History received its final touches after this victory but before the Council of Nicaea which Constantine summoned in AD 325 and which Eusebius describes in his later work, the Life of Constantine (VC, Vita Constantini), completed after Constantine’s death in AD 337. Manuscript variants in the Church History make it clear that the author himself went over his earlier versions and touched them up in order to write out Licinius (previously presented in neutral or even favourable terms as Constantine’s ally) and defend and glorify Constantine as the champion of Christianity.

      The Life of Constantine, in four books, is less a biography than an extended and extremely tendentious panegyric, whose exaggerations and distortions have led many scholars in the past to doubt whether it could be the work of Eusebius. Some still suspect that certain passages are later in date, but by detailed comparison with the techniques of Eusebius’s other writings on Constantine it has been convincingly demonstrated that the work as a whole is consistent with Eusebian authorship. Eusebius also composed official speeches for the dedication of Constantine’s church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem in AD 335, and a highly rhetorical panegyric of Constantine for the thirtieth anniversary of the emperor’s reign in AD 335–36, known as the Tricennalian Oration, or LC (Laus Constantini, Praise of Constantine).

      There are some obvious problems about Eusebius’ reporting about Constantine. In the first place, it is extremely one-sided; he wishes to persuade us that Constantine was a model Christian emperor in everything that he did. Yet it is clear that the Life of Constantine, doubtless written with an eye to the unstable situation which followed the emperor’s death in May, AD 337, takes what Eusebius had said in his Church History much further, embellishing and adding details of a highly tendentious kind. Thus the famous story of Constantine’s vision before the Battle of the Milvian Bridge is told for the first time by Eusebius only in the Life (I.28), being entirely absent from the account in the Church History of the same battle (HE IX.9), which is clearly in general the foundation of Eusebius’s later narrative. The theme of Constantine’s youth, and

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