Young Constantine was born in one of the military encampments where Constantius spent his early career as a soldier on campaign, although we do not know exactly where. By tradition, the year was 274, although the date of his birth, too, is the subject of speculation. Constantine may have been raised in Gaul, his father’s base of operations against the barbarians and later his seat of government as Caesar, or in the unknown provincial backwater where his mother had been sent to live, or—perhaps most likely—he shuttled between both places during his unsettled childhood.
The details of Constantine’s upbringing have not been preserved, if only because they were regarded in retrospect as awkward and embarrassing for a man hailed as “the Great.” He was “less than well educated,” as one ancient source delicately puts it,
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and the best evidence is found in the oratory, decrees and letters that can be shown to have originated with the emperor himself rather than one of his servitors—Constantine’s work is characterized by “clumsiness” and “childish silliness,” according to historian Andrew Alfoldi.
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We know that Constantine grew up speaking Latin, the
lingua franca
of the western Roman empire and the language used in matters of state; his command of Greek—the language of high culture in the Hellenistic world—was notoriously and even laughably poor.
What instruction Constantine received in matters of religion is a subject of much speculation. His father was a worshipper of
Sol Invictus
, a fact that prompts some historians to regard Constantius the Pale as a kind of proto-monotheist or even a secret Christian. One of his daughters by Theodora, for example, was named Anastasia (“Resurrection”), a name with powerful resonance in Christian tradition. The stern decrees of Diocletian against the practice of Christianity went mostly unenforced in the provinces of the Roman empire where Constantius reigned as Caesar, and his court was known as a place of refuge for high-ranking officials who happened to be Christians. But it is unlikely that Constantine or anyone else in his family were, as yet, practicing Christians. “If the sacrifice to the Genius of Empire that was the test of loyalty was ever demanded of them, they must have offered it unhesitatingly,” writes John Holland Smith, “otherwise Eusebius would have written not the
Life of Constantine
but the
Acts of Constantine the Martyr.
”
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Still, Constantius came under suspicion in the court of Diocletian for his distinct lack of fervor in seeking out and punishing the Christians who refused to demonstrate their good citizenship by offering sacrifice to the deified emperor and the other pagan gods. When young Constantine and his mother were summoned by Diocletian, abruptly and without explanation, the senior Augustus may have been seeking to hold Constantine as a hostage to ensure his father’s loyalty. And the ploy was successful in provoking the concerns of Constantine’s father—Constantius monitored his son’s welfare, seeking reports from his own sources in Diocletian’s court about how Constantine was faring in the treacherous world of imperial politics.
Constantine, it turned out, was faring remarkably well. Diocletian was impressed by the young man, who grew up strong, fit and handsome—the surviving busts of Constantine give him even features, a strong jaw and a cleft chin—and the emperor groomed him for a career in imperial service. At the age of nineteen, Constantine was granted his first commission as an officer in the Roman legions. A year later, he was betrothed to Fausta, the daughter of Maximian, the western Augustus under whom his father served as Caesar. By the age of twenty-two, Constantine had been promoted to tribune first class, a rank roughly equivalent to a colonelcy, in the palace guard that attended Diocletian, and he traveled with the imperial entourage on a campaign to Syria to suppress the unruly Saracens on the eastern fringe of the Roman empire. Later, he campaigned with distinction against the enemies of Rome in far-off Egypt, on the long embattled Persian frontier and in various hot spots where barbarian tribes threatened Roman outposts in Britain and Gaul.
In fact, young Constantine may have been rather
too
successful for his own good. He was “matched by none in grace and beauty of form, or in tallness, and so surpassed his contemporaries in personal strength that he struck terror into them,” writes the church historian Eusebius of Caesarea, a contemporary of Constantine and an eyewitness to many of the events he describes in detail in his
Life of Constantine
. So the superior qualities of the eldest son of Constantius the Pale excited jealousy rather than admiration among the other members of the Tetrarchy: “The ruling emperors, noting his virile and vigorous appearance and enquiring mind, were moved to jealousy and fear, and they carefully watched for an opportunity to inflict a damaging wound on his character.”
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Among the tales that came to be written into Constantine’s biography by Christian chroniclers are accounts that could (and may) have been drawn from various episodes in the biblical account of Samson and David. Constantine, it is said, was dispatched by a jealous Galerius to command the legions in places where the fighting was hottest, thus exposing him to the heightened risk of a convenient death in battle. On one occasion, Galerius set the young Constantine in single combat against an especially fierce prisoner of war taken in battle against the barbarians of the Danube Valley. According to another tale, young Constantine was so eager to prove himself—and so little able to control his formidable temper—that his comrades in arms baited him into taking on a wild lion. As if to prove Constantine’s kingly qualities, the lion was the loser.
The War on Monotheism
On February 23, 303, after consulting an oracle of Apollo and receiving what he believed to be encouragement from on high, Diocletian issued an edict that formally criminalized the practice of Christianity, and the so-called Great Persecution—the last and most extensive of the ten persecutions that started with Nero—began in earnest.
Diocletian had been moving toward open persecution throughout his reign. Only a few years earlier, for example, he had convened a conference at Antioch to consider a grave problem: when he sacrificed to the gods to obtain their advice on military operations against the enemies that surrounded and threatened Rome on all sides, the priests who studied the livers and other viscera of the slain animals were repeatedly unable to find clear answers to his questions.
The problem, said the chief soothsayer, was that Christians among the imperial servants and the palace guard were secretly crossing themselves at the moment of sacrifice. Christian magic, as the pagans saw the gesture, was so offensive to the gods and goddesses that they were shocked into silence. “Those Christian brethren, by signing their brows with the Cross,” explains the church father Lactantius, “put the gods to flight, so that they could not reveal the future from the entrails of the beasts.”
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Diocletian promptly ordered everyone in the imperial court to prove his piety and loyalty by offering a sacrifice in the pagan manner—anyone who refused was flogged, and the soldiers among them were stripped of their rank.
The most zealous of the Christians posed an even more direct threat, one that reminds us of the Maccabees and the Zealots. The Christian community in Syria, for example, rose up in open resistance against the imperial decrees that were meant to intimidate them into abandoning their new faith. And when a fire broke out in the bedchamber of Diocletian’s palace at Nicomedia, Diocletian suspected that it was an act of terrorism by a pair of eunuchs in imperial service who had been seduced into converting to Christianity. The eunuchs, he feared, had been persuaded by “desperate fanatics” among their fellow Christians to assassinate both Diocletian and Galerius, and the fire in his bedchamber represented their earnest if failed effort to do so.
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The soothsayers who blamed the Christians for their inability to see the future in a mess of guts were clearly playing on the mounting anxieties of the emperor. Every misfortune that befell Rome—every spike in the price of grain, every drop in the value of the coinage, every skirmish with a barbarian tribe on the embattled borders, even the bolts of lightning that struck the imperial palace—were seen as ominous and compelling evidence that the “atheists” were threatening the “peace of the gods” that had previously preserved the empire. The refusal of the Christian rigorists to afford even a simple gesture of respect to the deities of the Roman pantheon was seen as mad, demonic or subversive, and possibly all three at once.
Diocletian was also urged toward open war on monotheism by his second in command, Galerius, a man of barbarian descent who showed himself to be so brutal and so coarse that the troops under his command dubbed him “the Drover.”
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His own hatred of Christianity was stoked by his mother, a priestess in one of the pagan cults, who complained bitterly to her son about the poor turnout of Christians at the sacrificial rites over which she presided. Long before Diocletian issued the harsh decrees that have come to be called the Great Persecution, Galerius was ready to carry out an even more bloodthirsty purge—he urged the senior Augustus to decree that any Christian who refused to sacrifice to the pagan gods and goddesses be burned alive.
So the Great Persecution was Diocletian’s declaration of war on monotheism—the spirit of religious toleration that had always characterized paganism was withdrawn from Christianity, and the Christians returned the favor by refusing to acknowledge the pagan gods and goddesses. Christian churches were to be closed down, and Christian writings were to be seized and burned. Christians were forbidden to hold public office or testify in court. Any Christian who refused to demonstrate loyalty to the emperor and the state by turning over his or her Bible and dropping a pinch of incense on the altar fire was liable to torture, disfigurement or death.
“[C]onfessors for the faith,” writes Lactantius, a pagan who embraced Christianity during the Great Persecution out of admiration for the courage of the martyrs, “had their ears and nostrils slit, their hands and feet cut off, and their eyes gouged out.”
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Thus did the rigorism that inspired some zealous Christians to seek martyrdom find its counterpart in some zealous pagan magistrates who were perfectly willing to make martyrs of them. Gibbon, as we have seen, estimates that a couple of thousand Christians were put to death during the reign of Diocletian, and thousands more may have endured the elaborate forms of torture that are recorded in Christian accounts of the Great Persecution, although the most grotesque examples go unnoticed by pagan historians.
The Great Persecution was meant to exterminate, once and for all, the Christian god, if not the Christians themselves. Here was a decisive clash between two forms of extremism, one pagan and one monotheistic—Diocletian was determined to suppress the practice of Christianity under threat of death, and the willing martyrs within the community of Christians were just as determined to die rather than submit to his decree. Here and there throughout the empire, pagan magistrates showed themselves willing to oblige, as when one Roman governor in the province of Spain cruelly taunted a Christian bishop in the very moments before he was sent to be burned at the stake.
“You are a bishop?”
“I am.”
“You were.”
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Still, if Diocletian was a zealous persecutor of Christians, he was no megalomaniac. He was perfectly willing to share the office of emperor with his fellow tetrarchs, and he ultimately seemed to lose the will to rule at all. He abandoned the city of Rome, traditional capital of the empire, and moved his seat of government to Milan and later to Ravenna. He abruptly called off the games that were held to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of his reign, an act of lassitude that was regarded as an insult to Rome itself and the tutelary gods of the Roman empire.
The downward spiral of pagan Rome, according to the ancient historian Zosimus, began when Diocletian denied the citizenry the opportunity to celebrate his long reign with the customary ceremonies, combats, and contests. When the emperor fell ill with fever in the winter of 304-305, he simply surrendered to his fate. On May 1, 305, at the age of fifty-five, the senior Augustus abruptly abdicated, retreating to his estate on the shores of the Adriatic Sea and announcing his intention to live out his life tending his garden as a gentleman farmer.
Ironically, although Diocletian had succeeded in imposing order on the chaos that characterized imperial politics in ancient Rome, his willing abdication prompted a frantic new round of conspiracy and open conflict among the men who sought to seat themselves on the throne in his place. At first, Galerius succeeded Diocletian as Augustus in the east, and Constantius the Pale replaced Maximian, who had been coerced into joining Diocletian in retirement, as Augustus in the west. But the unsettled state of affairs prompted a series of pretenders and usurpers to make their own claims over the next several years. At one dizzying moment in 309, no fewer than eight men claimed the exalted title of Augustus. Among the contenders was Constantine.
The Fugitive
By 305, Constantine had gathered yet more honors in campaigns against the restive barbarian tribes along the northern frontier of the empire and the Persians who threatened to the east. As an officer whose courage, skill and ruthlessness had been proven in battle—and as the eldest son of the western emperor—he might have expected to be raised to the Tetrarchy during the game of musical chairs that followed the retirement of Diocletian. But Constantine had lost the latest round and—for that reason—he was regarded by the winners as a disgruntled and thus dangerous rival.