MILVIAN BRIDGE
Rumours were leaking out of the city of Rome, and they were playing right into the hands of Constantine. The tyrant and usurper Maxentius was the epitome of pure evil, they said, a practiser of witchcraft, a sacrificer of humans. He liked to abduct and rape married women. On one occasion, the city prefect was bullied into allowing Praetorian officers to seize his own wife so that she might become another of Maxentius’s victims. But by the time the guardsmen broke down her door, they found she had stabbed herself to death rather than give up her chastity to the self-proclaimed emperor. Maxentius was just as brutal with the citizens of Rome as a whole: when they rioted, he did not flinch in response, but sent in the Praetorians to massacre them. This at least is the portrait of Maxentius given by Eusebius.14 His Christian-biased work, written more than twenty-five years after the events described, and designed to exalt Constantine by comparison with his enemies, should be taken with a large pinch of salt. The fact remains that in the prelude to war in 312 Maxentius had successfully held on to power in Rome for six years. He must have been doing something right.
Maxentius knew how to make Romans feel good about themselves again. In 306 Rome was in decline, a shadow of its former glorious self. The four emperors barely set foot in the city. As they travelled between the new imperial cities closer to the frontiers of the empire, Rome was ignored because it was off the beaten track. In fact, the people of Rome and Italy could complain that they were being treated like just another province. The year before Maxentius came to power, Italians had lost the privileged tax-free status they had enjoyed for nearly five hundred years. The senators of Rome too had had to make a considerable mental adjustment to the times they lived in: the Senate and the emperor had drifted apart; the senators were eclipsed by the army. Indeed, it was from the military hierarchy on the battlefields of provincial frontiers rather than in the Senate House of Rome that emperors were now made. Romans felt increasingly as though they were living not in the great imperial capital of a brilliant empire, but in a backwater, a heritage town for tourists, and one decidedly lacking vibrancy.15 That is until Maxentius began his campaign. His was an unashamedly pro-Roman ticket.
Coins from his illegitimate reign show how he wanted to restore Rome to glory. His political slogan was Romanitas (Roman-ness). As a pagan, he appealed to Rome’s religious past. It was, after all, the home of all the gods that Romans had collected from all corners of the empire. Everywhere people walked within the city were rich layers of this extraordinary heritage: in addition to the centuries-old temples, statues, altars and imperial mausolea, there were shrines devoted to particular local deities on street corners in every neighbourhood. Maxentius not only rejuvenated pride in Rome’s old history, but also encouraged it by giving the city a new look. He was a prolific builder, authorizing a new palace complex near the Appian Way, an enormous hippodrome capable of seating 15,000 spectators, and, his greatest architectural feat, the Basilica Nova. Decorated with marble and detailed stucco mouldings, this government hall could boast of being the city’s largest vaulted building. By leaving his stamp on Rome in this way, Maxentius tried to secure his legitimacy as emperor in the west. By 312, however, his appeal was wearing thin.
The buildings he erected cost a fortune. In addition, he had to find the money to maintain the armies with which he had fended off attempts by the legitimate emperors to unseat him. But it was money that Rome did not have. The city, ruled by a usurper, was effectively cut off from the resources of the rest of the empire. As a result, Romans were forced to live on their own means; revenues from the provinces dried up. To make ends meet Maxentius taxed the whole population and forced senators and landowners to contribute gifts of money to the treasury. Making matters worse, another usurper, Domitius Alexander, had taken control of North Africa, thus eliminating Rome’s primary source of grain. Food shortages provoked riots, and the full force of the protesters’ anger was directed at Maxentius. To maintain control of the city, Maxentius was repressive, and the city of Rome came to resemble more a police state than a glorious reincarnation of the Eternal City. To one man, however, the growing chaos in Rome was wonderful news. This was the man whom Maxentius called the ‘son of a whore’; the man whose effigies he jealously destroyed; the man he hated for causing his father’s death. This was the man who was now crossing the Alps with an army to ‘liberate’ and ‘rescue’ suffering Rome.
Constantine’s advisers had not set the best of moods for their general’s campaign. Under the influence of pagan priests, they were fearful and hesitant, warning Constantine that the invasion of Italy did not bode well. They had their reasons: they could point to the fact that Constantine had left three-quarters of his army to protect the Rhine frontier from invasion by the Franks, and that he was intending to face the 100,000-strong army of Maxentius (inflated with auxiliaries from Sicily and Africa) with, according to our earliest source, just 40,000 men.16
Constantine, in response, disagreed. His soldiers might be outnumbered but, after the wars in Gaul and Britain, they had the advantage of being battle-hardened and fit for war. It was an advantage that would prove to be highly effective. After negotiating the Mount Cenis pass, Constantine and his army entered Italy and promptly defeated the three armies that Maxentius had sent to resist him. By October, Constantine had followed the route of the Flaminian Way and drawn up his troops 15 kilometres (9 miles) north of Rome at Saxa Rubra (Red Rocks). However, the composition of the army that pitched camp there was a little unusual.
In addition to officers and military advisers, Constantine’s close entourage also included Christians. Although Maxentius, despite his depiction by Eusebius in the Life of Constantine, was not a vehement persecutor of them, Christians had their reasons for hating him. He had banished three bishops from Rome and had failed to restore property that had been confiscated during Diocletian’s persecution of the Christians in 303–5. By contrast, Constantine was superficially a much more sympathetic ruler. He was not a Christian, but in Britain and Gaul in 306 he had rescinded Diocletian’s edict for the destruction of churches, and had restored Christians’ right to worship.17 This attitude of tolerance made Constantine a candidate for the attention of high-ranking Christians. They had come to his imperial seat at Trier to read aloud their works, and now they formed a small group travelling with him on campaign. One of them was thought to be Ossius, the bishop of Córdoba. It is possible that another was an influential man in his seventies called Lactantius.
A North African by birth, Lucius Caelius Firmianus Lactantius had personally felt the brunt of the Christian persecutions. He had travelled earlier in life to Nicomedia, where he converted to Christianity, and was summoned to Diocletian’s court by the emperor as a teacher of Latin rhetoric. During the violence of 303–5, however, he lost his position, and in order to save his life he eventually fled to Constantine’s western court at Trier. He met the emperor, composed the Christian work called the Divine Institutes between 308 and 309 (dedicating it to Constantine) and would later become tutor to Constantine’s son Flavius Julius Crispus, whom the emperor fathered with a mistress before his marriage to Fausta. If he was indeed now in Constantine’s camp, Lactantius was probably biding his time. The Christians in the emperor’s entourage would certainly have been happy to be on his side, but they would also have been looking to improve on the footholds of influence they had established over the years. All they needed was an opportunity. Whenever and however it came, they were at last in a position to pounce.