However, it is easy to imagine that, for all the pomp and ceremony and for all the polite applause, both men knew that nothing had really changed. Within a year of Licinius’s surrender and abdication, a detachment of imperial soldiers found him with his family in Greece. When Licinius saw the guards approach perhaps he knew instantly that Constantine had gone back on his word, that the emperor could never allow potential rivals and their heirs to live, could never forgive. The soldiers took him and his son aside and garrotted them.51
EPILOGUE
Constantia survived the death of her husband and child. The emperor gave her the title ‘Most Noble Lady’ and she remained an important figure at her brother’s court. Her presence there must have been strained and full of stony recrimination. She died in 330, perhaps no more than thirty-five years old. Constantia, however, was not the only relative to fall foul of her brother’s imperial authority.
In 326 Constantine ordered the deaths of both his first son Crispus (whom he had appointed to the rank of Caesar) and his wife Fausta, the woman who had borne him three sons. The cause is shrouded in mystery. There were suspicions at court that Crispus was having an affair with his stepmother; another rumour suggested that it was Fausta who had fallen in love with Crispus, but had been rejected by him. Either way, such immoral behaviour could never be seen to taint the core of the Christian imperial family – the emperor’s absolutist legislation on sexual matters forbade it. The short, brilliant career of Crispus ended in execution. The cause of Fausta’s death is recorded as suffocation in an overheated steam bath.
Constantine’s unsentimental singularity of purpose also showed itself in the religious policy of his later years. In the aftermath of his victory over Licinius, the emperor published several edicts in the east. The persecuted Christians were to be released from prison, they were to have their property restored and they would receive the same privileges as Christians in the west. Bishops were encouraged to repair churches and build new ones. But the preaching tone of these edicts went much further than the Edict of Milan. In the letters accompanying them, Constantine did not force his subjects to abandon paganism and take up Christianity, but he urged them to do so. The Christian God, he wrote, was morally supreme. It was God who had brought an end to persecutors, God who had established the correct observance of religion. Constantine had simply been his instrument.52 The message rang out: Christianity was now the officially favoured religion of the Roman world. But what about paganism?
Ostensibly the edicts suggest that Constantine was actively campaigning against paganism: some traditional temples were closed, and sacrifices and the consulting of oracles were forbidden, especially by Roman provincial governors and prefects.53 However, the picture Eusebius describes is misleading. Certainly Constantine wanted to stamp out magic and superstition: he outlawed the private use of diviners, and magic designed to sexually arouse or make an attempt on someone’s life. Devotion to the traditional gods, however, was another matter. That form of paganism would be very slow to die out; there was as yet no mass conversion to Christianity.
The imperial ban on pagan sacrifices could never be enforced. They continued in Italy, and in Greece the emperor even lifted the ban so that a cult known as the Eleusinian Mysteries might not be affected. Constantine also allowed a new pagan temple to be built in Italy and dedicated to the imperial family late in his reign. Temples in Rome were granted protection from the emperor, and it remained the job of the prefect of the city to restore and maintain the buildings, statues and centres of the ancient Roman cults in the fourth and fifth centuries. Nonetheless, later emperors would be much harsher in their clampdown on pagan practices. The process of fossilizing Rome’s pagan past had begun.
The Church may have become the unifying institution of Constantine’s Christian empire. An issue of doctrine, however, was spoiling the picture. When Constantine ‘liberated’ the east from Licinius, he discovered that the Church there was even more divided than that in Africa. The greatest dispute, however, was not a mere debate over the legitimacy of a bishop, but a philosophical dispute over the relationship between God and Jesus Christ: was God the Father the same as God the Son, or was he inferior? A priest called Arius argued that while God the Father was eternal and indivisible, God the Son had to be created after the Father as His instrument for the salvation of man. Although he was perfect, God the Son was therefore not eternal and could not be called God. Arius’s argument sparked an absolute furore and threatened an upheaval in Church unity once again. Constantine stepped in.
In 325 he called together and personally attended the first universal meeting of the Church, known as the Council of Nicaea. The occasion must have been an extraordinary sight. For the first time, over three hundred bishops from all corners of the Roman world came together in an attempt to thrash out the doctrine being disputed by Arius. On the morning of the first day, dressed in the splendour of his bright purple robe embroidered with gold and inlaid with stones, Constantine entered the large, silent hall of the palace at Nicaea. He walked with an elegant, modest gait. A small golden chair was set front and centre before the rows of bishops. Their excitement at the occasion reached a new pitch when the emperor showed deference by waiting for them to sit down before he did. Only when they gave him the signal did he sit first, and then the whole gathering followed suit.54 From his seat, however, Constantine did much more than invigilate proceedings. He took an active, forceful part.
He was credited, for example, with finding the form of words that resolved the dispute. This stated that God the Son was ‘of one substance’ in relation to God the Father. The formulation implied that Arius was wrong. Despite this intervention, however, Constantine, the great soldier, the commander who had won the civil war, was less concerned with the intricacies of doctrinal debate. The emperor wanted simply to put out the fire of the controversy and end the dispute. Cajoling, bullying, and slipping between Latin and Greek in his efforts to persuade recalcitrant bishops, Constantine strong-armed the majority into putting their names to the proposed form of words designed to heal the rift. Most complied, but Arius and two of his followers refused and all three men were exiled. Unity, admittedly with the exception of a few dissenters, had prevailed. The grand occasion had been a triumph. Or so it seemed.
Certainly there were striking successes. For the first time the emperor of Rome, the most powerful man in the world, had used his power to establish Christian orthodoxy. On many issues he had won agreement from the vast majority of attendants coming together for the first time. Although Constantine made a show of deferring to the bishops, they had assembled under his authority and the decisions they had reached were universally binding. Indeed, in exiling Arius and his followers the treatment of ‘heretics’ had been taken out of the hands of bishops and become subject to the criminal law pronounced by the emperor.55 Religious and imperial power had become one.
In reality dissension had not gone away. Eusebius’s account of the Council of Nicaea papered over the very real differences of opinion expressed there. Later on, Arius returned from exile and continued to deliver sermons in his influential city of Nicomedia. Before Constantine died, even the emperor himself would backtrack on the doctrine he had forced the bishops into agreeing. Only with time would the unity that Constantine desired at Nicaea be realized. Indeed, the council produced the ‘Nicene Creed’. This is the official summary of the Christian faith, which begins, ‘I believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty, maker of heaven and earth. . .’ To this day it is recited by Christians every Sunday. To this day, Constantine’s formulation is still the unifying creed of the Church.