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Introduction The Roman Empire of Constantine’s Sons

This book presents a study of the reign of Constantius II, a son of Constantine I who ruled the Roman Empire for a total of thirty-seven years, first as Caesar (r. 324–337), and then as Augustus (r. 337–361). It is also a study of the reigns of his much less well-known brothers, the Augusti Constantine II and Constans. It is not, however, a biography of these figures in the traditional sense of that term for reasons discussed later in this introduction. The three brothers began their imperial careers as co-rulers of subordinate rank (as Caesars) with their father and became Augusti some months after his death in May 337. The controversial nature of Constantine’s emperorship was apparent even during his reign,¹ and assessments proposing its divisiveness intensified in the years following his death.² In this regard, Constantine’s historical impact was reflected in the reign of his nephew, the emperor Julian, who became sole Augustus (r. 361–363) following Constantius II’s death in November 361. Modern writers of historical narratives tend overwhelmingly to value those rulers from whose reigns clear themes or lessons can be wrought. As a result, encouragement is given to create dramatising narratives. With regard to Constantine, he is recalled as the emperor who promoted Christianity across the empire,³ while Julian is remembered as the emperor who sought to undermine his uncle’s religious revolution by promoting instead his own interpretation of the empire’s traditional cults.⁴ By contrast, the reigns of Constantine’s sons appear to offer no comparable “take-home message”. Instead, simplified judgements frequently attend efforts to recollect or characterise the principal features of their reigns: In the case of Constantius II, scholarly attention has traditionally focused on his involvement with the Christian Church which has tended to result in reductionist assessments of him as, for example, an “Arianizing emperor”,⁵ while ancient slanders about the sexuality and aptitude of Constans are commonly repeated with little or no critical comment,⁶ or in the case of Constantine II, little or nothing is said at all.⁷ Indeed, it is something of a historical irony that those individuals who at various times set themselves up as alternative rulers to the Constantinian emperors have garnered greater attention in recent years, with Magnentius, the general who rose in revolt against Constans in 350, representing the most heavily scrutinised of the period’s usurpers.⁸ Although this neglect of the Constantinian emperors is beginning to change (see below), new studies of Constantius II and the dynasty of Constantine I more broadly are urgently needed. It is the purpose of this study to analyse the principal themes and issues raised by the reigns of Constantine’s sons, inevitably with a focus on Constantius II as the longest serving of the Augusti from this period, and to synthesise historic and current trends in research on the period.

Appointed Caesar on 8 November 324,⁹ the day of the foundation of the city of Constantinople,¹⁰ Constantius II progressed to the position of Augustus along with his elder and younger brothers, Constantine II and Constans, on 9 September 337, following a bloody coup in the summer of that year which removed many high-profile individuals, including the reigning Caesar and the brothers’ cousin, Flavius Julius Dalmatius, in a move that represented an unqualified rejection of Constantine I’s arrangement for the future of the imperial college. Following the death of their father, the brothers divided the empire into three not wholly equal shares. Constantine II received the western territories (dioceses of Britanniae, Galliae, Viennensis, Hispaniae, along with the Alpes Cottiae); Constans took over the central territories (dioceses of Italia, Africa, Pannoniae and Moesia) and Constantius II controlled the eastern territories (the dioceses of Oriens, Asiana, Pontica and Thracia).¹¹ This arrangement lasted only until April 340 when Constantine II and Constans came to blows in battle outside Aquileia, resulting in the death of Constantine II and the reallocation of his territory to Constans.¹² While relations between Constantine’s surviving sons were never especially harmonious, a decade of relative stability followed during which attempts were made to create “pan-empire” solutions to a variety of issues, for example, resolving disputes between the factional Christian communities of the empire. A high-level coup led by senior members of both the army and the civil administration in the western empire ousted Constans in January 350 and in so doing threw the hold of the Constantinian dynasty over the empire into disarray. In order to assist in an increasingly disharmonious environment marked by foreign and now civil wars, Constantius appointed his cousin, Gallus, as Caesar on 15 March 351. However, only a year after the death of the usurper Flavius Magnus Magnentius in August 353 and the Constantinian recovery of the western empire, Gallus was executed on Constantius’ orders in October 354 following a series of catastrophes in the management of the east. Gallus’ half-brother, Julian, was Constantius’ next appointment on 6 November 355, seconded to the position of Caesar in order to assist Constantius in restoring Constantinian rule to the west, with Gaul a high priority. For a short period of time, Julian’s appointment led to several successes in a region scarred by recent events. However, a fissure that may already have existed between the two cousins following the assassinations of 337 opened more fully in light of a combination of internal (the preference of the Gallic troops for Julian over Constantius) and external factors (the continued challenge to Roman hegemony in Osrhoene and Mesopotamia by the Persian Empire), which resulted in Julian’s acclamation by his troops in the early months of the year 360. A new civil war between members of the Constantinian dynasty seemed on the cards, only to be avoided as a result of Constantius’ death on 3 November 361. The mantle of emperor passed to Julian whom Constantius had named as his successor just prior to his death, and the Constantinian legacy gained a minor extension to its existence in the brief reign of Julian, the nephew of Constantine I.

These are the broad-brush strokes of a period that lies between the reigns of Constantine I (r. 306–337) and Julian “the Apostate” (r. 361–363), two giants of posterity in the history of the fourth century. Bloody coups, sibling rivalry, usurpers, civil war, court intrigues and treason trials, belligerent bishops and barbarians hammering on Rome’s frontiers: Together, these represent the period’s traditional points of discussion. Yet, the broader context for the events of the reigns of Constantius and his brothers is frequently overlooked, or when it is analysed, it is done so in a fashion that consciously or unconsciously recapitulates the agenda-driven themes of ancient historiography and earlier scholarly interpretations. What follows then in the first section of this introduction is a brief overview of some of the defining features of the empire inherited by the sons of Constantine, and a survey of the impact of their reigns on both the short- and long-term conditions of the later Roman Empire. The post-Constantine period was characterised by the continuation and, in certain areas, the intensification of long-standing trends in the configuration of imperial authority both within and beyond the territorial limits of the Roman Empire. In the first instance, the sons’ reigns witnessed the continued relativisation of Rome’s military authority. Militarily speaking, it is certainly correct to say that the Roman Empire was “at bay”¹³ during this time. The ambitious ruler of the Sasanian Empire, Shapur II (r. 309–379), who had made a name for himself by aggressively subduing the tribes of the Arabian Peninsula during (c. 326) the reign of Constantine,¹⁴ intervened intermittently – and on occasions, decisively – in contested areas of Armenia and Mesopotamia throughout Constantius II’s imperial career, and prompted the emperor to adopt a three-pronged policy of “defensive strength, offensive power and diplomacy”¹⁵ in order to deal with Shapur’s ambitions. The reason for Shapur’s aggression is seemingly disclosed in a letter in his name to Constantius from 358,¹⁶ in which Shapur alludes to the treaty established between the two empires in the year following the defeat of the Shah Naresh (r. 293–303) by the Caesar Galerius in 298: “It is my duty to recover Armenia with Mesopotamia which double-dealing wrested from my grandfather [Naresh]”.¹⁷ While the authenticity of this exchange of imperial correspondence is moot,¹⁸ our source would appear to reflect Persian judgements about the punitive nature of the settlement established by the Romans at the end of the third century.¹⁹

The escalation of Persian aggression towards Armenia and the cities of north-eastern Mesopotamia during the final years (358–360) of Constantius’ reign illustrates the connected realities of imperial power at this point in the fourth century. For most of the 350s, Sasanian forces were pre-occupied with external threats of their own. Shapur’s efforts to subdue a confederacy of Iranian Huns²⁰ intent on encroaching beyond the north-eastern frontier of Iran came at a tremendous cost to Sasanian military resources. It was only after Shapur had concluded a treaty with these tribes, identified by Ammianus Marcellinus as the Chionitae and the Gelani, that the Sasanians could turn their attention back to their western frontier.²¹ As Ammianus records, Shapur’s military capacity was bolstered by auxiliaries from among the Chionitae and Gelani, his former enemies, who were instrumental in his capture of the city of Amida from Rome in 359.²² An additional influence on Shapur’s strategy towards the end of the 350s was the emergence of intelligence that indicated that Constantius’ ability to defend the east had become compromised as a result of having to deploy his forces to support the western and central empires against several “Germanic” tribal confederacies.²³

The Constantinian emperors deployed instances of both soft and hard power against these “barbarian” groups. To the east of the Rhine, the disparate parties united by our sources under the names Franks and the Alamanni²⁴ were at various points antagonised, placated and defeated by Constantius II, Julian and their generals during the 350s. Across the Danube in the provinces of Valeria and Pannonia, the Sarmatians, the Limigantes and the Quadi presented a series of challenges to Constantius that pre-occupied him right up to the point of his return to the east in late 359.²⁵ There is a tendency among scholars to downplay the threat presented by the northern and central barbarians to the security of the empire, and to assess the campaigns of Constantius as opportunistic “‘policing’ expeditions, to be turned into, or even mounted as, major campaigns … aimed at increasing imperial prestige”.²⁶ While this is a reasonable assessment in some cases, it should be said that the strategic importance of the Carpathian Basin to the integrity of the central regions of the empire along with the accompanying complexities of the social relations thrown up by Roman interactions with the inhabitants of barbaricum²⁷ meant that Constantius II had little choice but to commit considerable time and resources to managing the activities of those confederacies beyond the limes.

However, the empire’s governing class had come to expect near-continuous trouble at the frontiers. The empire inherited by Constantine’s sons had evolved over time into a form that reflected the offensive and defensive demands of its transregional nature. In this regard, the sharing of imperial power between two or more emperors through the evolution of the imperial college was a pragmatic solution to an empire exposed to threats of varying degrees. The exact origins of collegiate government are contested – a fair argument can be made for seeing the reigns of Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Versus (161–169 CE) as the first instance of “true joint rule”²⁸ – but it was the Tetrarchic system of four emperors introduced by Diocletian (r. 285–305) that heralded the imperial college and style of government that most directly influenced the reigns of Constantine and his sons. The imperial college as it evolved under the Tetrarchs was deemed the most effective way of maintaining the empire as a united structure capable of coping with threats both internal and external. The innovative dispersal of imperial authority across the empire was its most enduring legacy. The Tetrarchy catalysed the “centrifugal tendency”²⁹ of dispersed rule that emerged during the third century with the establishment of imperial cities across the empire that were intended to facilitate the defence of the empire at its “pinch-points”, and to improve the efficiency of its administration.³⁰ The result was, in the judgement of Bryan Ward-Perkins, “a most unusual empire”. Speaking of the fourth century broadly, Ward-Perkins qualifies his observation by noting that

… politically the fourth century Roman Empire had been turned inside-out. The emperors did pay occasional visits to the historic center, Rome, and they lavished patronage on it, but they and their courts spent almost their whole lives in the periphery.³¹

His assessment is especially pertinent to the era of Constantine’s sons. Following the redistribution of territories in the wake of the dynastic coup of the summer of 337 and the sons’ allocation to themselves and their administrations of specific cities and geographic areas, Constantine’s successors spent the majority of time in locations situated along the “military belt” of the empire,³² namely Trier in the west, Sirmium and Naissus in the heartland, and Antioch in the east.³³ The facilitation of the empire’s defences against “outsiders” was a key factor in determining the imperial presence in these cities, as was the demand placed on the emperor and his staff to be ready and available to both receive and dispatch embassies to meet with neighbouring monarchs and their representatives. However, by this point in the fourth century, emperors and their armies had become largely inseparable³⁴: The emperor was first and foremost a military leader, and the army “not Rome or some other peaceful province, was the political world in which emperors lived or died”.³⁵

Furthermore, fears of rebellion leading to a coup engineered from within the army provided an important excuse for the emperor never to wander too far from where his troops were stationed.³⁶ The murder of Constans, orchestrated by his own senior officers and administrators in Autun while he was absent on a hunting trip in the eastern Pyrenees, illustrates that a scenario typical of third-century imperial politics could still occur in the age of dynastic rule and the stability such an arrangement appeared to offer.³⁷ Usurpation, which when contested led to civil war, is therefore a defining feature of the epoch of the Constantinian emperors. The historical evolution of the political and social conditions underlying acts of usurpation – a political action identified in modern scholarship as the (usually, violent) appropriation of power from a sitting emperor by his rival – is notoriously complex,³⁸ but, as Matthew Canepa has pithily noted, “ultimately, whoever held power could be legitimate, despite how they came to power”.³⁹ Recent studies, however, have sought to isolate the principal factors that contributed to making usurpation, “so common as to be plausibly described as a fundamental feature of Roman imperial government”.⁴⁰ Indeed, a “culture” of usurpation seems to have been hardwired into the Roman system from an early period. Long-standing features of the office of emperor, for example, its lack of constitutional definition and its tendency to be “shaped by the pressure to respond to initiatives from below”⁴¹, were accentuated by the changing nature and shape of the late empire. These demands hastened on the one hand the demise of traditional kingmakers, namely the Senate and Rome, but on the other reinforced the authority of rival parties, principally the army from which the emperor ultimately derived his legitimacy. Stability following a period of haphazard succession was evidently introduced with the re-emergence of a ruling imperial family in the guise of the Constantinians: Unusually given the pattern of usurpations during the previous century,⁴² the decade of the 340s saw no challenge to the reigning emperors, represented by the dyarchy of Constantius II and Constans. Yet, the military context underlying the overthrow of Constans and the emergence of Magnentius as the emperor in his victim’s territories during early 350 demonstrates that the political conditions, which had become entrenched during the previous decades, continued to endure in a period that, for this very reason, has been termed the “long third century”.⁴³ However, there were exceptions in this case. The role of the Gallic administrative class in Constans’ demise reveals discontent with the management of the empire beyond the immediate interests of the army. Furthermore, the inheritance of the empire as a patrimony – styled in places (e.g. Eusebius of Caesarea’s Life of Constantine) as the transfer of imperial power by Constantine to his sons in the form of a gift⁴⁴ – did not immunise members of the ruling dynasty from being viewed as having acted tyrannically – tyrant being a contemporary, moralising term applied retrospectively to delegitimise a rival’s claim to imperial authority.⁴⁵ The role of Constantius II in the coup of 337, which included the execution of his half-cousin Dalmatius who had been appointed Caesar in 335 by Constantine himself, prompted contemporary voices to refer to his actions as those of a tyrant. In this regard, Julian, another of Constantius’ cousins, emerged as one of the Augustus’ earliest contemporary critics, although Julian himself accepted the acclamation of his troops in Paris in 360 and became the emperor without Constantius’ consent: He accordingly also qualifies as a usurper.⁴⁶

How Constantine’s sons responded to the issues surveyed above thereby contributed significantly to the subsequent arrangement of the Roman Empire in the fourth century and beyond. Of the three Augusti, the youngest, Constans, was arguably the most promising innovator, administratively speaking, of the brothers. “Political events and administrative logic”⁴⁷ drove Constans’ actions in reshaping the government and administration of those territories under his authority between 340 and 350. Following the death of Constantine II in 340, Constans inherited his eldest brother’s territories, resulting in his oversight of a vast mass of land stretching from Caerleon in Britain to Crete in Macedonia. Thus, Constans’ solution in expediating the administration of civilian life in the western and central portions of the empire was to develop the concept of the regional prefecture introduced under Constantine (trialled in the diocese of Africa between 333 and 336⁴⁸), and to appoint Aconius Catullinus as the praetorian prefect of Gaul (c. 340), with the jurisdiction of Constans’ existing praetorian prefect, Antonius Marcellinus, limited to Italy, Africa and Illyricum.⁴⁹ In 343,⁵⁰ a third regional prefecture of Illyricum was created with the appointment of Anatolius Azutrio based in Sirmium.⁵¹ Constantine’s innovations to the office of praetorian prefect stripped away the oversight for military affairs that had previously been central to the role, with the majority of these responsibilities – with the exception of logistics and supply – assigned to the newly created office of the magister militum.⁵² Under Constantine and his successors, praetorian prefects became conduits for the emperor in the administration of financial, judicial and legal matters.⁵³ Their newly established authority was such that in the matter of appeals, Constantine ruled in a constitution from 331, “we do not permit appeals from the praetorian prefects who alone can truly be said to try cases as representatives of our sacred majesty”.⁵⁴

The consolidation of the regional prefectures was a clear indication that the tendency towards decentralisation had indeed been accelerated by the decisions made by Constantine’s sons regarding the division of the empire in the period following their father’s death. As Clifford Ando has remarked about this period, “the causes of decentralization were multiple and contingent, and were often exogenous to the empire; decentralization was often de facto rather than de iure”.⁵⁵ Causative factors forced the regionalist tendencies of the empire in the post-Constantine period, and Constantius II in particular contributed towards – but also limited – these tendencies. Nowhere is this more apparent than in his approach to civic politics. The extent of Constantius’ endowments of cities in the eastern empire, specifically Antioch and Constantinople, has become ever more apparent over recent years.⁵⁶ As a result of Constantius’ military obligations in protecting Roman interests along the frontier with Persia, the emperor resided in Antioch for a near-continuous period prior to departing for the west in order to subdue the rebellion of Magnentius in late 350. As such, Constantius came to know the Syrian city very well, having first arrived there as Caesar in c. 335.⁵⁷ The urban infrastructure of Antioch and its environs greatly benefitted from his presence,⁵⁸ and members of the Antiochene elite also took advantage of the numerous opportunities for advancement within the imperial administration that arose because of the emperor’s attentions.⁵⁹ Constantius’ promotion of Constantinople, while similar to his treatment of Antioch in terms of investing heavily in the urban infrastructure, the built environment and the cultural landscape of the city,⁶⁰ was somewhat more complicated. Muriel Moser has argued that although Augustus in the east, Constantius during the early part of his reign promoted a relationship with Rome (in a competitive manner since the city lay in Constans’ territory) by fostering close ties with the city’s senatorial order,⁶¹ thereby aping his father’s approach to managing the empire through the promotion of an empire-wide cursus honorum (the career path of sequential political offices: cf. OCD 2003: 415) whereby senatorial officials could be appointed to high-ranking positions in the eastern half of the empire.⁶² Thus, Constantius managed the affairs of the eastern empire with one eye, so to speak, fixed squarely on a network of patronage based in Rome. This relational approach somewhat blunts assessments of the empire as a decentralised entity: Rome remained key to the development and promotion of the eastern emperor’s authority and continued to inform the aspirations and careers of members of the administrative elite appointed in the east. The Constantinian-era ideology that proclaimed Constantinople to be a “Second Rome”, or a “New Rome”,⁶³ is wholly intelligible in the context of a relationship between the empire’s traditional centre and its other cities – specifically the city on the Bosphorus – that never really eroded, thereby ramifying the notion of decentralisation. As Ando notes:

… lacking our notion of a court as an institution, the Romans possessed no framework with which to explain the significance of an emperor’s residence away from Rome; and when they finally discovered one, its term of art was that of a ‘new’ or ‘second Rome’.⁶⁴

Despite the tendency to interpret the regional prefectures of Constans and the embellishment of the cities of the east by Constantius II as a drift towards a regionally fragmented empire, the dynastic configuration of imperial authority between the late 330s and 350 continued to be predicated on the basis of a functional unity that was certainly more than just ideological. The quotidian business of government, for example, the publication of laws and imperial rulings and the annual appointment of the ordinary consuls that provided a framework for the dating of official documents, remained a collegial affair under Constantine’s sons. Those occasions when collegiality appeared absent, for example, the apparent disagreement over the appointment of consuls for the years 344 and 346 continue to attract comment and speculation (see Chapter 5). If we do feel the need to point the finger of blame at someone for the diminution of imperial unity during the time of the Constantinians, we should do so in the direction of Magnentius. It was Constans’ former general who ended the functional relationship between the western and eastern halves of the empire in a move that definitively terminated the Constantinian college of two Augusti. While characterising Magnentius as a “regional emperor” is technically quite correct, it also unfairly downgrades his achievement.⁶⁵ The rebellion of 350 was a well-organised coup which gave rise to a proficient administration that took the majority of the western regions out of Constantinian control for over twenty-four months (by way of a marker, Rome was retaken by Constantius’ forces in September 352⁶⁶), a situation that had profound and long-term consequences for the future shape of the Roman Empire. For example, Muriel Moser has recently argued that in response to Magnentius’ occupation of the west which resulted in Constantius being cut off from his senatorial networks in Rome, the eastern emperor responded by creating a body comprising men of senatorial rank – i.e. assigned the title clarissimus⁶⁷ – for the eastern half of the empire based in Constantinople (an initiative which Moser dates to c. spring 350⁶⁸). In other words, the impetus for the creation of an imperial senate in Constantinople was Magnentius’ usurpation – although serving as a catalyst for innovations to the senatorial body of the city introduced by Constantine I.⁶⁹ The move once again assured Constantius of the necessary political support of the senatorial class. This was a gradual process nonetheless that outlasted the usurpation in the western empire: The impetus began with the loss of Constans’ territory, but was only fully completed with the installation of Honoratus as the first Urban Prefect of Constantinople in December 359.⁷⁰ As Moser also indicates, following Magnentius’ defeat, Constantius did not reinstate the empire-wide cursus honorum that had been a feature of his reign prior to 350, and sought instead to recruit to senatorial posts in the eastern provinces from eastern-domiciled senators only.⁷¹ However, the influence of Rome and its senate was evident in the rules and procedures (for example, the process of adlecting new members) of the senate in Constantinople which looked to its ancient ancestor for the way to transact business. It was also a place where Latin continued to hold sway.⁷²

Other areas of life in the empire were also significantly affected by the emergence of Constantine’s three sons as Augusti. On the matter of religion, specifically the place of Christianity in the Roman world, there should be little doubt that the theological and ecclesial disputes that emerged during the 320s and 330s became increasingly factionalised as a direct result of the management of the empire headed by Constantine II, Constantius II and Constans. Richard Paul Vaggione has traced the influence that the reigns of Constantine’s sons had on the emergence of the unyielding factionalism that characterised relations between Christian communities – and, in turn, their relations with the agencies of the imperial government – during the middle years of the fourth century, and despite its reductionist tendency, Vaggione’s analysis identifies with considerable precision the impact that partitioned imperial rule had on the emergence of the sectarian Christianity of the fourth century. In the period after the Council of Nicaea in 325 up to the death of Constantine I,

once the government recognized that a simple solution was not possible, it tried to ‘manage’ the conflict by enforcing silence on some of the participants [e.g. by exiling key episcopal figures] and requiring intercommunion and limited dialogue of most of the rest.⁷³

However, as Vaggione notes, “the policy was not a success”.⁷⁴ With the demise of one-emperor rule in 337, the dissension between parties spilled out into the public arena, and appears to have been exacerbated by dissension among the Constantinian emperors themselves with regard to the status of high-profile clerics who, in turn, became conduits for wider party affiliations: Thus, “… public ecclesiastical identity tended to be expressed in terms of political and theological loyalty to specific bishops – Athanasius [of Alexandria], say, or Marcellus [of Ancyra], or Eusebius of Nicomedia”.⁷⁵ In this way, dissenting bishops could find “safe havens” in the territories of those emperors who were sympathetic to them as individuals.⁷⁶ With the return of rule by one emperor in 353 in the wake of the civil war, public displays of ecclesial affiliation had the effect of creating “empire-wide resistance”⁷⁷ to attempts by Constantius II to develop empire-wide solutions to ecclesial disunity.

The Constantinian emperors were theocratic rulers whose primary religious responsibility was the promotion of piety across the empire. Like Constantine, this involved the dissemination of the idea that they were champions of the Christian faith. In this regard, however, their circumstances differed significantly from their father’s. Constantine’s sons were the first Roman emperors to be born and subsequently reign as devotees of the Christian God. All the sons were, therefore, honour-bound to promote Christianity in a way that upheld the message that was central to their father’s emergent “propaganda” of the 320s, in the wake of his defeat of Maxentius, whereby his triumphant status was ascribed to the support of the Christian God.⁷⁸ In contrast, however, to the opportunities for the pan-imperial promotion of Christianity that were available to Constantine in the period following 324,⁷⁹ the sons’ engagements with Christianity were more often than not confined to the geographic areas prescribed by territorial jurisdiction. This was certainly the case for the decade of the 340s when Constantius II and Constans ruled the empire. During this period, imperial interactions with the Christian communities in the sons’ provinces were excessively influenced – both potentially, and in reality – by a variety of local issues, predominantly the resolution of disputes over various matters (and not only over doctrine) between individuals and groups. This is not to say that imperial responses were entirely reactive and situational⁸⁰: Both Constans and Constantius II at various points sought to pursue courses of action that suggest “proactive, dirigiste” religious policies,⁸¹ although this is not a claim that can be employed without additional clarification, and is certainly not correct for all instances of government interaction with Christian groups of the time. Indeed, the involvement of the government in the resolution of religious disputes frequently led to the very opposite of what is assumed to have been the principal aim of imperial interventionism, namely Christian unity: The tendency of all parties towards factionalism was further stirred by government intervention in, for example, the occupancy of episcopal sees, or in the development of credal formulae.⁸²

The impact of this can be clearly seen on the prevailing historiographical issues surrounding the study of Constantius II, especially in ancient authorial responses to his handling of disputes within the church following his emergence as sole Augustus in the wake of his defeat of Magnentius in 353. Who this emperor chose to endorse, and who he chose to condemn echoes through the historical record and continues to inform contemporary judgements of Constantine’s longest serving son, for example, in the characterisation of him as an “Arianizing emperor” who looked to force “Arius’s heresy on the whole Church”.⁸³ This claim is made in an otherwise immaculate work of critical scholarship, a situation that would seem to highlight the need for a clear-eyed treatment of this topic. We turn now in the second part of this introduction to consider a selection of the issues arising from representations of the Constantinian emperors – with the focus naturally on Constantius II – in the context of a discussion regarding ways of approaching the study of the imperial history of the mid-fourth century.

Writing the Reign of Constantius II

We Christians hold fast to this divine instruction [Jn. 12.25]; we stand, and will stand firm, Constantius, even though your hook tears through our limbs and repeatedly furrows our wounds. We are stronger than you, our torturer, and all your punishments, as our only thought is that this butchery of your cruelty will serve to bring us eternal glory. Barbarians often spare the defeated and there is a place for mercy in war, even amongst those who live like wild animals. But what you do is truly indescribable, for we have always wished you good fortune and are unfailing in our desires and constant prayers to God that this may come about. You despoil, proscribe, slaughter with the sword and punish in many ways; you deny burial to bodies that you decreed to be butchered; you ban almsgiving; you have filled the mines and all the places thought worthy of the name of exile with those of us who resist your cunning schemes; you never stop banishing the innocent and harassing them with hunger, thirst and nakedness. You heap these evils upon us, who seek eternal blessedness.⁸⁴

The author of this passage was Lucifer, bishop of Cagliari in Sardinia, a Nicene Christian who was a companion of Liberius, the bishop of Rome, and a supporter of Athanasius. Despite the judgement of Richard Hanson that Lucifer’s work from which this passage is taken, The Necessity of Dying for the Son of God, was so full of wild and extravagant charges against Constantius II that “it is difficult to make a plausible selection”,⁸⁵ the above quotation encapsulates a number of key issues involved in studying this emperor and his reign that can be subordinated to a central question: How does a historian handle agenda-driven representations of an emperor? This is not a question posed in any abstract sense but is rather a pressing concern for the subject in hand since the reign of Constantius II is characterised by sources that vehemently denounce him, in addition to which the same sources have been very influential in shaping both ancient historiographical portrayals of him and the judgements of modern scholars in evaluating his reign. While Lucifer’s work was most likely composed during or soon after the Council of Constantinople held during the new year of 360 at which universal consent was sought to a controversial, subordinationist (Homoian) credal formula,⁸⁶ the historical background behind Lucifer’s remarkable pamphlet lay in his refusal to condemn Athanasius of Alexandria at the Council of Milan in 355, a conference that was supported by Constantius himself and which formed part of imperial efforts to obtain consent among Western bishops for the decisions of the Council of Sirmium in 351.⁸⁷ Central to this initiative was the desire to achieve universal agreement over a credal statement – the Fourth Creed of Antioch from 341 – that in the form with appended anathemas presented at Sirmium condemned ousia-terminology that had been a feature of the Nicene Creed, but which was deemed (very possibly by the emperor himself) “a reconciling formula obnoxious to nobody and capable of being accepted by all”.⁸⁸ As a result of his commitment to Athanasius, Lucifer was sent into exile, a common fate for recalcitrant clerics of the period.⁸⁹ By the time of Milan, Athanasius had become the leading figure in opposing the efforts of eastern-based clerics to promulgate a subordinationist interpretation of the Son’s relationship to God the Father. But Athanasius’ role in this regard had also become a cause célèbre largely as a result of his rocky relationship with the Constantinian emperors⁹⁰: He had most recently been charged with conspiring against Constantius with Magnentius, a claim he vehemently denied in his Defence before Constantius (9.5–20, 10.16–26).⁹¹ The splits in the fourth-century church may have begun as a result of competing ideas sparked by the teachings of Arius over the Son’s nature in relation to God the Father,⁹² but they quickly developed into infighting about the theologies and the (alleged or real) crimes and misdemeanours of members of competing episcopal networks, the one led for a short while by Eusebius, bishop of Nicomedia, which was set against the one led by Athanasius and Marcellus of Ancyra. (The terms “Arian” and “Nicene” continue to be employed to identify these factions, but they are problematic from the point of view of being terminologically imprecise.⁹³) One of the consequences arising from Constans’ murder in January 350 was that the Western bishops sympathetic to the dominant anti-Eusebian figures – Athanasius, Marcellus and Paul of Constantinople – were deprived of their imperial champion. This provided grist to the mill of their eastern opponents who were able – for most of the 350s, at least – to count Constantius as a kind of patron, and who drew on his influence to secure the banishment of their opponents, to be replaced by bishops who were aligned with their own networks and theological ideas.

Those clergy, including Lucifer, who found themselves deposed and exiled, became engaged in open opposition to the emperor, his administration and the ecclesial factions which were supported by imperial authority. In an exercise in parrhesia – the established philosophically derived act of speaking truth to power – Hilary, bishop of Poitiers, Athanasius and Lucifer wrote literary responses (known technically as an invective: See below) during Constantius’ reign (all three dating between 357 and 360) that compared their experience as dissidents and exiles under Constantius II to dissidents from earlier periods, drawing specifically on biblical paradigms of persecution and memories from more recent times involving persecutions of Christians by (pagan) emperors that had become central to the historic notion of the church as a communion of martyrs in the pre-Constantinian period.⁹⁴ In a neat inversion of status, the invectives of Athanasius (History of the Arians), Hilary (Against Constantius) and Lucifer (The Necessity …)⁹⁵ portrayed Constantius II as a tyrant who persecuted the genuine faithful, and whose own claim to being a Christian monarch was negated as a result of his support for teachings that undermined the “true religion” as set out in the creed of Nicaea (cf. Necessity § 5). For Lucifer – whose invective is by far the most colourful and entertaining of the three authors – Constantius is a “worm of Arius” and a “most ignorant emperor” whose commitment to the Arian heresy makes him unable to recognise, “that Christians everywhere hold the same faith as us, and, standing firm in this same defence of ours, they, like us, wish to die for the Son of God”.⁹⁶ Constantius’ actions in support of the heretical blasphemy of Arius (Necessity § 12) are, according to Lucifer, the result of the influence of the devil, “that subtle practitioner, the defrauder of innocents”, who has corrupted the emperor’s mind (Necessity § 5). Richard Flower, who has done more than anyone to highlight the importance of these invectives for understanding the tumultuous decades of the 350s and 360s,⁹⁷ notes that in their representation of the emperor and their mobilisation of biblical and Christian paradigms, these Nicene authors created a world that was “eminently recognisable: Christianity was being troubled not by complex and arcane internal theological divisions, but by a vicious assault from an external enemy, an anti-Christian Roman emperor”.⁹⁸

The ultimate value of these Christian invectives should be judged in terms of what they disclose about the response of a specific section of the church to the broader ambitions for the ecclesial body in the period following the “Constantinian turn”.⁹⁹ Historic reports and allegations of violence and coercion are a recurring feature of the accusatory narratives produced by both sides of the theological divide during this period, and there should be little doubt that people died as a result of the factionalism of the time. However, the systematic overlaying of events by these authors with the historic discourse of persecution from an earlier period in the history of the religion indicates, in the words of Michael Gaddis, that some Christians “used discourses of martyrdom and persecution to problematize and challenge the state’s exercise of power in religious affairs”.¹⁰⁰ Flower, however, has gone even further by challenging the extent to which these invectives can be read as historical texts at all, in light of their tendency to ascribe all persecution and suffering to the hand of the emperor alone:

not only is it uncertain whether the initiative for certain policies came from Constantius or from particular bishops, but also a historian of this period is faced with diametrically opposed presentations of the emperor’s wishes: was he driven by a pure and pious desire for Christian unity or a tyrannical, diabolical urge to enforce his wicked will?¹⁰¹

Both outcomes may indeed arise from the act of misconstruing the evidence presented by Lucifer and his Nicene confreres, and occur when a historian is set on offering a positivist narrative, as well-intentioned as that may seem. It is – as Flower suggests – “more fruitful” to foreground the representational value of these texts. This need not be an insular exercise that confines its focus to the strategies deployed in the text alone; rather, it has the potential to progress the study of its subject beyond the source material. By evaluating the representation of imperial power in sources and by arriving at the acknowledgement that portrayals of power sought frequently to legitimise (or even delegitimise) the position of the individual making them, we may also begin to understand the exercise of imperial power on its own terms.

As noted above, Constantius’ reign is characterised by sources that convey hostile representations of the emperor. The works of Lucifer, Hilary and Athanasius qualify as examples of invective literature (in Christian guise), a species of epideictic (or ceremonial) rhetoric that was traditionally partnered with the encomium, a speech praising its subject that could include a deity, a human being, an animal or a city.¹⁰² Speeches in praise of the emperor, known as panegyrics, were composed to mark imperial celebrations, such as accessions, anniversaries of reigns or the presence (adventus) of the emperor in the cities of the empire. Such speeches sought to praise the emperor and his achievements in effusive terms across several established topics, for example, ancestry, education and military exploits. In common with other later Roman emperors, Constantius was the recipient of numerous panegyrics, and a small but significant sample of them survive (see Chapter 3). By contrast, invective sought to defame its subject by convincing listeners of its recipient’s failure to attain success in the same areas covered by panegyrics. Both represent ethical compositions since they measured a ruler’s ability to perform according to established principles of conduct.¹⁰³ Budding rhetoricians composed panegyrics and invectives during their educational training in the empire’s rhetorical schools. The practical application of this rhetorical culture in the context of the political scene of the later empire demonstrates that its principal concern was the legitimisation – or the opposite, the stripping away of legitimacy – of its subject. In the context of the ceremonial life of the imperial court, the ultimate role of panegyric was thus to affirm the legitimacy of the emperor. Invective undermined this process by establishing a ruler’s unfitness, or illegitimacy.¹⁰⁴ In taxonomic terms, there is a degree of open-endedness regarding how the two forms interacted with one another. A panegyric could, for instance, engage with invective by comparing its subject’s conduct as a model emperor to the failings of a corrupt ruler within a framework that set a good emperor against a bad one, as in the case of the Latin panegyric of 313 which focuses on Maxentius’ imputed cruelty as a point of contrast to Constantine I.¹⁰⁵ However, as Flower has noted, “in contrast to the countless opportunities for performing public panegyrics … there were significantly fewer opportunities for the composition of invectives (and certainly for their delivery)”.¹⁰⁶ Like other historic examples of invective literature that sought to undermine their subjects, the aim of those texts from the final years of Constantius’ reign was to portray their imperial subject as an illegitimate emperor, a paradigmatic tyrant whose failings were framed in theologically loaded terms. Their distinctiveness as instances of Christian invective derived from the biblical and Christian exempla which were employed to measure Constantius’ fitness to rule, thereby reflecting a situation whereby a tyrant was considered to have emerged from within the Christian community itself: His illegitimacy was therefore posited according to the religious standards for measuring Christian emperors that derived from earlier patristic authors, including Eusebius of Caesarea on Constantius’ own father.¹⁰⁷ The exact audiences for the invectives against Constantius are moot, but they were unlikely to have been read in front of the imperial court! Their existence, however, is an important counterweight to the prevailing culture of praise that was central to late Roman court ceremonial.

At this stage, it is worth stating that this study values imperial panegyrics highly and regards them as important sources for the study of Constantius II. This goes against the established trend set by certain formative studies that has tended to dismiss the evidential value of panegyrics for the period.¹⁰⁸ The prevailing characterisation of imperial panegyric as a genre pre-occupied with flattery may be said to derive from the dichotomy first introduced by ancient historians that set panegyric in competition with the truth-telling ideals of ancient historiography.¹⁰⁹ Flattery and lying (its correlative extension) are value judgements that continue to be levelled at the evidential significance of panegyric, but which make little sense according to the internal logic of the panegyrical form.¹¹⁰ The relationship between orator and material that comprised the basis for the speech very likely involved a creative response to the grammar of power, more so than has been assumed previously since panegyric has tended to be dismissed as little more than the slavish aping of imperial ideology.¹¹¹ Laurent Pernot highlights the subtleties underlying this relationship with his comment that the encomium in imperial society “proclaimed and maintained the social consensus, the adherence of all to recognized models and ways of thinking”.¹¹² And yet, panegyrics are no less agenda-driven sources than invectives. Indeed, following the encomiastic example outlined in the work attributed to Menander Rhetor from the late third century, the focus for an imperial speech of praise is the amplification of an emperor’s character and achievements that “allows no ambivalent or disputed features, because of the extreme splendour of the person concerned”.¹¹³ Panegyric qualifies arguably as the representational medium par excellence.

Previous studies of Constantius II and the Constantinian dynasty have drawn heavily on the historical narratives presented by late antique- and Byzantine-era authors, foremost being the histories of Ammianus Marcellinus, Zosimus and Zonaras (the latter writing in the twelfth century although drawing on fourth-fifth-century historiography¹¹⁴), and the ecclesiastical histories of Socrates, Sozomen, Theodoret and Philostorgius. Even though portions of Ammianus’ history prior to 352–353 are no longer extant¹¹⁵ – presumed lost¹¹⁶ – his Res Gestae occupies an elevated place in the study of Constantius II due largely to Ammianus’ proximity to events and individuals in the service of both Constantius and Julian. As a result of Ammianus’ considerable partiality for Julian, however, the image of Constantius presented by Ammianus is frequently (but not entirely) antithetical to the image of Julian.¹¹⁷ Agendas also determine the portrayals of Constantius II in the other historical narratives identified above, which we discuss in greater detail in Chapter 3. The tendency of modern historians to prioritise these narratives, simply because they are “histories” and have thereby been characterised – mistakenly – by an objectivity that is absent from panegyrics, for example, is difficult to sustain especially in light of recent research that has ramified the relationship between panegyric and historiography by highlighting the numerous differences but also commonalities between the two forms,¹¹⁸ and in the knowledge that certain historical sources for Constantius’ reign – principally Ammianus – drew on epideictic portrayals of emperors for their own narratives.¹¹⁹ In this regard, the recent study by Diederik W.P. Burgersdijk and Alan J. Ross offers an important caveat:

… the ability of panegyric (on account of its temporal primacy and authority as a genre so closely implicated with the emperor and the imperial court) to set the agenda for how later writers should fashion the image of the emperor, should be unsettling for those who still privilege historiography as comparatively neutral and more reliable genre.¹²⁰

All the sources that form the basis for this study are concerned with disseminating images of the emperor. Those that had been prescribed or sanctioned by the imperial authorities, for example, constitutions, coins, medallions and honorific inscriptions, are representational (indeed, especially so): Their fundamental purpose was communicative in that they sought to convey a specific image/message about the emperor to a specific audience for a specific event or time in order to shore up the emperor as the one who rules with the consent of an intertwined cosmic/earthly hierarchy, beginning with the blessings of the divinity which were refracted through dynastic precedent and conditioned by the notion of legitimacy supplied by the empire’s military and senatorial institutions. The extent to which the emperor and his advisory body had a direct hand in all representative forms, however, is an important question that certainly cannot be assumed without scrutinising each example, in turn, a consideration highlighted most clearly by the evidence for imperial titles conveyed on milestones, a seemingly prosaic but nevertheless crucial evidential artefact. As Eberhard W. Sauer has demonstrated with regard to a sample of imperial inscriptions from milestones dated to the early fourth century, the broad variation in imperial titles, including spelling errors and factual mistakes, indicates that leading members of local councils frequently erected milestones without any oversight from the central authorities, and from a position that sought to demonstrate political allegiance to what they believed at the time to be the prevailing imperial ideology.¹²¹ Such instances illustrate that these displays of allegiance may have been well-intentioned but were also on occasion ill-informed!

The issues surrounding the contents and contexts of these sources are discussed in the following chapters. In the meantime, it is worth asking what some of the broader issues are when approaching sources for the reign of an emperor from a representational point of view? Leonardo de Arrizabalaga y Prado in his controversial study of the controversial third-century emperor, Elagabalus, raises a pertinent question in relation to his own imperial subject when he asks, “how, if at all”, may Elagabalus be studied?¹²² He takes as his lead a quotation from an essay by Arnaldo Momigliano, who asks (following Arrizabalaga y Prado’s translation):

How are we going to proceed where we cannot be guided by the ancient historians? … [and] how are we going to evaluate the classical historians if and when they are no longer our guides and we are thereby tempted to reduce them to the rank of ideological evidence for their own time?¹²³

While he commends the sceptical sentiment underlying Momigliano’s questions, Arrizabalaga y Prado is critical of modern approaches that study ancient historiography,

not for facts about or understanding of its subjects, but rather to study its authors’ ideologies. Concomitantly, ancient history – the pursuit of facts about antiquity, and their objective analysis and unbiased interpretation – is disdained, in favour of hermeneutic exegesis of ancient historiographical discourse. That is a pity.¹²⁴

It is a pity, he continues, because this approach fails to contribute to “historical enquiry in the fullest sense”, which comprises the discovery and interpretation of “verifiable facts”. But what constitutes “verifiable facts” with regard to an individual emperor? These might include, inter alia, facts about his family, his upbringing and education, his rise to power, his policies (a term, like propaganda, that should be used with caution in an ancient world context), the details of his itinerary, his “personality” and relationships with others, and his decline. As noted above, details covering these areas are conveyed to modern students in source material that comes in a variety of guises – for example, documentary-rhetorical texts (imperial letters and constitutions) and material artefacts (coins, statuary, monuments and buildings) deriving from or closely related to the imperial centre, or what we may call re-descriptive exemplars (for example, panegyrical encomia) that respond to the imperial persona emerging from the same centre, or authorial agenda-driven texts such as historiography – but the extent to which these sources transmit “facts” is a moot point. To reiterate earlier observations, all these sources convey representations determined by the agendas of those who commissioned and produced them. (With reference to artefacts of the second category, Arrizabalaga y Prado amends his earlier statement that “facts can be gleaned from [material] artefacts” – with the claim that “for the artefacts whence one gleans facts, in historical periods, are often propaganda”.¹²⁵) A central approach of this study is to highlight the subjective nature of all sources, and also to illustrate their intersubjective role in fostering the dialogue of legitimacy that took place between the citizens of the empire and the emperor and his government. This approach owes something to recent developments in the study of late Roman emperorship, in particular the “representational turn” discussed by Burgersdijk and Ross in their edited volume from 2018, and it also takes inspiration from recent attempts to deconstruct the way in which legitimacy functioned in the empire, exemplified in the recent studies by Johannes Wienand (2012a; and his 2015 edited collection, Contested Monarchy), Noel Lenski (2016a) and John Noël Dillon (2012) (all with the exception of the edited collection from 2015 dedicated to Constantine I!). For Arrizabalaga y Prado, the solution to the “counsel of despair” presented by “historiography [and] artefacts” is to recognise the value but also the problems presented by all ancient sources, and not to dismiss sources “just because they lie, distort or conceal”, since on occasions they also impart the truth.¹²⁶ While I applaud such honed scepticism, my approach in this study of Constantius II is slightly different: Certainly, where possible, I will excavate evidentially based details of the emperor’s life, but I also give due regard to creation and dissemination of representations of Constantius II, Constantine II and Constans in textual and non-textual sources – for example, those deriving from the emperor, his government and advisers (since they were, after all, promoting an imperial ideal that reinforced existing conventions and promoted new ones), in addition to those responding to the promotion of the imperial persona – for example, in speeches and panegyrics – via a process that may be likened to a feedback cycle, and also those later sources (predominantly of a historiographic orientation) that manipulate imperial images in order to address either openly or covertly the issues of their own time. In this sense, then, this study is not a biography of Constantius II but rather a study of Constantius’ reign that is guided in the main by contemporary and historic representations and reactions to that reign.

In contrast to the veritable flood of studies dedicated to Constantine I appearing around 2012 at the point of the seventeen-hundredth anniversary of Constantine’s victory over Maxentius, the son of the Tetrarch Maximian, at the Milvian Bridge outside of Rome in October 312,¹²⁷ the appearance of studies dedicated to Constantine’s sons in recent years has been more like a runnel. Although Constantius’ role in shaping the political climate of the Christian Church during the 340s and the 350s has long been acknowledged in numerous studies examining the contribution of the fourth century to the history of theology,¹²⁸ it is arguable that the first modern critical treatment of Constantius’ reign beyond his involvement with the church was Richard Klein’s monograph from 1977.¹²⁹ While Constantius’ involvement with theology and ecclesiastical politics remains central for Klein, his study is notable for its critical handling of the sources and its attempts to address questions arising from the chronology of the period, an issue which had been and continues to be a major consideration in studying this emperor. Broader questions relating to Constantius II’s reign were the subject of a collection of essays edited by Albrecht Dihle in the Fondation Hardt Entretiens series from 1989, although the collection also contains a number of contributions that examine the political and cultural significance of the Constantinian dynasty more widely (for example, Friedrich Vittinghoff’s piece on Constantine’s dynastic arrangements¹³⁰). One long-standing area of neglect concerns the administration of the empire following 337. This gap was partially filled by the pioneering study of Chantal Vogler from 1979, which once again took Constantius II as its main subject but also considered questions and issues relating to the administration of the western empire first under Constantine II and then under Constans.¹³¹ The importance of the constitutions composed in the names of the sons of Constantine to the administrative and legal study of the period has been highlighted by Paola Ombretta Cuneo in a contribution from 1997 to the series, Materiali per una palingenesi delle costituzioni tardo-imperiali.¹³² A number of high-quality works of synthesis covering the years 337–361 have appeared in recent years, including the study by Timothy Barnes from 1993 which addressed, in a typically forthright fashion, a range of issues pertaining to sources and chronology, followed in 2004 by Pedro Barceló’s monograph on Constantius II,¹³³ and in 2013 by Pierre Maraval’s book which examines the reigns of all three of Fausta’s sons.¹³⁴ Peter Crawford’s study of Constantius II from 2016 is a valuable contribution to the study of the mid-fourth century, particularly in relation to detailing Constantius’ numerous domestic and foreign military campaigns.¹³⁵ Muriel Moser’s monograph from 2018 examines the political relations between Constantius and the senatorial aristocracies of Rome and Constantinople, and brings a fresh perspective to studying the political networks and imperial management of the empire following the death of Constantine I. A recent monograph by Walter Stevenson from 2021 has performed a remarkable service in reappraising Constantius II’s political and missionising initiatives in Himyar and Aksum, initiatives half-told in the epitomised Church History of the early fifth-century “Arian” (heterousian) historian, Philostorgius.¹³⁶ Stevenson’s work persuasively demonstrates the universalising ambitions of this Christian emperor, in addition to highlighting his aptitude for what we would now refer to as intelligence-based warfare against the Sasanian Empire.¹³⁷ The collection edited by this author and Shaun Tougher from 2020 in the series New Approaches to Byzantine History and Culture evaluates the dynastic, administrative, cultural and representational features of the reigns of the sons and includes chapters examining the prevalence of civil wars in the period (the contributions by William Lewis¹³⁸ and Mark Humphries¹³⁹). Studies examining the literary and historiographic sources for the reigns of Constantine’s immediate successors have proliferated in recent times, and include the publication of volumes covering the reign of Constantius II in the extant books of Ammianus Marcellinus’ history by scholars from the Netherlands.¹⁴⁰ More recently, studies by Gavin Kelly¹⁴¹ and Alan J. Ross¹⁴² have highlighted the complex allusions and narratological features underpinning Ammainus’ literary construction of imperial authority during the reign of the Constantinian dynasty, and studies of correspondingly nuanced representations of imperial authority by Christian authors of the fourth century have been produced of late by Mark Humphries¹⁴³ and Richard Flower.¹⁴⁴ Indeed, the influential roles that the reign of Constantius II and his brothers played in shaping the composition of Roman power in the later stages of the empire have been scrutinised in important edited works, including the collection by Johannes Wienand from 2015 (Contested Monarchy), the aforementioned volume by Burgersdijk and Ross from 2018, and the volume from 2021 by María Pilar Garcia Ruiz and Alberto J. Quiroga Puertas (Emperors and Emperorship in Late Antiquity).

This present study blends both chronological and thematic approaches, in addition to scrutinising the sources that form the basis for historiographic narratives of the period. The representation of imperial authority – how emperors and their agency were imagined by those inside and outside government – is therefore the major concern for Chapters 2 and 3 of the study. Chapter 2 discusses a selection of key sources from the period that lay in close proximity to the emperor and the imperial court with a focus on legal constitutions, coinage and other donatives such as silver plate and medallions. The question of how much input the emperor himself had in the selection of images and legends, in the case of coins and medallions, or in the composition of legal rulings, edicts and letters, remains moot, although this study proceeds from the position that the emperor had some hand in how he and members of his family were portrayed in imperial communiqués and iconography, the question of how much depended most likely on the gravity of the matter at hand, or as Simon Corcoran puts it in relation to imperial letters, “the more important the subject matter and the more significant the recipient, the greater the emperor’s personal involvement will have been”.¹⁴⁵ The chapter focuses in particular on both historic and contemporary scholarly interpretations of these sources, and seeks to arrive at an understanding of some of the priorities underlying imperial “self-representation” during the reign of Constantine I’s immediate successors. Chapter 3 examines a selection of literary sources representing the reigns of the Constantinian emperors and their governments, beginning with imperial orations (panegyrics, speeches of thanks, etc.), and moving on to historiographical narratives: Two evidential types which previous commentators have either dismissed as instances of sycophancy run riot (panegyrics) or bemoaned the absence of adequate coverage (historiography, specifically, the “lost books” of Theodosian-era historian, Ammianus Marcellinus) or tendentious portrayal (Philostorgius’ epitomised Church History from the fifth century) of the period between 340 and 350. Chapter 4 discusses the creation of the family of Constantine I as an imperial dynasty emerging from the ashes of the “meritocratic” (ergo, non-dynastic: An evaluation which I largely reject) Tetrarchy, beginning with the “failed” instances of dynastic consolidation (Bassianus, Crispus) of the 310s and 320s, and moving on to what may very well have been Constantine I’s own “preferred solution” in the 330s of a dynasty which incorporated the offspring of his half-brothers (the children of Constantius I and Theodora) alongside a college headed by himself and his sons by his second wife, Fausta, the daughter of the Tetrarch, Maximian. The reconfiguration of this dynastic formation by Constantius II in the immediate aftermath of his father’s departure from this earthly realm is the point of departure for the reigns of Constantine II, Constantius II and Constans, and the partition of the empire into three respective spheres of authority. This arrangement held for a very short time prior to the eruption of a brief but historically significant conflict between Constantine II and Constans, which resulted in the death of the former and elevation of the latter to a position of prominence which threatened the interests of Constantius II. The occasionally disharmonious but largely congruous college of two Augusti which ruled the empire between April 340 and January 350 is the subject of discussion in Chapter 5. The chapter makes use of recent scholarly work which has reappraised the reign of the emperor Constans, the youngest of the three “Faustian” brothers, and the way in which his government in the western half of the empire interacted with his brother’s government in the east in a number of areas, including taxation liturgies, theology and bishop-management. Chapter 6 looks at the confluence of crises that befell Constantius II in the year 350, his annus horribilis. Roman exceptionalism is very much the dominant impression conveyed by the sources dealing with this period; yet, it is clear that Roman imperial hegemony was seriously threatened during the 340s and 350s by the “other” major imperial power of west Asia, namely the Sasanian dynasty which controlled late antique-era Persia. Constantius had lived with this threat for most of his adult-life as the Augustus assigned to rule in the eastern half of the empire, so he was cannily aware of the manner of responses required whenever the armies of the Sasanian monarch, Shapur II, appeared in Mesopotamia and Osrhoene. However, complications arrived thick and fast for Constantius in 350 with the appearance of Magnentius, a Roman general, whose cabal of self-interested generals and civil servants arranged the murder of Constans and the take-over of the western empire. No mere local usurper, the reign of Magnentius was the first time that Constantinian authority had been seriously challenged prior to the overthrow of the emperor Licinius in 324. The chapter narrates the main features of both the civil and foreign campaigns of the 350s, but also considers the broader implications of the political and military crises affecting Constantius’ reign in this decade, including the thorny question of dynastic succession and how imperium could be effectively shared in order to bring administrative coherency and political stability to the vast landmass of the later empire. Constantius’ reign during the 350s following the defeat of Magnentius forms the basis of discussion in Chapter 7. While commonly characterised as a time of sole rule for Constantius, this was a period when Constantinian authority was once again shared, first in the guise of Constantius’ cousin, Gallus, appointed Caesar by Constantius in 351, followed by the reign of another cousin, Julian, appointed Caesar by Constantius in 355. Gallus’ relations with the imperial centre of power was not a happy one, and the testimony of Ammianus, which “restarts” in book fourteen of his work with the reign of Gallus in Antioch, provides considerable insight into the political culture of Constantius’ and Gallus’ governments from this time. At this point, I offer a brief definition of the term “political culture”, a matter of some importance in light of the fact that Ammianus’ history (and indeed scholarly perceptions of events during the 350s) is to a certain extent dominated by politicised rivalries among the civil and military classes of Constantius II’s government. These instances of individualised competitive behaviour – reducible in most cases to a “competition for honours”¹⁴⁶ – arose out of but also shaped social relations of the time and influenced on occasions the political direction of the emperor’s government in a manner which Laurens E. Tacoma has lately proposed as central to the ancient historical appropriation of the concept of political culture, a term which he defines as

… not merely an articulation of power relations, but it is actively construing these relations by acting them out. Its social function is not only to buttress and legitimate the participants’ position in society (something that is certainly important), but as the position of the members is also open to contestation, it offers a platform for negotiation.¹⁴⁷

Gallus’ role as a patron of figures such as the politician and Christian missionary, Theophilus “the Indian”, is often overlooked by commentators as a result of the dominance of Ammianus’ narrative. This chapter focuses on some of the less well-documented aspects of Gallus’ reign, and considers the opportunities that Gallus’ engagement with the Christian (Homoian) community based in and around Antioch provided to Constantius for the expansion of his Christian-vision of empire into territories such as the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf once Gallus had been removed from power in 354. Chapter 8 continues discussion of Constantius’ reign during the 350s. Its focus is threefold. It begins with a discussion of the circumstances and events of Julian’s early period as Caesar and Constantius’ “management” of his new Caesar. It then picks up the numerous theological threads raised in previous chapters to consider Constantius’ involvement in providing a solution to the ongoing factionalism affecting the Christian Church throughout the 340s and 350s. It ends by discussing the details of what appeared to be another pending civil conflict with Julian, an event only curtailed by Constantius’ death in November 361. Chapter 9, an Afterword, looks at the immediate memorialisation of the reign of Constantius II, and the broader political and cultural currencies of the Constantinian dynasty in the context of the later fourth century.

This book has been a long time in the making, and many people have helped along the way. In particular, I would like to thank Michael Greenwood at Routledge for showing an interest in the project at an early stage and latterly for his enormous patience while I completed the manuscript. For assistance and advice on aspects of the study over the years, I offer my sincere gratitude to Richard Flower, Jill Harries, Mark Humphries, Josef Lössl, Alberto Quiroga Puertas, Shaun Tougher, Susanna Towers, Rebecca Usherwood, John Vanderspoel and Will Lewis. To Sarah, Luke, Amy and Willow, I thank you for tolerating the many hours when I was surrounded by an island of books and papers. I dedicate it to the memory of people long passed but remembered daily, Audrey Baker-Brian (née Hadfield), Fred Baker-Brian and Rosemary Baker-Brian.

Nicholas Baker-Brian, January 2022

Notes

1. See now Wilkinson 2009, 2010; also Barnes 2011: 127–131.

2. See esp. Fowden 1994.

3. On Constantine and the promotion of Christianity, see recently Drake 2000: 154–231; Cameron 2006: 96–103; Van Dam 2007: 252–353; Barnes 2011: 107–143; Bardill 2012: 218–325; Harries 2012: 106–181; Lenski 2016a: 27–83, 2017.

4. On Julian’s reign and religious policies, see recently Rosen 2006: 394–462; Tougher 2007: 54–62; Elm 2012: passim; Teitler 2017: passim; Greenwood 2021: passim.

5. Cf. Lienhard 1999: 29.

6. Recently deconstructed by Woudhuysen 2018.

7. See now, Lewis 2020.

8. See the following studies (not an exhaustive list by any means): Bastien 1964 (a numismatic study but with an important narrative overview of Magnentius’ reign, pp. 7–28); Didu 1977; Delmaire 1997; Bleckmann 1999a; Drinkwater 2000; Szidat 2015; Humphries 2015; Leppin 2015; Humphries 2020.

9. See esp. den Boeft, den Hengst, Teitler 1991: 233–235; also, Barnes 1998: 232.

10. Them. Or. 4.83b (Leppin and Portmann 1998). See the discussion in Krautheimer 1983: 134, n. 5.

11. On these divisions, see esp. Slootjes 2020.

12. See Slootjes 2020; on the conflict of 340, see Lewis 2020.

13. À la Potter 2004.

14. See Shahîd 1984: 62–64; Daryaee 2017.

15. Blockley 1989: 467.

16. Blockley 1989: 480.

17. Amm. Marc. 17.5.3–8. See de Jonge 1977: 127–168; and recently Jackson Bonner 2020: 78–81.

18. Cf. Dignas and Winter 2007: 60.

19. On the terms and implications of the treaty of 299, see Blockley 1984.

20. Their identities are discussed by Rezakhani 2017: 87–103. Also, Potts 2018.

21. Sasanian bloodshed: Amm. Marc. 16.9.3–4. Treaty with the Chionitae and Gelani: Amm. Marc. 17.5.1.

22. Amm. Marc. 19.2.1–15.

23. Amm. Marc. 16.9.4; Blockley 1989: 480–481. On the issues raised by the designation Germani to the confederacies beyond the Rhine, see esp. Halsall 2007: 118–131.

24. See the preamble in Drinkwater 2007: 1–10.

25. See esp. Istvánovits and Kulcsár 2017: 326–337.

26. Drinkwater 2007: 9. Similarly, see the analysis of Constantius’ campaigns against the Sarmatians and Quadi in 358 in Mócsy 1974: 287–288.

27. See Istvánovits and Kulcsár 2017: 338–343.

28. Omissi 2018: 19.

29. Omissi 2018: 15.

30. Cf. Rees 2004: 27–30.

31. Ward-Perkins 2014: 117.

32. Ward-Perkins 2014: 116.

33. Cf. the imperial itineraries assembled in Barnes 1993: 218–228.

34. See esp. Hebblewhite 2017: 215–218.

35. Ward-Perkins 2014: 122.

36. Ward-Perkins 2014: 122.

37. Although as Harries 2012: 195 highlights, the centre of the rebellion, Autun, was neither a frontier city nor a centre with a large concentration of troops.

38. Influential recent studies include Paschoud and Szidat 1997; Szidat 2010; Omissi 2018.

39. Canepa 2012.

40. Omissi 2018: 20.

41. Millar 1977: 617.

42. See the analysis by Omissi 2018: 20.

43. Notably Haake 2015.

44. Notably, Eusebius, Vit. Const. 4.63.3. See Dagron 2003: 13–53.

45. Cf. Omissi 2018: 21: “Contemporaries did not provide objective definition as to what marked a ruler legitimate or illegitimate. Rather, they defined just rule in contrast to tyranny, and did so in explicitly moral, rather than constitutional terms”.

46. See most recently, Bleckmann 2020.

47. Barnes 1992a: 252.

48. Barnes 1992a: 250–251; Dillon 2012: 108–109.

49. Davenport 2020: 227–229.

50. Barnes 1992a: 258.

51. Barnes 1992a: 258; also Davenport 2020.

52. See Davenport 2020: 224–226.

53. Dillon 2012: 108.

54. Cod. Theod. 11.30.16.

55. Ando 2017: 402.

56. See esp. Henck 2001a, 2007.

57. Cf. Barnes 1982: 85.

58. See esp. Malosse 2004.

59. Moser 2018: 126–127.

60. On the Constantinian endowment of Constantinople, see esp. Bassett 2004: 22–36; 50–78. On Constantius II’s contribution in particular, see Henck 2001a, 2007; Moser 2018: 256–266.

61. Moser 2018: 117.

62. See Moser 2018: 85–118 for a discussion of the cases.

63. See the discussion by Grig and Kelly 2012.

64. Ando 2017: 402.

65. Harries 2012: 114.

66. See Chastagnol 1962: 135–139.

67. See Skinner 2008.

68. Moser 2018: 189–194.

69. See esp. Skinner 2008.

70. PLRE 1: 438–439 (Honoratus 1); Moser 2018: 214–215.

71. On these senatorial positions, see esp. Davenport 2019: 586. Moser 2018: 220.

72. Moser 2018: 256.

73. Vaggione 2000: 150.

74. Vaggione 2000: 150.

75. Vaggione 2000: 151.

76. Cf. Vaggione 2000: 152, and the comments on Constans and Athanasius.

77. Vaggione 2000: 152.

78. See esp. the comments by Lenski 2016a: 37–42.

79. See esp. the analysis of Drake 2000: 309–352, and passim.

80. Cf. Diefenbach 2015: 362–363.

81. Diefenbach 2015: 363.

82. Diefenbach 2012, 2015.

83. Lienhard 1999: 29.

84. Lucifer of Cagliari, The Necessity of Dying for the Son of God 3; trans. Flower 2016: 147–148.

85. Hanson 1988: 320.

86. Flower 2016: 360.

87. See Hanson 1988: 325–334; Barnes 1993: 109–120.

88. Hanson 1988: 291.

89. See esp. Stevenson 2021: 41–71.

90. Notably, Barnes 1993: passim.

91. For commentary, see Barnes 1993: 101–108.

92. For overviews of the theological traditions, see Lienhard 1999: 28–46.

93. Cf. Lienhard 1999: 30–35, and a discussion of these and alternative categories.

94. See Gaddis 2005: 68–102 for an overview, and Flower 2013: 127–177 for a discussion of three authors named above.

95. See Flower 2016.

96. Trans. Flower 2016: 152–153.

97. Flower 2013, 2016.

98. Flower 2013: 148.

99. On this expression, see esp. Ritter 2006: 535–537.

100. Gaddis 2005: 69.

101. Flower 2016: 20.

102. See Pernot 2005: 175–181.

103. See esp. Rees 2010.

104. Cf. Flower 2013: 56–57.

105. For example, Pan. Lat. 12(9)3.5–7. Flower 2013: 98; Omissi 2018: 116–142.

106. Flower 2013: 53. As Flower notes (pp. 59–61), instances include Synesius of Cyrene’s invective against Arcadius.

107. Flower 2013: 78–126.

108. The classical dismissal of panegyrics as sources for the Constantinian period is Jones 1964: 115.

109. See esp. Ross 2016.

110. See esp. Vanderspoel 2019; Pernot 2005: 179–181.

111. See Vanderspoel 2019. Cf. the somewhat odd mix of critical analysis with commonplaces in Omissi 2018: 59–66.

112. Pernot 2005: 180.

113. Men. Rhet. 2.368.3–8 (Russell and Wilson 1981: 76–77).

114. See Neville 2018: 191–196.

115. See Barnes 1989.

116. Proposed reconstructions of the lost portions include Barnes 1998: 20–31.For an alternative view, see Rees 2014.

117. An excellent place to begin with Ammianus on Constantius II is Teitler 1992; also, Whitby 1999.

118. For example, Rees 2010; Ross 2016a: 174–189, 2016b.

119. Esp. Ross 2016a: 177–178.

120. Burgersdijk and Ross 2018: 14.

121. See esp. Sauer 2014.

122. Arrizabalaga Y Prado 2010: 2. See the review by Mary Beard, Time Literary Supplement (25/2/11).

123. Arrizabalaga Y Prado 2010: 5, quoting from Arnaldo Momigliano, Settimo Contributo alla Storia degli Studi Classici e del Mondo Antico (Rome 1984), pp. 32–33.

124. Arrizabalaga Y Prado 2010: 6.

125. Arrizabalaga Y Prado 2010: 10.

126. Arrizabalaga y Prado 2010: 10–11.

127. See the important review article by Flower 2012.

128. Notably, Brennecke 1984, 1988; Hanson 1988.

129. Klein 1977.

130. Vittinghoff 1989.

131. Vogler 1979.

132. Cuneo 1997.

133. Barceló 2004.

134. Maraval 2013.

135. Crawford 2016.

136. See Amidon 2007.

137. Stevenson 2021: 20–97.

138. Lewis 2020.

139. Humphries 2020.

140. Bk. 14 = De Jonge 1972 (2013a); Bk 15 = De Jonge 1972 (2013b); Bk. 16 = De Jonge 1972; Bk. 17 = De Jonge 1977; Bk. 18 = De Jonge 1980; Bk. 19 = De Jonge 1982; Bk. 20 = Den Boeft, Den Hengst, Teitler 1987; Bk. 21 = Den Boeft, Den Hengst, Teitler 1991; Bk. 22 = Den Boeft, Drijvers, Den Hengst, Teitler 1995.

141. Kelly 2008.

142. Ross 2016a.

143. Humphries 1997, 1998.

144. Flower 2013.

145. Corcoran 2014: 187.

146. Tacoma 2020: 22.

147. Tacoma 2020: 14–15.