The Oration was composed in Latin, according to the unambiguous statement of Eusebius: ‘The King used to prepare his compositions in the Roman tongue.’ Eusebius, who always flattered Constantine, would not invent a detail which would be bound to lower his hero in the eyes of many Greeks. Constantine no doubt acquired some Greek when he resided in the Asian province of Bithynia before 305; but at court he would have spoken Latin, and Lactantius, who taught rhetoric in that province, never tried to write in any other tongue than his native one. Like Augustine, Constantine would not have felt the need for a fluent mastery of any other language at the age when these are acquired with most facility, and, according to Eusebius, he addressed the Eastern bishops at the Council of Nicaea through an interpreter in 325 ce. It may therefore be inferred that even at this date he was unwilling or unable to sustain a long oration in the Greek tongue.
None the less, many scholars have maintained that the Oration to the Saints was written in Greek. The weakness in their position is that they tend to find their evidence in those passages which would have been most cogent and familiar to a Latinspeaking audience: namely, the appeals to the Sibylline Oracles and the Fourth Eclogue of Virgil. None of the Greeks who wrote on behalf of Christianity had cited Virgil; to cite him as a prophet was beyond the thought of any Latin author before the emperor’s contemporary, Lactantius. Sibylline declamations (that is, poems attributed to a female prophet of great longevity and authority) are adduced by Greek apologists—indeed, for Athenagoras, they are almost the only poetry worth remembering—but these are of the theological kind that preach the unity and transcendental attributes of God. Our author takes for granted that the Sibyl’s role was to prophesy future happenings, and in this he agrees with 52 maintains that Constantine spoke in Greek. T. D. Barnes, Constantine and Eusebius, 74, shows that even Constantine’s references to Plato required only a modest education.
Virgil, with Lactantius, and with the sacred books consulted by the Roman Senate on critical occasions. These facts once acknowledged, we may allow ourselves to hope that the sporadic inconsistencies which are said to entail Greek authorship of this speech can be adequately explained on the assumption of a Latin archetype.
As for the Sibylline verses, there is no doubt that they were first composed in Greek. They form the acrostic Iesous Christos Theou Huios Soter Stauros (‘Jesus Christ Son of God Saviour Cross’); the first five words are a standard Christian motto, often represented by the Greek word IXOYE (‘fish’). The Latin version reproduced in Augustine’s City of God achieves no more than an incomplete transliteration of these characters, and does not translate the lines which make up Stauros. There is nothing to preclude a Greek quotation of the oracle in a Latin work, for Lactantius quotes a handful of these lines without preserving the acrostic; it would, however, be a decisive proof that the author was not the Western emperor if he were found to have invented any part of the acrostic for himself. Suspicion falls on the seven lines which contain the last word, Stauros. The absence of these verses in Augustine’s Latin rendering might be traced to many causes—casual omission, an excusable fatigue in the translator, or a feeling that the secret of the Cross was not germane to an apologetic treatise. On the other hand, the poem is complete without these verses, and the fact that they appear in a longer oracle, which now stands as the eighth book in the Sibylline collection, is no proof that they antedated Constantine. Unlike Christos, Theou Huios, and Soter, Stauros is not one of Jesus’ titles, and cannot be included in the symbol of the fish.
The origin of the final stanza has, in fact, little bearing on the authorship of the speech, since even a Latin monoglot would be free to employ a Greek collaborator. It might be said that a Latin speech entails a Latin audience, who would not be able to follow a long Greek poem in recitation. But surely even Greeks would be incapable of deciphering the acrostic at one sitting, and these arguments tell us only that the present text is a published version, not the speaker’s copy. After all, we know that the texts which Cicero, the greatest Latin orator, submitted to the admiration of the reading public were by no means literal transcripts of the words that he spoke in court.
No setting for these verses could be more apt than the Oration to the Saints, ascribed to Constantine and delivered, if the opening paragraph means what it appears to say, on the day that commemorates the death of Christ: ‘Light more splendid than day and the sun, the prelude to the resurrection and recomposition of bodies which have travailed in time past, the sanction of the promise and the road which leads to eternal life, the day of affliction is here’ (Oration, i). To convene a group of prelates for a secular oration on Good Friday was a victory over custom, already worthy of the ruler who later styled himself ‘Victorious’ (Niketes). When we hear him speaking of that day as one of brilliant salvation, we must remember that the Church of the early centuries was inclined to see the Cross as more an interlude than an instrument in the victory of Christ. His passion was interpreted dogmatically as a ransom to the Devil, homiletically as a call to martyrdom, liturgically as the origin of purifying virtue in the sacraments, and symbolically as the extension of his arms to embrace the nations. Nevertheless, a more prominent place in the history of salvation was often given to Christ’s teaching, his temptations, or his rising from the dead. Justin owed his conversion to philosophy, Paul to an encounter with the resurrected Jesus; but Constantine would seem to have been the first Christian who could trace his faith directly to a vision of the Cross. According to the story told in Latin by Lactantius within a few years of the event, it was in 312, while preparing for a battle against his one remaining rival for the Western throne, that Constantine received a promise of victory ‘in this sign’; he adopted it at once as his insignium, and within a few hours was master of the capital. We do not know how long it took this tale to reach the East, for our earliest witness is Eusebius, in the Life that he published after the emperor’s death.
Everything but the language of the Sibylline oracle therefore points to Constantine, and to a Western audience. It goes without saying that Virgil, represented here as the mouthpiece of the Sibyl, would be less well known in the East than the West, where he was regarded as the poet laureate of imperial Rome, and even African apologists could call him noster Maro. If his most famous eclogue is indebted, as some have argued, to a Hellenistic oracle in the Sibylline collection, it would be almost inexplicable that a Greek should choose to comment, not on the oracle itself, but on the Latin imitation, which would be known to very few members of his audience. The translation of the verse is loose, but so is the speaker’s commentary, most of which is equally applicable to the Latin classic and the Greek periphrasis. Only at the end does the annotation seem to rest on the same defective grasp of Latin that has impaired the Greek translation of the poem:
Seeing thy gentle mother’s smile, begin
To know her, for she bore thee many months.
They parents have not smiled on thee by day,
Nor hast thou touched the bed or nuptial couch.
For how could his parents have smiled upon this one, who was their God, unqualified power, without a form . . . and who is unaware that the Holy Spirit has no experience of the bed? (Oration, 21)
The exegesis fits the Greek text well enough, but not the manuscript reading of the Latin:
incipe, parve puer, risu cognoscere matrem;
matri longa decem tulerunt fastidia menses.
incipe, parve puer; cui non risere parentes,
nec deus hunc mensa, dea nec dignata cubile est.
(Eclogue 4, 60-3)
It should be observed, however, that these verses in the Latin have been thought by many scholars to cry out for emendation, and even Quintilian, writing in the first century, reads the third line differently. It is therefore not improbable that Constantine was working with a different text; and I submit that this can be reconstructed by the simplest of conjectures, a change in the punctuation of the manuscript:
incipe, parve puer, cui non risere parentes, nec deus hunc mensa, dea nec dignata cubile est.
Elsewhere we meet with trivial discrepancies between the annotations and the Greek form of the eclogue, which disappear when the Latin is consulted. Paradoxical though it seems, the strongest evidence that the speaker knew his text in Latin is a misquotation:
Here the recollection of the minor poem has been waylaid by one of Virgil’s characteristic echoes of himself in the Aeneid:
Magnus ab integro saeclorum nascitur ordo (Eclogue, 4. 6) (The great line/order of the ages is born from the beginning)
. . . Maior rerum mihi nascitur ordo. (Aeneid, 7. 44)
(A great line/order of things is born for me.)
Latin result: Magnus ab integro saeclum mihi nascitur ordo.
(The great line/order of ages is born from the beginning for us/me.)
We may, if we will, believe that both the Aeneid and the Fourth Eclogue had been translated into Greek, and that the Latin had been rendered so precisely as to entail the same confusion. But even then, a Latin-speaking orator was more likely to have fallen prey to the treacherous resemblance, as the very familiarity of the passages would tempt him to recite without a book. As we might expect, then, the comments on Virgil’s poetry bespeak a Latin author, and no doubt a Latin audience. We have also seen that the language of the Sibylline acrostic tells us little, but the addition of the word Stauros rather vindicates than vitiates the claim of the Emperor Constantine to the speech whose superscription bears his name.