Constantine in the sixth century

As much scholarship has already illustrated, at no time did Constantine have a coherent agenda for creating a Christian Roman Empire. ² Constantine did eventually come to be seen as the tutelary figure in the association between Christianity and Roman Empire, but this was a representation of Constantine cultivated over time by church leaders and by subsequent emperors who sought a recognizable means for communicating legitimacy in an imperial world that was increasingly different from that which had produced the first Roman emperor. ³ Certainly by the early fifth century, Constantine had become established in the late-antique imagination as a founding figure for Christian Empire. For example, the Theodosian Code (published 438) began its record of imperial decrees with the enactments of Constantine and ended that record with legislation pertaining to Christianity (Book 16), thus “bookending” a legal presentation of the development of Christian Empire. ⁴ Similarly, in the fifth and sixth centuries the name of Constantine had acquired the same legitimating power as that of Augustus, particularly in the eastern capital of Constantinople. Emperors such as Leo and Justin were “ritually incarnated” as “new Constantines” upon accession. ⁵ The potency of Constantine’s association with the distinctive kind of Christian rulership that had emerged in Constantinople could be activated to provide legitimacy for even the most questionable of imperial successions. ⁶ In the sixth century, emperors at Constantinople celebrated the gilded image of Constantine when it arrived via adventus at the imperial seat of the Hippodrome in annual celebration of Constantine’s birthday and the founding of the city. ⁷ At the same time, Constantine’s legitimating agency was not absolute and universally recognized; rather, the political and religious discourses of the sixth century indicate that the image of Constantine as a new kind of Roman emperor could be appropriated or rejected. Constantine in the sixth century could only be imagined in relation to the ideological definition of Roman Empire, but like every other period of Roman history, an ideological definition of the state was liable to contestation by groups with different interests in the idea of Roman Empire. As can be imagined, the discourse concerning Constantine and his relationship to Christianity and Roman Empire was particularly animated among writers exposed to the political culture of Constantinople. In the western Mediterranean, by contrast, interest in the legacy of Constantine seems to have had less immediate urgency, with most writers content to channel the stories of Constantine received through Lactantius, Eusebius and other earlier sources. Nevertheless, even in the “successor states” of the former western Empire, Constantinople had considerable political reach and peculiarities in the transmission of Constantine’s deeds may have more to do with the perception of Constantinople among Latin writers of the sixth century than a received tradition for Constantine. ⁸ In what follows, this chapter will outline some of the circumstances of political and religious polemic in which Constantine appears in the eastern and western literature of the sixth century.