ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests that John Malalas and Theophanes, though both idealizing Constantine and making him a focal point in their work, saw his significance in quite different ways. That is, there is a change in the way Constantine is perceived in chronicles across three centuries, which in turn reflects changes in the historical circumstances. Alexander Kazhdan lists various elements in the developed Constantine legend, which are common to a number of ninth-century accounts. These include a fictional ancestry for Constantine, concern whether his mother was a prostitute, Constantine's support for Christians as a youth, his orthodox baptism by Silvester in Rome, his veneration of the Cross, and various embellishments to Helena's vision and discovery of the True Cross. Constantine is reclaimed simultaneously from both Arians and iconoclasts for the iconodules. Malalas' Constantine, though baptized by Silvester early in his reign and in Rome, was just a Christian. Theophanes' Constantine had to be an orthodox one, anti-iconoclast and anti-Arian.
