ABSTRACT
To say that there are two Constantines, one pagan and one Christian, sounds like a truism, but, in fact, it is a truth that we ought to ponder. Marcus Aurelius, no friend to the Christians, is much the same man in Christian and in pagan historiography; Constantius II, a more assertive Christian than his father, cuts an equally wretched figure in all of our sources. Constantine’s interventions in episcopal quarrels were surely capricious enough to invite the same obloquy that catholic writers poured on his successors; if they did not, the reason was that he wore the halo of a savior, who could not be compared unfavorably with any of his precursors so long as a pagan restoration was conceivable. Constantius was in the position of England’s James I, whose misfortune it was to succeed Elizabeth, just as it was her good fortune to have succeeded Mary. The fact that Constantine came to represent an irreversible shift in religious policy might suffice to explain the hostile chorus of pagan witnesses (broken only when they have something to gain by flattery), if we had reason to suppose that they saw any policy in his profanations. To his pagan detractors, he is a voluptuary, a plunderer, and an enemy of the gods, but in his own cause, not in that of some new deity. Even his conversion, when remembered, is the final metastasis of an internal distemper; he is not a religious zealot but an archetypal tyrant, whose few virtues are exhibited only in battle, while in peace he makes war on the wealth and liberty of his own subjects. His sons may be answerable for other crimes, but his is to have enslaved the empire, not to a coterie of unlettered priests but to the specious affluence of Constantinople.
