ABSTRACT
My text is taken from the second book of St Ambrose, Concerning the Faith: ‘The army is led, not by military eagles and the flight of birds, but by Your name, Lord Jesus, and Your worship’. 1 For St Jerome, symbols of the Empire’s Christianization are spiders and owls in the deserted temples of Rome, and ‘the insignia of the Cross on the soldiers’ flags’.2 What then was the impact of Constantine’s new religion upon the army in the century that elapsed between his Christian victory at the Milvian Bridge (28 October 312) and the Gothic sack of Rome (24 August 410), those milestones in what Gibbon calls the triumph of barbarism and religion? If one takes Eusebius literally, ‘the historic world conversion from heathendom to Christianity was first of all effected in the army’.3 But was the army really Christianized? How far did Christianity affect the behaviour of fourth-century soldiers, their loyalties and morale? These questions must be pursued through a maze of anecdotal evidence, and the answer will be a series of impressions reflecting only too faithfully the fragmented, tendentious quality of the sources.
