ABSTRACT
Constantinople was established and embellished as a new Roman imperial city by the emperor Constantine I in the 320s and 330s. He provided ‘New Rome’, as he called it, with a solid defensive wall stretching from the Sea of Marmara to the Golden Horn, inside which he created a splendid and spacious new metropolis with an oval shaped forum, an imperial palace, baths, and porticoed thoroughfares, plus a local senate. Between the death of Constantine in 337 and the accession of Theodosius I in 379 emperors spent a total of just twenty-seven months in the city, or an average of less than two weeks per year. He was proclaimed at Sirmium in January 379 but had scarcely had time to assemble his own imperial court when he was forced to set out against the Goths for the campaign season of that year.
