The reign of Constantine is frequently presented as one of the great turning points in history, setting the Roman empire (and ‘western civilisation’) onto a radically different path. With the 1,700th anniversary of the Battle of the Milvian Bridge having fallen in 2012, the last two years have witnessed another effusion of re-evaluations of both the man himself and his three decades of imperial rule, with much attention continuing to be paid to assessing both the degree of innovation and the immediate impact of his actions. D.’s scholarly volume explores a selection of Constantine's surviving legislative pronouncements but, rather than re-treading the familiar ground of the emperor's ‘religious policy’, its focus is on the ways in which he sought to control the administration of justice across his wide empire and, perhaps more importantly, to communicate his intentions to his many millions of subjects. As one would expect, D.’s material for this study is mostly drawn from the Theodosian Code, which famously includes many forceful denunciations of wrongdoers and declarations of imperial intentions. His portrait of the emperor is therefore suitably dramatic and animated: ‘The Constantine that emerges from his legislation has little in common with the stereotypical picture of a late antique ruler, aloof and serene. Constantine reveals himself in his legislation as greater than a monolith: he is a firebrand, a populist autocrat, more terrible than majestic’ (p. 258). This is an emperor with a watchful eye and a swift hand, and he wants everyone to know it.
Before examining the content of Constantine's pronouncements, D. first deals with the sources and forms of the extant material. Chapter 1 is therefore largely devoted to the Theodosian Code, including the long-debated questions regarding its compilation and intended scope. Regarding the fact that the earliest documents preserved in the Code date from 312, D. argues coherently that this date has no specifically religious significance, but rather marks Constantine's conquest of Italy and Africa. This then enabled his rulings to enter the collections in Rome and Carthage which were later to become important resources for the Code’s fifth-century compilers. D. endorses the view that obsolete legislation was not excluded from the Code, arguing that Sirks’s opposing view is based on a misreading of the phrase uis sanctionis in CTh 1.1.6 (A.J.B. Sirks, The Theodosian Code: a Study [2007], pp. 158–67). This is followed by a chapter classifying the forms that Constantine's pronouncements took, arguing that the ‘epistolary edict’, in which changes to law were made in a document addressed to a specific individual, rather than the whole empire, was a distinctly Constantinian innovation, albeit one building on Tetrarchic trends. Chapter 3, which looks at the tone of imperial statements, similarly notes the presence of a more complicated and elevated register in letters to imperial officials during the final years of the Tetrarchy, setting the scene for this to develop further under Constantine.
D.’s discussion of the content of Constantine's pronouncements begins by looking at the ways in which the emperor presented himself to his subjects as an approachable figure, who ‘invites, even encourages, the provincials to report administrative abuse to him personally’ (p. 99). Here, as for the remainder of the book, the argument is assembled through close consideration of a number of documents in turn, usually presented in both Latin and English.Footnote 1 Chapter 4 also examines the developing roles of both the praetorian prefects and imperial agents in hearing complaints about provincial officials and investigating their activities. This concern about the behaviour of the imperial administration is explored further in the following chapter, ‘Constantine and the Provincials’, where D. considers what he terms Constantine's ‘paradoxical hostility to his own representatives’ (p. 119). Attention is paid to the emperor's apparent attempts to make the administration of justice fairer and more transparent, through regulating trial procedure and encouraging provincials to send acclamations to him if they wished to complain about their governor. D. also revives an interpretation of CTh 1.16.7 (of 331) as banning all sportulae (payments to officials in return for administrative action). Such fees were famously listed for all to see in an inscription known as the ordo salutationis, erected at Timgad in the early 360s. D. therefore concludes that Constantine was legislating to maintain access to justice for all his subjects, however poor, but also that this battle against corruption was lost within the following three decades. This analysis forcefully asserts that CTh 1.16.7 ‘was not some showpiece for posterity but law, and circulated throughout the empire’ (p. 145), leading to widespread, but probably not universal, enforcement by officials. This more traditional interpretation therefore pushes against readings of this constitution, and other late Roman legislation, as attempts ‘to mark out one idealized version of later Roman government’ through the ‘dramatic exaggeration’ of their rhetoric, rather than ‘expecting undisputed conformity’ (C. Kelly, Ruling the Later Roman Empire [2004], p. 214).
Chapter 6 maintains the focus on the imperial administration by exploring further Constantine's self-presentation as the defender of ordinary provincials and taxpayers against the depredations of corrupt officials, including provincial governors, numerarii and prison officials. This careful exploration of imperial rhetoric illuminates clearly the skilful way in which the emperor could, when necessary, distance himself from his own underlings and so position himself alongside his subjects as both their fellow victim and the avenger of the administrators’ crimes. The book concludes with two chapters examining the formal procedures for legal proceedings and appeals. Here, as elsewhere, Constantine emerges as a man who ‘strove publicly both to guarantee justice and to prevent its perversion’ (p. 249). Both judges and litigants were vehemently instructed to follow correct protocol and to refer matters to the emperor where appropriate. D. carefully describes the practice of consultatio, in which a judge sought the emperor's advice in reaching a decision, and the parallel Constantinian innovation of appellatio more consultationis for appeals after a verdict had been given. In both these cases, judges were expected to send full documentation to the imperial court, with severe punishments threatened for those who disobeyed. Concomitantly, appellants who sought to bypass the proper channels or to lodge dilatory appeals against sound convictions were similarly excoriated.
As D. rightly stresses in his conclusion, as well as making concrete changes to the running of the empire, such pronouncements helped the emperor to maintain the appearance of restless surveillance of his bureaucracy and merciful concern for his people, so that he ‘inexorably tightened his grasp on the Roman Empire, on its subjects, and on fleeting power’ (p. 258). Therefore, while it does maintain a tight focus on the reign of Constantine, this book engages with the wider debate over the ultimately inseparable ‘practical’ and ‘ideological’ functions of late Roman legislation, proposing an account of their relationship that emphasises the former. D.’s Constantine is definitely an innovator in these ‘secular’, administrative matters, a man who ‘transformed a passive government typical of the High Empire into a relatively proactive, popularizing autocracy that would persist long after his reign’ (p. 6). This book therefore seeks to bring Constantine out of the shadow of the Tetrarchy, although the question remains as to whether the extant ‘spontaneous’ legislation of Diocletian and his colleagues is to be regarded as a greater innovation, which Constantine continued and developed. (See, for example, J. Harries, ‘Constantine the Lawgiver’, in S. McGill, C. Sogno and E. Watts [edd.], From the Tetrarchs to the Theodosians: Later Roman History and Culture, 284–450 ce [2010], pp. 73–92, especially 75–7.) Of course, no emperor could ever have been completely ‘reactive’ or ‘proactive’, and differences in the type and quantity of surviving imperial pronouncements pre- and post-Constantine will always present methodological challenges. None the less, D. has produced a valuable contribution to our understanding of both the practice of government and the rhetoric of imperial rule in the early fourth century.
