Raymond Van Dam's latest monograph is an important contribution to recent research on Constantine and early fourth-century history. Van Dam introduces his own study of the “Constantinian revolution” by invoking two classic studies of Augustus—Ronald Syme's The Roman Revolution (Oxford, 1939) and Paul Zanker's The Power of Images in the Age of Augustus (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1988). Like Syme, Van Dam traces the political maneuverings and networks of power that brought Constantine to power and solidified his rule. Like Zanker, he considers Constantine's reign in terms various, and sometimes competing, processes of public representation. And like these classics, Van Dam's book aims at explaining broad social and political continuities and transformations in the Roman Empire. At the same time, Van Dam avoids—and insightfully critiques—reductive narratives of Constantine, both those that focus myopically on the emperor's relationship with Christianity and those that would interpret Constantine's attitudes toward religion as either “purely” religious or “merely” political. Instead, Van Dam “highlights different, and often alternative, perspectives on the significance of his reign” (11). He is largely successful. Van Dam addresses all of the well-trodden, classic primary sources while bringing other equally important but less well-known sources to the fore of his analysis. The result is a study that explores complex historical interrelationships between imperial politics, dynastic ideologies, civic and ethnic identities, and religious discourses.

The book is divided into three sections. The first, “A Roman Empire without Rome,” is organized around a close reading of a rescript of Constantine granting a priesthood and temple of the Flavian dynasty and the honorific name of Flavia Constans to the central Italian city of Hispellum. Where previous scholarship has looked to this document as evidence of either waffling or ambiguity in Constantine's religious policies, Van Dam examines the text in terms of Constantine's efforts to replace the Tetrarchic model of collegial imperial succession with a return to a dynastic system. In these chapters, Van Dam pays as much attention to Hispellum's perception of Constantine as to the emperor's self-presentation. Constantine's imperial representation was mutually constructed in the interactions between petitioning cities and the emperor. Van Dam's analysis thus highlights the importance of local politics in Constantine's efforts to establish a new dynasty.

Here Van Dam also considers Constantine's changing attitudes toward the city of Rome itself. Maxentius, whom Constantine defeated in 312, had been based in Rome, and Van Dam interprets Constantine's monumental building projects in the city as ways of displacing his rival and establishing his own relationship with the city. At the same time, Constantine shifted his attention away from Rome, first to the Balkans and then, after defeating Licinius in 324, to the eastern provinces. Van Dam argues that Constantine's patronage of Rome was an ambivalent imperial gesture. While establishing Constantine's imperial presence in the city, such monuments pointed simultaneously to his absence. Rome, like provincial cities, became the beneficiary of the patronage of a distant emperor whose imperial image was conveyed through monumental building projects.

The second section of chapters is organized around a contextualized reading of petitions of the Phrygian city of Orcistus to Constantine. These chapters benefit from Van Dam's earlier research into the social and religious history of Cappadocia. Here, Van Dam sets questions of religious identity—both Constantine's and that of local populations in the East—within the contexts of late antique civic diplomacy and the politics of cultural identity. Assertions of shared piety and religious preference had long been a means for provincial communities to establish ties with Roman imperial regimes. Van Dam argues that the changing religious policies of first, the Tetrarchy, and later, Constantine, had problematized “religion” as a category within early fourth-century diplomatic discourse. The ambiguity of religious language in Orcistus's petitions was a calculated effort on the part of the city to negotiate the political uncertainties of a new imperial regime. Van Dam also discusses the ways Diocletian and the Tetrarchs promoted Roman imperial unity through the hegemonic use of Latin in their administration of the East. Van Dam argues that the gradual Christianization of the East paralleled the Hellenization of imperial administration and elite culture in the nascent Byzantine Empire. In this assessment, Constantine appears as a cultural conservative. Like the Tetrarchs, he was a native Latin speaker and maintained the cultural political hegemony of Latin in his administration of the East.

The book's final chapters examine interconnections between theological and political discourses. Van Dam does an excellent job of analyzing the political theology of the Tetrarchs, showing how Diocletian's new imperial model was based on a tension between rhetorics of hierarchy and concord. This political theology, the author contends, was emerging at the same time that Christians were grappling with a theology based on concepts of unity and multiplicity. The rise of Constantine as a monarchic, Christian ruler prompted Christians to consider both the emperor's relationship to God and the relationship between God the Father and God the Son. Van Dam presents “Arian” theologies of the Son's subordination and political theologies of Constantine's divine election as mutually reinforcing discourses of power. The articulation of pro-Nicene theologies, he argues, in turn reinforced and was buttressed by post-Constantinian political philosophies that located Christian emperors as human servants of Christ rather than as earthly analogues to God's Son. Van Dam does a fine job elucidating the blurriness of the distinctions between political and theological discourses. Both served as figurative media for theorizing and publicizing power. This focus on Flavian and Tetrachic political philosophies, however, does obscure the classical and Hellenistic political philosophies of kingship that had long been part of Roman imperial rhetoric and Christian theology. Reading Van Dam's skillful analysis of the interrelatedness of imperial representation and theological rhetorics alongside other recent studies of the linguistic and social aspects of the “Arian” controversy, though, offers a richer, better contextualized account of the development of early fourth-century theologies.

This book is highly recommended for specialists and graduate students in early fourth-century history and theology. Van Dam also provides introductions, editions, and translations of the Hispellum and Orcistus documents in appendices, adding to the utility of the volume for graduate seminars. Van Dam's clear, readable style is accessible to non-specialists as well.