In his book, P. (Professor of Greek and Latin at the University of Michigan) sounds out one of the most fascinating figures to rule the Roman Empire: Constantine the Great, the first Christian emperor (a.d. 306–337). In eight parts, subdivided into 33 chapters, totalling about 300 pages, P. paints a comprehensive and detailed picture of an age of transition and an astonishingly successful emperor: in a time of dramatic domestic and foreign conflicts, Constantine prevailed over his adversaries in a whole series of civil wars; these military achievements laid the foundation for the consolidation of his rule over the Empire, which culminated in the founding of a new imperial dynasty. The success of his reign was helped not least by Constantine's profound administrative and religious reforms, which met the most diverse demands, interests and goals of his subjects and decisively shaped the face of Late Antiquity. Constantine reigned for a total of 31 years, longer than almost any other Roman Emperor.
Only to a limited extent does P. adopt a biographical approach; instead, he primarily explores the principles of Constantine's rule against the backdrop of overarching trends of his time. The result is not actually a biography, but rather a comprehensive sketch of the nature and functioning of the Roman state in Constantine's era and beyond. P. brings excellent qualifications to the task of composing a study of this epoch and its pre-eminent protagonist. He has long worked intensively on both the third and fourth centuries: two centuries that are historically intimately related, but generally studied separately. The divide between the Principate and Late Antiquity is one of the most powerful historiographical demarcation lines. But just as it is impossible to understand Augustus without bearing both the Republic and High Empire in mind, it is impossible to understand Constantine unless we situate his reign squarely in the structural framework of both the third and fourth centuries. P. occasionally loses sight of Constantine in doing so, for instance, when he discusses questions of coin circulation under Aurelian and similar problems at length, but overall his effort to situate Constantine's reign in the overarching trends of the third and fourth centuries is the great strength of his book.
This approach also allows P. convincingly to qualify the significance of religion for the reign of the first Christian emperor. Scholarship on Constantine normally focuses on his religious policy, and particularly on the nature and development of Constantine's personal religious convictions and their impact on the Christianisation of the Roman monarchy. Constantine's administrative, legislative and personal political decisions are usually observed through this lens – with the result that continuities are often overlooked or underestimated. Only in the last decades have scholars increasingly attempted to gain new perspectives on the transformation of the Roman monarchy between the Principate and Late Antiquity and to understand Constantine's reign as that of ultimately a more or less typical Roman emperor. P.’s book continues this trend and develops an overall interpretation of Constantine's reign in which religious change appears as an integral, but also limited, aspect of Constantine's efforts to rule the Roman Empire effectively.
The strength of P.’s analysis lies in his strong grasp of law, administration and prosopography. P. exhaustively teases out the emperor's interaction with decisive civil and military administrators of his government, such as the praetorian prefects Valerius Maximus Basilius, Iunius Bassus and Ablabius. The development of the Constantinian dynasty as a central organising principle of his reign is also laid out in detail. In his treatment of Constantine's legislative activity, the meticulous reconstruction of the legislation on marriage and adultery is particularly noticeable. With such carefully executed analyses, over the course of the book a generally convincing portrait arises of a ruler who in a period of great social change reacted to a shifting variety of problems with traditional means of Roman rule, but at times also with innovative strategies. Much of Constantine's involvement and many decisions here had little to do with religion. P. is able to elaborate this so convincingly because he maintains a healthy scepticism of Eusebius’ extremely influential depiction, which hardly misses an opportunity to portray Constantine as an ideal Christian emperor. At the same time, P. does not hesitate to draw on sources on Constantine that only seldom receive proper attention in comparable biographies: for instance, the documents on the Donatist controversy, Constantine's non-religious legislation in the Codex Theodosianus or Constantine's Oration to the Assembly of Saints.
P.’s primary goal thus is to elaborate how Constantine successfully created and maintained an ordered society in light of the structural conditions and historical changes of his time. This is problematic only in so far as P. is thereby also constantly in search of the ‘personality’ of the emperor. Even if P. distinguishes between different facets of Constantine's personality as administrator, as military leader, as devout Christian and so on, he understands these ‘personalities’ not primarily as social roles, as one might expect given the focus of the book on structural historical conditions, but rather as a genuine world of attitudes and desires that P. attempts to decipher with a sometimes openly psychologising approach. He would like to restore the man his complexity, which has supposedly been lost in recent scholarship, and thus penetrate deep into the emperor's mind. P. seems to know exactly what Constantine ‘thought’, ‘believed’, ‘intended’ and ‘aimed for’.
Fusing these two approaches – a structural perspective, on the one hand, and a focus on the emperor's ‘personalities’ on the other – causes conceptual frictions. Yet P. finds a prominent model for his historical method in Jacob Burckhardt, whose decisive study Die Zeit Constantins des Großen (1853) appears to have served as the conceptual blueprint for P.’s own interpretative model. Burckhardt attempted to merge structural developments with the emperor's genius (which roughly corresponds to the emperor's personality in P.’s account) into a coherent overall picture. In both accounts, it ultimately remains unclear how the connection between structural history and individual genius/personality is successfully made, and both interpretations suffer from conceptual anachronisms: while Burckhardt's Constantine takes the stage like a late-antique Napoleon, the dramatis personae of P.’s ‘story’ (p. 4) bear the traits of ordinary twentieth/twenty-first century Westerners. One example illustrates this best: when Constantine's mother is left by his father for another woman, P. understands this as a sign of a ‘passionate relationship’ with the new woman (p. 34). The fact that an insignificant stabularia was thus replaced by the daughter of the second-most-powerful man in the Empire is apparently not reason enough. On Helena, thus ‘dumped’, P. remarks, ‘We can now only guess at her courage and determination as she made a new life for herself. We may sense in the later record the role that she played in protecting her son, giving him refuge when the world seemed to have turned against him, reassurance that he was still loved … It is hard to imagine that she would not enjoy the laughter of children playing outside what was once her palace in the park on Rome's Viale Carlo Felice – or that her son would have changed the world if she had not given him the strength to face the uncertainty of his future’ (p. 34). I think this sounds like a soccer mom supporting her son who wants to make a difference and stand up for something. Perhaps P.’s interest in ‘personalities’ should be regarded as merely a concession to the genre of traditional biography. Readers who are willing to give these passages such a favourable reading will enjoy P.’s book and, on the whole, can learn something new about development of the Roman empire in the age of Constantine and beyond.
