Constantine's conversion to Christianity has always been a central question for those interested in Late Antiquity. In 1958, the Italian historian S. Mazzarino stressed the importance of the German humanist J. Löwenklav as the first modern interpreter of the ‘end of the ancient world’. Accordingly, Löwenklav was also the first scholar to propose in secular terms what could be denominated the ‘Constantinian question’ (S. Mazzarino, La fine del mondo antico [1959], pp. 95–100), which addresses the relation between the making of a Christian Roman Empire and Constantine's personality (his violent behaviour, his conversion, his political ambitions). L.’s new book shows that the Constantinian question is still a fundamental component of the study of Late Antiquity, but it also shows how far modern scholarship, regarding methodological sophistication and diversity of examined sources, can distance itself from those early humanist days. The volume addresses that centuries-old question with innovative approaches and inspiring learning. L. is not a newcomer either to studies about Roman emperors or to those about Constantine, having published an indispensable book about Valens, Failure of Empire (2002), and having edited the Cambridge Companion to the Age of Constantine (2006). In Constantine and the Cities, he reframes the Constantinian problem in terms of political efficacy of communicative actions established between the emperor and his subjects, reading the literary sources (Christian and non-Christian) as well as numismatic and epigraphic ones, under the inspiration of reception and communication theories.
The book is divided into four parts, which are preceded by an introduction and followed by an epilogue. The introduction sets the main themes and problems to be dealt with, and it also presents the heterogeneous representations of Constantine that have been created from ancient to modern times. Curiously, the humanist interpretations of Constantine are absent from L.’s introduction: the section on ancient images of the converted emperor concludes with Lorenzo Valla, while the one on the emperor's modern images starts with Jacob Burckhardt. Here L. explains his approach, which consists of employing reception theory and Habermas's theory of communicative action to address the relations between emperor and Roman citizens. The reception theory helps L. to decode the multiple layers at work in the communication process: the emperor and his messages, the changes made by official and unofficial professionals of communication and, finally, the audience in the cities. Habermas's theory of communicative action, in turn, allows L. to expose the dialogic nature of the relations between the emperor's authority as legislator and the way his subjects used laws and rescripts he passed for their own ends.
In the first part, ‘Constantine's Self-Presentation’, L. reveals the several images that the emperor projected to different groups. He begins by stressing the changing nature of those images: Constantine as a junior tetrarch, as the destroyer of tyrants, as the champion of faith and as the divine ruler. This protean imagery is then opposed by what L. calls the pillars of Constantine's public persona: his relationship with the idea of divine light, his association with military victory and his claims of divine inspiration. Nevertheless, those pillars are shown to be less unchanging than one would expect, having been initially rendered as more appealing to pagan audiences, and later as progressively more Christian in style and in ideological overtones. The first part ends with the analysis of the dialogue between the emperor and his Christian audience (motivated mostly by the unsatisfactory status of the sources for other audiences). Here L. reviews the historiographical debates about Constantine's conversion (where L. argues in favour of an early conversion), his role as the bishop for those outside the church and the relationship between Christianity and Empire envisioned by the emperor. L. convincingly maintains that Lactantius' idea of tolerance had a deep influence over Constantine's policies on religion.
In the second part, ‘The Power of Petitions’, L. addresses what the cities requested from the emperor and how Constantine was able to employ his role as legislator (mainly through the system of petition and response) to cautiously tip the scales in favour of Christians throughout the Empire. In the chapters about Orcistus and Hispelium, L. presents the evolution of the petition-and-response system from the first tetrarchs to Constantine. In the context of conflicts between local communities, the system was used to promote hidden agendas of civic patronage and changes in cultic practices, by either promoting villages to the status of civitas or punishing recognised cities by revoking such status from them. L., then, looks for the repetition of such patterns of Constantinian religious patronage in other Roman cities, highlighting the connection between Christianisation and Imperial name-giving for western cities, and the intense competition among eastern cities (ingeniously framed as peer polity interactions).
In the part that could be seen as the more conventional section of the book, ‘Reconstructing the Ancient City’, L. connects Constantine's religious agenda with the tetrarchic transformations of the Roman state, which moved the control of most of the cities’ revenue away from the hands of the civic curial classes into those of imperial bureaucracy. First, he addresses the impact of redistribution of wealth across the Empire (including confiscation of temple property) on civic authorities, which reduced the availability of resources for pagan temples. Next, L. convincingly demonstrates that wealth was employed in a well-defined Constantinian programme for the construction of Christian buildings in the cities throughout the Empire. Concluding this section, there is a reconstruction of the debates concerning Constantine's empowerment of bishops: by conceding them judicial authority, granting them power over manumissions, allowing them to use the public postal system and bestowing exemption from curial service. Here the reader meets a Constantine more cautious with the consequences of those policies than usual in recent historiography.
The last part, ‘Alternative Responses to Constantine’, deals with several instances in which the audience answered unevenly to the Constantinian message. That appears to be the case of certain pagan cities, whose negotiated engagement depended on the careful reading of the emperor's ambiguous images. Concerning pagan cities’ resistance, L. argues that, when Constantine's agenda was frontally opposed, even though sometimes he made use of violence and coercion, the emperor seemed to avoid such policy (what is illuminated by a comparison with the violent actions of Constantine's successors). L. then shows how the conflict between Donatists and Caecilianists challenged the emperor's decision of granting authority to bishops and was crucial for his later movement towards religious tolerance. Again, he compares Constantine's policy with the use of violence by his successors. In this context, I would argue that Donatist resistance in the fifth century was more unyielding than L. believes. Otherwise, it is hard to understand why, in 417, Augustine was still writing letters as lengthy as Ep. 185 to the new Comes Africae, explaining ab ovo the whole Donatist affair. This part's final chapter addresses two very complex cities, Antioch and Alexandria, exploring how these two metropoleis, their diverse communities and the peer polity competition among eastern cities were central for the developments of the Arian controversy and Constantine's engagement with it.
L. recasts the recurrent historiographical opposition between the sincerity of Constantine's conversion and his alleged adoption of Christian religion for political reasons as part of a wider set of ideological and political conflicts within and between the cities of the Empire. Indeed, the disputes over the emperor's changing image were central for his subjects; still, L. recreates from those disputes the emperor's ‘exercise of power as an intersubjective process’, eventually producing a tangible image of Constantine.
