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\'Constantine the Emperor\' - David Potter
#1
Some time ago I mentioned that I was planning to read and review David Potter's book Constantine the Emperor, which was published earlier this year. I've now done so and posted the review on Amazon, but since a few people on RAT have also read the book and commented on it I thought I'd risk repeating myself here for sake of general interest and perhaps provoking a discussion!


The emperor Constantine is one of the greatest figures of antiquity – only Alexander the Great rivals him in the number of books devoted to his study. As David Potter writes in this one, Constantine was ‘not only one of the most successful emperors of Rome, but one of history’s most influential leaders’.

If there was to be a definitive history of Constantine, Potter, the author of the compendious and enormously detailed The Roman Empire at Bay, looked like he might be the man to write it. This isn’t that book, unfortunately, but it’s a serious contribution to the field anyway.

Potter starts his account long before Constantine's birth, with the capture of Valerian by the Persians, going on to describe the Crisis of the 3rd century and Diocletian’s institution of the tetrarchy. This covers the first third or so of the book, but it’s vital in establishing the context for Constantines’ reign. Potter’s detailed and thorough analysis of this complex era covers all the main points, besides going into some unexplored corners. Many other histrorians have mentioned in Panopolis papyri in connection with Diocletian’s Egyptian tour; Potter suggests that the travails of the strategos of Panopolis in procuring supplies for the imperial party might betray a lingering allegiance to a recently defeated usurper! This sort of lateral thinking and detailed enquiry is one of the things that made The Roman Empire at Bay such a pleasure, and it’s welcome here too. Potter’s note about Diocletian’s idea of piety, ‘humans are acting on a stage laid out before the eyes of the gods’, is both insightful and a brilliant introduction to the discussion of the persecutions which follows.

Once Constantine appears on the stage, Potter follows the course of events rather more directly. He doesn’t really attempt to elucidate Constantine’s conversion to christianity, except to note that dreams have a long history in the relationship between emperors and gods. Neither does he have much time for the idea – first put forward by Peter Weiss and supported by Timothy Barnes – that the vision of Apollo Constantine apparently saw in Gaul was a solar halo (although he notes that his refusal of the theory ‘does not necessarily indicate an attachment to the Nazi party as is implied [by Barnes] in his discussion’!).

On Constantine’s christianity generally, Potter takes a middle line, portraying neither Burkhardt’s arch pragmatist or Barnes’s devout hammer of paganism. Constantine’s view of christianity seems to have been quite muddled anyway – Potter does a good job here of picking apart the confused theology in the Oration to the Saints - but in Potter’s view he was happy enough for his subjects to be either christian or pagan, so long as they were loyal and kept the peace. In his epilogue Potter debunks most of the wilder notions about Constantine that have accrued over the centuries, from the Donations to the Da Vinci Code.

All this is fair enough, although there are lapses – there’s nothing much on the years between the death of Fausta and Constantine’s own death, beyond the building of Constantinople. Barnes refers to his period as a ‘dark age’, and it’s easy to see why Potter spends little time on it, but a bit more attention to the wars with Sarmatians and Goths and the engineering works on the Danube would have been nice. Potter’s view of army reforms is a little cursory and vague, meanwhile – where he got the idea that Diocletian equipped his men with ‘leather chest protectors’ instead of ‘chain mail’ is unclear, but it surely wasn’t from Nicasie, as mentioned in the endnotes! A little more on the culture of the times too maybe would have been good – the literature, the development of art and architecture, the changing iconograpy of empire. Potter write well and interestingly about these matters in The Roman Empire at Bay, but here he seems deliberately to restrict his view to the imperial orbit, which is a shame. Compared to the depth of wide-ranging analysis and debate in The Cambridge Companion to the Age of Constantine (ed.Lenski), for example, Potter’s contribution can seem a bit thin in places.

For all his caution, Potter nevertheless proceeds from a number of very bold assumptions. The first appears on the opening page – Constantine, Potter claims, was ‘born around AD 282’. Constantine’s actual birthdate is unknown, but most historians opt for a date up to ten years earlier. Timothy Barnes (2011) makes a good argument for Constantinian propaganda promoting a later birthdate; Eusebius states in his Church History that Constantine became emperor at the age that Alexander died, which would put him in his early thirties at the time, rather than his early twenties as Potter claims. Potter doesn’t really refute any of this, and it’s unclear why he settles for 282, and more importantly why he doesn’t mention in his main text that his claim might be controversial. It may seem a small point, but in a book that may be seen as authoritative, this is important.

Also curious is Potter’s repeated claim that Constantine loved his wife Fausta. Much of Constantine’s personal life is obscure – we don’t really know what happened to his first wife Minervina (despite Potter deciding that she died in Nicomedia!), nor whether they were legally married. Fausta’s birth date is also mysterious – Potter opts for AD299, which makes her a child of seven or eight when she married Constantine. There’s good reason for the assumption, which Potter goes into in The Roman Empire at Bay but not here - another case of the earlier book being somewhat superior - but it’s still not a firm fact. Interestingly, Potter claims in his endnotes that the story in Zosimus about Fausta betraying her father’s plot against Constantine proves that Fausta did not share the imperial bedroom. In fact, it seems to prove exactly the opposite: that Fausta shared a chamber with the emperor in cAD310 and was able to make decisions about who was allowed into it, and was therefore a grown woman and not a child of ten or eleven.

Potter makes no particular guesses about the deaths of Crispus, Constantine’s eldest son, and Fausta. He does rather vaguely allude to idea that Fausta might have died much later than Crispus, and therefore Constantine might not have directly killed her; a few pages later they have merely ‘drawn apart’. Constantine, Potter says ‘seems never to have ceased loving his wife’. This seems disingenuous – we can’t say anything about matters of the heart at this distance. One does wonder, as well, what sort of ‘love’ might encompass murdering the loved one, or ordering her murder. Whatever Fausta did, Constantine never forgave her for it. Potter finds it only ‘ironic’ that in the year of her death the emperor passed a series of very punitive laws against adultery. That he never remarried, and developed an interest in celibacy, might suggest that whatever Fausta had done had put her husband off the idea of matrimony altogether – or, in fact, that he was a bitter misogynist who disliked women, aside from his sainted mother. Either possibility would be as admissible as Potter’s idea of Constantine's undying love.

Despite this, Constantine the Emperor is still a solid and very readable book. The view that Potter presents of the emperor is necessarily a partial one, and in many ways a rather biased one. But read against Barnes’s version, for example, or Stephenson’s, or in company with Lenski, Odahl or Van Dam, Potter’s book makes a respectable contribution to seeing both Constantine and his age in all their fascinating complexity.
Nathan Ross
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#2
Thanks! I will definately pick this up.

One book on Constantine NOT to buy is "Constantine the Great General: A Military Biography"
http://www.amazon.com/Constantine-Great-...roduct_top
There are some who call me ......... Tim?
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#3
If I remember correctly, in the page 16 the author tells how the heavy armour seems to be disappearing in depictions of the roman soldiers in the late 3th c. AD. He also suggests that late roman army abandoned earlier heavy armour and started to wear for example leather armour "like the auxiliaries". I thought he would have had more knowledge of the late roman military equipment. Quite disappointing. Sad
Virilis / Jyrki Halme
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#4
Quote:If I remember correctly, in the page 16 the author tells how the heavy armour seems to be disappearing in depictions of the roman soldiers in the late 3th c. AD.

Yes, it's page 15-16, when discussing the 'reforms' of Gallienus. He also goes for the 'elite central cavalry reserve' idea too. It's probably too much to expect any one historian to cover all the aspects, but it is strange that Potter follows such a dated idea about the army when he seems so well informed on recent studies in other areas.
Nathan Ross
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#5
Yes, that puzzled me too. I must say that in other respects it is a very good read.
Virilis / Jyrki Halme
PHILODOX
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#6
Quote: He also suggests that late roman army abandoned earlier heavy armour and started to wear for example leather armour "like the auxiliaries". I thought he would have had more knowledge of the late roman military equipment. Quite disappointing. Sad

IIRC (and I will have to consult the book when I get home from work), in Goldsworthy's Complete Roman Army, the illustrations of a late legionnaire do bear a striking resemblance to the images of a republican/principate auxiliary. Granted, these are only artistic renderings.....
There are some who call me ......... Tim?
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