In Our Time - Constantine the Great

Episode Date: October 5, 2017

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the life, reputation and impact of Constantine I, known as Constantine the Great (c280s -337AD). Born in modern day Serbia and proclaimed Emperor by his army in York in 306AD, Constantine became the first Roman Emperor to profess Christianity. He legalised Christianity and its followers achieved privileges that became lost to traditional religions, leading to the steady Christianisation of the Empire. He built a new palace in Byzantium, renaming it Constantinople, as part of the decentralisation of the Empire, an Eastern shift that saw Roman power endure another thousand years there, long after the collapse of the empire in the West. With Christopher Kelly Professor of Classics and Ancient History at the University of Cambridge and President of Corpus Christi CollegeLucy Grig Senior Lecturer in Roman History at the University of Edinburghand Greg Woolf Director of the Institute of Classical Studies, University of LondonProducer: Simon Tillotson.

This is the BBC. Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time. There's a reading list to go with it on our website, and you can get news about our programs if you follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. I hope you enjoyed the programs. Hello, Constantine the Great ruled the Roman Empire longer than anyone else, other than Augustus, and by his death in 337-A.D, the empire was transformed. He set up a power base in the East, which is Constantinople,

became the centre of the Empire at Byzantium, for another thousand years. He protected the borders from invasions, and he was the first emperor to be baptized, protecting Christians from persecution and promoting Christianity, so strongly that soon after his death, it became the empire's official religion. Later, it was even believed he donated his Western Empire to the papacy. We'd meet to discuss Constantine the Great R. Christopher Kelly, Professor of Classics and Ancient History at the University of Cambridge and President of Corpus Christi College, Lucy Grigg, Senior Lecturer in Roman history at the University of Edinburgh and Greg Wolfe, director of the Institute of Classical Studies at the University of London.

Greg Wolfe, in what shape was the Roman Empire in when Constantine was born in 272 AD? Constantine was born into an empire that was in recovery after a couple of generations of chaos. It had gone through maybe 60 years of civil wars, barbarian invasions. And at the time he was born, it was just beginning to put itself back together again. How long had he been running? How long had the empire been running when he was born? About 250 years, 270 years, depending how you count it. So there's a long period of peace in the first two centuries AD,

and then there's a century where things begin to go wrong, and then they go very badly wrong. And then as he's born, more military emperors are beginning to put it back together again. But the empire's changed to survive. It's had to mutate into something new. Into what? into something that is run by generals, by armies, where the old dignified aristocracy, the Senate in Roma,

they're sort of marginalised, they're very rich, they live a fantastic lifestyle, but the centre of power is wherever the emperor is, wherever the army is moving back and forth across the northern frontier. When you say they're sort of irrelevant, does that mean they didn't take part in decisions about we will resist the Sasanians in the east

or we will fight the barbarians in the north? What did they do then? In what way did the loss of power demonstrate itself? For the first couple of centuries, they never took real decisions, but in the first couple of centuries, the senators were providing the generals for the armies, they were providing the main advisers for the emperors. And every emperor until the third century had been a senator first.

They came out of that senatorial class. And what happened to the third century is that the emperors come more and more from people who have spent their entire time with the army. Many emperors, Diocletian among them, barely went to the city of Rome. Let's talk about Diocletian. Why is he important? Diocletian, who came to power in 284, when Constantine was just a child, he began to create a new structure for the empire. And it's a structure where you have more than one emperor.

You have a couple of senior emperors, a group of junior emperors called Caesars. They divide the military job of running the empire. It's not split into separate states. And Diocletian is the most success of a series of these military emperors. He creates a new tax system, the army, the coinage. Everything is now geared towards a more sort of military, well-organised structure. And can you tell us to direct an immediate advantages of that? Well, the advantage is you've got an emperor near the frontier, whichever frontier is under threat,

whether it's the Rhine, whether it's the Danube, whether it's facing the Persian Empire off in what's now Syria. you've got somebody on the spot and they have their palaces and their courts and decision making all around them. And each of these emperors with their assistance or second in command who are called, the emperors are called Augustus,

the assistants are called Caesars. These have them had independent power or did they have a joint policy? Well, as far as we can tell, the way they always presented it when they could is that they were all working together as a college, as a group of emperors. Inevitably, in any group of colleagues,

there are sometimes tensions. sometimes these became militarised tensions. Did Constantine have any direct contact with Diocletian? I don't know whether he actually met him. He was the son of one of Diocletian's nominees for the next rank, Constanius. Lucy, Lucy Greene, can we talk about Constantine's early life? Yes. The problem with Constantine's early life is we just don't know much about it.

his own propaganda as well as the propaganda of those not so keen on him tries to obscure some of the facts even down to when he's born, but he's born 272, 273. He's born in Serbia, as Greg's saying, he's not from the traditional Roman aristocracy. He's from a military background. Part of the controversy is over indeed his own status because his father, Constantius, a soldier who gets promoted, does very well

then the tetrarchy, but his mother is referred to, well, the most charitable description of her is as a stable girl or as an innkeeper's daughter. She's also referred to as being of the lowest status. There are those who think that she was not married to Constantius but was in fact his concubine, so Constantine wasn't legitimate. But these things are really up for debate. She was English and she ended up a saint. I don't think she, well, there are all kinds of stories about her English as well. probably not so she's also from the Balkans

and probably his father meets her while on campaign I'm relying on Evening War rather than any Of course, Evelyn Moore I'm great novelist but not so sure about the history Anyway put that aside And so he was born into an army atmosphere At a time when the army was taking over

And what was his education then Was it entirely to do with being in the saddle as a young boy and going into battle like that? Well no because when his father gets promoted he gets sent to follow diocletian to court. So he goes to Nicomedea, and while he's there, he would have been educated in Greek, which he wouldn't necessarily have known before.

And he clearly picks up rhetorical skills, an understanding of law, the things that are more traditional aristocratic ruler would have had. So that's the kind of education he gets as part of this tetrarchic court atmosphere. It's a bit curious, because you're not struggling, but facts about him aren't easily available, yet he was this great empire. It was a time when people writing stuff all over the place.

Why do we know so much about him? Why do we know more about him, sorry? As I said, because he has what seems to be a very successful propaganda machine. So he censored stuff. The date of his birth, he clearly tries to doctor to try it. You asked a key question, how much time to spend with diocletian. Clearly it becomes a bit embarrassing. that he's been closely associated with Diocletian

because Diocletian has a bad reputation amongst the Christians, for one thing. And so they tried to sort of massage that he was very young when he was at Diocletian's court. And there's also the hostile sources against him, but I think it's worth remembering that it's not so unusual that we don't know the details of someone's early life and that most of what we think of as facts

in the ancient world are up for debate. So you'd say, what was then an Arisocratic education reading, 19 and Greek, and it tells a little more about? But again, no, I can't really, because we don't know. We do know that you learn. Let's move on swiftly. I mean, when he started the time, he was the army, as I understand it.

The army, yes. We elected him as Augustus and they presented it a fait accompli too. It's absolutely a fait accompli. That they acclaim him as Augustus in York. And you can see that statue of him next to the Minster still today. And so he's calling himself Augustus in the West, except there then has to be a bit of a stitch up and he's officially in a compromise acclaimed as Caesar, a junior emperor

but yes, on the ground in Britain and Spain and Gaul he is acclaimed as Augustus so he's really on his way at this point but there's still other people in the field. Christopher Kelly, this begins an extraordinary career or he's already known as a great commander for fighting the intransigent Picts, going to. for the Gauls and so on. But Diocletian retired, didn't he, which was nearly unprecedented.

Diocletian retired the year before in May 305. Why did you do that? Well, Diocletian had a particular idea as to how unity in the empire might be restored. As Gregor said, after that third century of near imperial collapse, Diocletian established the Tetrarchy, Greek for rule of four,

in which he established a college of emperors, and they were picked as the strongest, most competent, most influential generals in the empire at the time. That's a brilliant interim solution, but it's not a solution that lasted more than a generation. The problem is very simply put, when one of the tetrarchs dies, or in Diocletian's case, retires, how do you replace?

And in thinking about the replacement, you have to think about how you negotiate between who you think is the next best and most powerful and the sons of the previous emperors. And it's precisely that conflict between emperor's sons, of which Constantine is one, and other claimants to the throne. So the tetraarchy was a stable way of reunifying the empire, but it was an unstable way of securing imperial succession. And that's why when Diocletian retires in 305, the empire is again plunged into civil war, and Constantine is a major player in that war. Just to try to nail it, his army, his father's arm built by him and himself, voted, elected him to be the Augustus. Was this a fix, or was it because he was a good commander and led them to success,

therefore to loot their effort and their own sort of fame? Well, I don't think those two things are in conflict. No. What didn't happen, if you like, was the assent of the other members of the Tetraki as to who should be the new member when Constantine's father died. The army jumped that by proclaiming him immediately Augustus in York in 306. How did his record by then, has his military record by then been recognised as exceptional? Not particularly, except that in all of these cases,

as being the son of an existing emperor gave him unprecedented advantage and also experience of command. He is the man in the position, and I suppose in some ways, although he might have felt a long way from the senses of power in York when his father died, nevertheless there he's fairly free of rivals on the periphery of empire with a seasoned and well-disciplined army. It's a good position to strike for power. And did he after that, as it were, march on Rome to try to claim total authority? I mean, over six years. He initially moves through Britain into France, has his interim capital at Trier, and then eventually moves down the Italian peninsula,

because the prize is still Rome. So the prize was to defeat his brother-in-law and enemy. and other Augustus, Maxentius, which he did at Milvian Bridge, a battle of Milvian Bridge, who is over the tie, but that was, can you tell us about that battle, but then the added significance

of that battle? The strategic importance of that battle is that it's the victory that gives Constantine possession of Rome. It establishes him as the undisputed ruler

of the Western half of the Roman Empire, in addition to the symbolic, significance of having captured Rome. Can I turn to you then, Greg, for the other factor in that battle, which is the vision he is alleged to have had, and the effect that that had on him, the battle and the future? Yet this is where the story gets really spooky, because up to then, we've got a very, very successful soldier emperor, like all the others.

And if he died in the battle, we'd not remember him any more than the sons of Carus. And in that sense, this is the point where Constance, something gets interesting because we're told he's in the middle of the day and he looks up in the midday sun where this troops around him and he sees a cross shining in the sky above the sun and that afterwards there's a dream in which christ comes to him and explains about how this works and he tells him to make an image which is probably the cairo that which looks to us like a cross with a p in it the first two letters of christ's name in greek kai roe for kura christ and put this on a great big symbol, a great big banner, and this will lead him to win. And the words associated

are, with this, you'll conquer. Now, the tricky bit is this story. With this sign, isn't it? With this sign, you'll conquer. And the tricky bit is this story actually we first know about after his death. And the person who writes about it, Eusebius, who's his biographer, has already written an account 25 years before where he doesn't mention this. And there's another account where Christ comes and gives a slightly different message in a dream before the battle and so on. And it looks very suspicious that constantise Christianity rolls like a snowball through history. The later the source, the more Christian he is. And so how real this vision is is a huge issue.

And some people say, okay, it's for real. It's a solar phenomena. It's a weird meteorological effect, which is kind of the equivalent to saying it's a weather balloon instead of a UFO. But what I think clearly is is this propaganda machine Lucy's talking about which over time has made Constantine more and more Christian in retrospect.

Well, what does happen after that battle is his opponent his horse throws him into the diver and they fish him out and decapitate him and so that's the end of Maxentius. And so Constantine is in a position of solar and he does start quite soon to do positive things for a minority, neglected and very often persecuted sect,

well, many known as the Christians. So that happens, vision or no vision. It does happen that even those people who want, those ancient people, sources, bishops like Eusebius, who want to present Constantinus Christian, even from childhood, they can't really find much to say that he did for the Christians until after that battle. Lucy, let's just talk about, let's tease away at this, because his father, Constantine's father was, as I understand it,

anti, not particularly fond of the Christians. But on the other hand, he's different from Diocletian. His father is certainly... I was coming to Diocletian who persecuted the... Yes, his father is not persecuting the Christians and his germane in the same way that Diocletian is persecuting his. I mean, as I've said, it's boring to keep on saying we don't know about his upbringing,

but it could have been some... He could have been exposed to a vaguely favourable notion of Christianity earlier on in his life. But yes, clearly it's after the Battle of Milvian Bridge that he's in a position to do something, although even so he's not doing it on his own. I was just thinking that in a sense, you don't have to believe in miracles to see the Milvian Bridge as marking a fundamental change in Constantine's policy and religious understanding. There's a way in which miracle stories are strongly Christian ways of writing that story. But it's clear, for example, in a long traditional way

that Roman emperors had pledged their allegiance to particular deities before battle. And if that battle had been successful, if they'd been victorious, they proclaimed that they had a special relationship with that deity. The miracle or not, Constantine won the Battle of the Milvian Bridge, and won the battle against a well-defended and fortified Rome and went on with the support as he saw it of the Christian God.

Now, whether that constitutes a conversion to Christianity in the way that we would understand Christianity or the way that Christians in the empire wanted to claim that Constantine had become Christian is another question. Can I go back to you, Luce? That was excellent. Just a tug-away, why do you think that he espoused the Christians? They were not particularly significant.

They'd been persecuted for two and a half, nearly three centuries and so on, as had the Jews. Pagan gods were still abounding, as it were. So why do you think he did it? I think this is the huge question, and we'll never see inside the soul of Constantine. I mean, the Christian church clearly has been growing. It's amassed property.

It's got wealth. It's not the caricature of, you know, the rabble gang of the poor in the cities anymore. There are lots of speculation. Does he see in a church or is there just too much hindsight, a useful vehicle for unified religion, unified empire? I think I'm not sure you could say that he could have seen that in 312. There's clearly a trend in late antiquity towards monotheism, The Tetrax themselves had very much closely associated themselves with a particular form of religion.

In Iran, the Sasanians are going in for a more monotheistic religious policy. And there does seem to be some sense in which monotheism and state power maybe can work together. One God, one emperor. Yes, but yes, indeed. but how you can say that Constantine could have seen all this in 312? That's a tricky question. So Christopher Kelly, again, what change for Christians? Because a year later, there was the Edict of Milan.

Now, that was, again, that was very, very important. He put down his protection of Christianity and set on a firm basis, as it turned out to be the rapid and extraordinary development of Christianity. So what change? Why did he want to have this? the edict of Milan, and what was in it that was important? I suppose we have to remove one piece of grit from the historical narrative.

There is no edict of Milan. The text that's called the Edict of Milan was not an edict, was not issued in Milan, and was not issued by Constantine. In which case, I've been misled by all three of you. Never mind. Well, to a certain extent, we've all been misled because this document was swiftly labelled

by Christian writers, the edict of Milan. The reason I think that it was reframed was it's actually a letter written by Constantine's imperial rival, Lachinius, who controlled the eastern half of the empire after his meeting with Constantine in Milan. But it's one of these important moments that's been re-escribed to Constantine because it's so key in the Christian narrative.

And what's key about it? What's key about it is that it establishes freedom of religion for the first time in the Roman Empire in the sense that this is the first time that such freedom has been imperially legislated. Now we need to be careful about the boundaries of freedom to religion. The document that we call the Edict of Milan establishes freedom for religions who worship divinities or the divinity, but that divinity must also support. the emperors and the imperial program of the Roman Empire. So it doesn't authorize subversive or anti-imperial religious practices, but it does for the first time authorize a broad freedom of religious worship for any form of worship that supports the basic aims of the empire.

Is there any sense here that special favour is being given to the Christians in what is wrongly completely? wrongly, please listeners, and don't read the notes of the Edict, I mean, let's, I know you've got it in the evening because you all do. So is there any way in which Christians are particularly

and specifically and importantly favoured in this? Well, yes, in the sense that, the restrictions that were placed on Christians by Diocletian and under the persecutions, particularly the churches owning property and

their position as institutions, Christianity, the ownership of property by churches is now all made completely legal. So what's important about the so-called edict of Milan is that it reverses entirely the anti-Christian legislation of the previous generation. Christianity is now a religion of the Roman Empire that as legal and as licit as any other religion that supports the empire. Thank you. Do you think Greg, Greg Wolf, that at that time, I know this is difficult, but I'm not going to be silly about sausage anymore because of that doubt they are. That he knew that it was a great monotheistic religion,

or did he think, Constantine, that it was just another religion and he wanted to net all the religions? We can't know for certain what he thought, but as far as I see it, what they've done is they've reversed a very ill-judge policy of a, decade and so ago. We say Christians are persecuted for centuries. They're a bit unpopular and there are local riots, but there aren't

really imperial persecutions of any scale to the third century. They had a hard time in the first and second century from time to time, didn't they? It's very difficult to find to have you a hard time in the first century. Let's just carry on with what we've got. Most Christians are so below the radar that people barely

noticed them for the first 150 years of their existence. In the third century when things get rough, probably accidental, there's a persecution of them in the 250 that's centrally organised. Then there's about 40 years of peace. Then Diocletian, the very end of a long reign where he does lots of other things, begins to home in on Christians and on other groups like the Manichaeans. And this is clearly a disaster.

Homing against them, you mean? Yes, because most people don't care enough about them to persecute them. As Lucy said, in some parts of the Empire, there's no evidence they really did much persecuting at all. Christians later when they wanted martyrs had to invent lots of martyrs to make the persecution look grand than ever were. So I see this letter as simply saying, okay, this was a blind alley, we're going to do something different now.

I think it's got a sharper edge than that in the sense that Diocletian's persecution of Christians makes coherent sense with, as Lucy's already pointed out, push towards a more monotheistic religion and religious practice on behalf of the tetrarchy and Diocletian. It's almost as if in these Christian persecutions, Diocletian has identified the main rival monotheistic religion to his particular form, which was based around sun worship and the old cult of Jupiter. And there's a sense, I think, that the empire is leaning and thinking about. different sorts of competitive monotheism, which includes Christianity,

and Constantine decides to move in a different direction, but still within that arc of moving towards monotheism. So that wasn't the end of paganism by any means, Greg? No, I mean, I see Constantine is rather stumbling into this, and pagan temples carry on for centuries. There are enormous temples in some parts of the world for a couple of hundred years afterwards. But then there begin to be enormous basilicus for the Christians as well. It just gets added to the lovely mix.

And so you have... Lucy, you want to come in. Do you want to do this? Again, this is the question. How serious does Constantine get about Christianity? How early on? He does build churches in Rome. He doesn't knock down the pagan temples

and build them right in the historic centre. He builds churches in strategic but still eccentric locations in a city of Rome. And we're going to come to Constantinople, Bill's Church is there, but in the early years of his reign, I completely agree with the others. This is a bit of a smoggers board. He kept moving east, and the ancient city of Byzantium, he turned into the then modern city, and we called it Constantinople. Why did he do that?

It's a good strategic location in terms of interaction with the east. it also seems to have been a good place to build a new city. There was a city there. He pretty much raised it to the ground, although the archaeological evidence doesn't really allow us to know this. We haven't really talked much about his rival emperor Likinius. It's after Likinius has dealt with him that he immediately found Constantinople in 324.

It's officially opened, whatever the word is, in 330, and he does see it as a new base for himself, for his dynasty, that doesn't have the baggage of Rome, and is somewhere where he can found, pretty early on, it's called Alta Roma, Second Rome. Very soon after that, it's called a new Rome. He is doing something different here. Constantine is an innovator.

He does set up a meritor Rome in quite an important way, Senates run by itself and so on and so forth. it sets out to be a very powerful counterweight to Rome at the very least. Definitely, because there have been these tetrarchic capitals and Trier and Nicomedea and so on. But Constantinople does seem to be different. It gets a corn doll, which otherwise was just in Rome, as you say. Excuse me? A corn doll.

So a donation of corn, as in the bread that's given to the plebs of Rome. Constantinople gets one. It gets its own Senate, some years, some small few years after that. and then his son will give that officially the same weighting as the Senate of Rome. So Constantinople is definitely different in degree. It is a new Rome, and this is why it ruffles a lot of feathers. Strategically, Christopher Kelly, how would you describe this move on Constantin's part? Frankly, I think it's a brilliant move.

Constantinople is beautifully situated, access to the Balkans, access across Turkey to the Persian frontier, midway between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean, equidistant between the Rhine frontier and the Euphrates. It offers significant strategic advantages not shared by Rome further down the Italian peninsula, and not surprising that emperors in the West move north to Milan and then Ravenna. But perhaps most importantly, it's a shift of the imperial capital to the centre of the wealthiest parts of the Mediterranean. It's a shift from the Latin West to the Greek East.

In some ways, it's a move that is two centuries later than it might have been. When Augustus defeated Antony and Cleopatra, there were discussions then about moving the capital of the empire to Egypt to Alexandria. The logic is the same, in a sense, of moving the capital of empire to where, where the economic and strategic center of gravity is, and that's better expressed by Constantinople. And he saw all that. I mean, we don't know what he saw as a Christian. I'd like to be serious about that.

We don't know of it, but we do know that he saw these strategic advantages. Well, I think that what we can say with some comfort is that as an experienced general, and as a victor in a series of civil wars that lead him to reunify the Mediterranean, he has his choice of where in the Mediterranean he will found his new capital. And I think that the choice of Constantinople, its success is certainly borne out.

But then we go into the same loop that we have been in our discussions of Christianity. That is simply to say, how do we track back from something that is clearly successful to understand Constantine's motivations? did he, as Greg has said for Christianity, stumble into Constantinople, which then happened to be a good choice, or do we say that because it was a good choice, then we ascribe to him the motive and foresight for a brilliant decision?

Well, that's the question I was going to ask, Greg, myself. Greg, what are you thinking about that? I think I'm much happier seeing Constantine as a super successful soldier emperor who does all this reunification of Christmas talked about the man as seeing him as a religious visionary. When he died in 337, he almost immediately becomes virtually a saint. In fact, as soon as he sees the sign, the Milvian Bridge, gangs of bishops home in on him and say,

right, this is one of our boys now. And there's a whole process of building a narrative about the inevitable spread of Christianity in which Constantine becomes a key figure. As for Constantinople, that seems to me to be, yeah, eminently sensible. Any other soldier Emperor could have done it. But if history had been a bit different and the great new capital was found at Nicomedea, we'd still be looking back through sort of, you know, 1,500 years of Roman history based on Nicomedea rather than on Constantinople. Lucy, we're talking about a man who I've read in the notes from U3, okay, murdered his wife and son,

and yet we're also talking about a man who was sanctified by the historian Yusavius when he wrote about him, twice wrote about him. what was his reputation towards the end of his lifetime is there any way of getting what we might tentatively call a certain reality in this? I don't think we can at all. There are so many competing versions. Certainly there's the good side of the story but even the Christian authors can't get away

from the problem of his wife and his son. I mean this is one of the great stories from antiquity in that there seems to be the case that he suspects his wife of having had an affair with her stepson, his son is put to death and his wife is suffocated, locked up in a bathhouse. This story appears very, very widely. He's clearly a very ruthless figure. He gets rid of many members of his family, blood family, family, family by marriage. his nephew Julian, who then of course

becomes an emperor, Julian the Apostate the great what would it have been of late antique history really says lots of very nasty things about Constantine as this. Well, haven't been any nasty things. Yeah, as a murderer who only converts to Christianity because it's the only religion

that will absolve him of these terrible sins and definitely depicts him as a bloodthirsty tyrant and hypocrite. Christopher Kelly, How integral was Constantinople to the Christian Church? We can dwell a bit more on Christian Church.

Now, because it begins quite soon, as I understand it, to gather real power, have rights, privileges. As Greg has said, the bishops invade, let's call it the court of Constantine and say, we're here. And as I understand from what you say, they tell him, begin to tell him what to do with these other Christians that you're favouring then who are going, we're the real Christians, and God says to us,

the real Christians, you do that. So they start offering advice, whether it takes it or not, it's probably lost in an agreement. But we know they offer it. Okay. We have the Council of Nicaea. Before we go on to the Council of Nicaea, that did happen, didn't it?

Fear Norton is a Council and it happened in Nicaea in 225. Those listeners, we're now on firm ground. That's taken us quite a while. So the reason that the Council of Nysia is important is that we do, I think, stand here on some firmer ground than some of the areas we've discussed, particularly the vision at the Milavian Bridge. The Council of Nysia is one of the first universal councils, that is that bishops from all around the empire, are invited at the invitation of Constantine. This is a council that is opened and chaired by Constantine, and we do have the text of the opening speech, which he delivered in Latin and was simultaneously translated into Greek.

This is 326. It is. And he's... 25, sorry. 25. And he's clearly trying hard to establish some kind of unity within the church. And I think you see in Nysia the political engaging. of Constantine with Christianity.

That is that I mean that he establishes in Nysia what we still call the Nicene Creed. And that, as it were, is a political statement of Christian belief. In what way? That is that it's not firmly, theologically founded. It is and remains capacious, slightly woolly and vague in some of its descriptions of the divinity and of the Christian narrative, deliberately so, is designed to be a document that a broad group of Christians can subscribe to.

But in a sense, that's to miss its fundamental importance. Its fundamental importance is that it initiates a revolution in the way that we think about ancient religion. There hasn't been, until the Nicene Creed, a statement of belief, for any other Roman religion. Roman religion has not been formulated in a way that one could stand and say, I believe, and then catalogue a series of statements of belief. I think that Constantine initiated this to establish unity in the church, but he also, by so doing, established something that has proved definitionally central to the nature of Christianity.

that one should be able to say, I believe. Do which people in this country did years in, years out. Beautiful translations, I'm told. Would you have anything to add to that, Lucy? I would only add that he's already got involved in a dispute between rival groups of Christians in North Africa, the Donatist controversy. So he'd already sort of poked a toe in.

That doesn't go well. It provokes a famous cry from one of the parties that he doesn't pick. What has the emperor to do with the church, which is another way, a more negative way of looking at the problems of what happens when the emperor gets involved with the church? Was there hangover still, Greg, from Diocletian's persecution of Christians,

were the people around the bishop's thinking, well, it's really going to turn against us, it's been against us, or we've been ignored, and then at the best we've seen were being persecuted, but maybe this is just a little light at the end of a very small tunnel. and we should button down the hatches again. They wouldn't have been human if they hadn't wondered

whether this would be reversed, just like Diocletian's persecution was reversed. And nothing was for sure. I mean, there was no way of giving them rights forever. The next emperor could have been another persecutor. And it didn't happen, but yeah, they must have been unsure about it. And Constantine can't have known what was happening. I like to think he went to bed after the first day at the session of the council thinking, I joined this religion for unity.

Look, they've been squabbling about things I never knew existed. And in a sense, was Constantine hedging his bets? He doesn't get baptized until just before his death, which is something that obviously is found a bit embarrassing, and there are alternative versions of a story that try to get away with that. And plenty of pagan images on coins, and some participation in pagan richly. He remains Pontifex Maximus, the chief priest of Rome religion,

right to his death. Isn't the business of baptism on his death to do with the fact if you repent all your sins on your death, you're cleaner than you're going to be if you repent them 10 years before your death. It is a safer option, yes. Well, so in that sense, it isn't entirely stupid, really. So what other things?

We've been talking about this Christianity, which is obviously because it went on to be what it became, enormous business, religion, cult, movement, whatever it was, until it's still in the world now, quite strongly in some countries, as we all know. Can you just give us an idea one or two of the other things that he did, the reason we keep calling him the Great?

We can add to religious reform to moving the capital to Constantinople a whole raft of other reforms that very much stabilised the empire after that century of near chaos in the third century. One might point, for example, to his coinage and monetary reforms which established the Roman Empire really for the first time on a secure gold standard, the minting of the solidus Latin for simply the solid one, a important gold coin that actually remains at the centre of Mediterranean monetary and fiscal policy for over another thousand years.

So there's economic stabilisation as well. I think we shouldn't overestimate the recovery. Within 50 years the empire is on the upper. upers again. And what we have left with an empire that becomes a single city eventually, Constantinople, and a Christianity that spread all over the world, that these are relics of a failed project to save the Roman Empire. The Roman Empire was saved for 50 years. A century later, it's just as bad as stated it had been before Diocletian. Is this because of a fundamental... I agree with that, first of all, Lucy? Well, it depends which focus, if you're looking from the east, that's not

that really isn't the case. So it depends whether you're, if you accept the notion that well, Rome is moved and new Rome is Constantinople, that keeps going for an awful lot longer. As a single city with an empire that covers part of the Aegean. I think also it depends on what you expect an empire to do, as it were. Greg's definition is fine if we think politically, but if we're going to think culturally or in terms of religion, in terms of the lasting legacy of the classical world, or the Roman Empire, then the impact of Constantine's consolidation of that, framed with Christianity at the beginning of the 4th century, has an enormous effect.

I think Constan would have been very disappointed if he'd known what happened afterwards. I think he was a very conservative person who tries to defend and create a Mediterranean Empire based on soldiers, based on good old Roman values. Yes, a new capital, a new coat of paint on the old thing. but what actually ends up is very, very different. And some of his solutions have an afterlife in other ways, but they don't really do what he wanted them to do. I think he would have been delighted, actually,

in the sense that he would have taken the credit for creating Christendom for framing an ideological and political language that lasted more than a millennium. Thank you very much. Thank you, Christopher Kelly, Lucy Grigg, Greg Walth. Next week, could you send in your ideas? ideas through website. One thing, a BBC in Our Time.

On the 27th of October, we're going to pick one of your ideas to do the program on, and I'm running out of time. Thank you very much for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. We didn't get, I mean, there's so much fun about Constantine. We didn't get to sort of the afterlives. The donation of Constantine, there was no time for that.

It's obviously a forgery, but it comes from somewhere. And it's from this story that starts quite early, this alternative version of his conversion where he is healed from leprosy by the Bishop of Rome, Miracle and the Bishop of Rome's Sylvester. He really did have leprosite.

No, he didn't really have leprosy. And as a result... Would have been the same story again. As a result, he donates the West in Rome to the church. They try to make hay out of this for some time until a clever renaissance, a humanist priest

points out its forgery. Yeah. But that partly comes out of some of the contradictions. Why did he convert? Why was he baptized so late? Oh, no dear, he was baptized by a heretic bishop. Whoops. So that story has its origins and some of the problems starting in his lifetime

about how to deal with the sort of messy reality of the lives of Constantine. What was this court like? I mean, did he have a court like we imagined courts with a big chair which he sat on, and persons came about and scraped. He would sit. He would sit. Everybody else would have to stand. They'd stand around to him in a concedorium.

And there's a lot of ritual around all of these as the late Roman emperors. And there'd be traditional people, there'd be soldiers, there'd be some senators, there'd be some grandies, and then there'd be these bishops who would be whispering sweet nothing's in his ear. And there's the Christian version of Constantine's court in which it is said that Constantine occasionally gave long sermons to his courtiers. Must have been awful. presumably worked out ways of standing without looking bored

for the hour 90 minutes in which Constantine spoke about his policies. I think we might... Actually, I think we could do it a bit of that. I mean, somebody who sort of knew what his policies were. To speak for 90 minutes to Gloverby. It would be handy. Well, he was, if nothing else, he was strong and stable.

You took the words out of my mouth. There's certainly meetings committee, meetings, Parliament's change when people have to stand. Yeah. In terms of their pithy formulation of thought and also their resistance to filibuster and sort of shabby thinking. So if you stand, you think more clearly and you don't want to be that too long

so you don't try to disrupt business. That's right. It would be visually stunning. Wouldn't anywhere of any of these tech trots end up? They built these enormous buildings. when we have the later ones that the images from Ravenna which is the sort of inner lineal descent from this sort of stuff

we see just how extraordinary they were like an ancient Versailles or something but by then discussion has really been discouraged and the Contestorium is now known as the Selentium and it does what it says on the can would Christians have thrived without

constantine? I think it was still in the balance I don't think there was anything inevitable about the world or the empire becoming Christian in Constantine's Day or even afterwards. Now people are going to disagree. Some people think it spreads like a virus through society and eventually some emperor or other is going to have to get behind it. But other religions are coming and being suppressed? It isn't impossible to persecute religions out of existence.

There aren't any manichies around anymore. And that's partly because Roman and Persian Empress had a good old go at squeezing them out. Perhaps Christianity wasn't inevitable. So maybe Christians wouldn't have tried. Or maybe they'd just been a tiny little bit. There are great empires like the Chinese Empire that didn't become monotheist. So we could perfectly imagine a Roman empire that goes on to the 15th century with dozens and hundreds of gods. And we could imagine some kind of barbarian West a bit like it.

I'd covered it from a slightly different angle in the sense that what we think of as Christianity is fundamentally for. by its interaction with Roman imperial power. And I think that was important, particularly with the Council of Nicaea and the Nicene Creed. So would Christianity have thrived without Constantine? For it to become the kind of Christianity that we still recognise, it would have required some interaction with Roman imperial power at some point. It's difficult to think of Christianity, even in the modern terms, without it at some stage being appropriated as a key political ideology by a world empire.

What do you think? Well, there's the case of Julian the apostate, his short reign, he's not really around long enough to help us with a sort of counterfactual. He decides not to bother persecuting Christians because he said it doesn't work. It looks like he's beginning to try and reform polytheistic religion in a similar kind of way, although that's debated, but he dies. He dies before we really get to. see what would have happened. But I do agree with Christopher, the interrelationship between

politics and religion that was always characteristic of Roman religion, that's Christianity. And we can think a bit about what happened to Judaism, which never did become the central religious belief of an enormous empire. And yet it survived very well. It would have looked different, more fragmented, quite different, authority structured in a more diffuse way. But that would be perfectly imaginable. Zoroastrianism, the empire that sponsored it disappeared. There are still Parsis who regard themselves as Zoroastians. So we could imagine a Christian world

which hadn't had that. But I think Christopher's right. The Christianity that we look back down through the telescope of history and sea is it's completely formed by this sort of fusion with the empire and Constantine's a big bit of that. Well, thank you

all very much indeed. I think the producer's coming in with one of his offers you can't refuse. Well, the first thing is next week Melbourne, you've got Afroben. You mentioned that Oh, I forgot. After a bed. Cheer coffee. Coffee, be late.

There are many more history and discussion programs from Radio 4 to download for free. Find these on the website at BBC.com.com. UK slash Radio 4.