David S. Potter

While I'm giving this book four stars, I do have the sense that it ends on something of a whimper, as Potter takes you from the rise of Rome as an imperial power, with the First Punic War, ending with the reigns of Antoninus and Marcus Aurelius; men who cemented the image of the Roman Empire as one of the best of all possible worlds. The issue that Potter wrestles with is that the Roman republic never developed a good way of disciplining its military "contractors," once it became clear that show more a militia army was insufficient, and it is out of that mix of business and elite competition that the imperium emerged. Although Potter has insights to impart on every page, and offers intelligent critiques of the sources that have come down to us, I'm left with the impression that he attempted to do too much in the page count allotted to him. show less

Giving this three stars. I enjoyed this book, however I was a history major and keep up with academic readings. This was not terribly accesible to the lay reader, though it seems a major attempt was made to make it so. There is a plethora of detail and a thorough background to Constantine's world and era which was interesting, but would be difficult for the off the street reader to wade through. This makes the life of Constantine easier to understand, though, and grounded it in a picture of show more the Roman political world. LIke other reviewers I was initially worrried that this would be heavily biased towards a Christian Hero picture of Constantine, and was pleasantly surprised when it was not. I recommend this for readers who enjoy immersing themselves in an era when reading history. show less

A pretty academic but readable biography by a serious scholar. It turns out that contemporaneous information about Constantine is relatively sparse despite his outsized role in the history of Rome and Christianity.

As a result, the early years of Constantine are a blur, and mostly describe his probable experiences in Diocletian’s court. The biography draws from panegyrics (long poems celebrating his achievements) and Constantine’s responses to petitions from around the empire. It reveals show more an world where people had fixed legal duties and obligations to their communities, much of the petitions were seeking for exemptions from these costly obligations.

The author tries hard to not “back out” Constantine’s life from his conversion. Hence the title “emperor” and reliance on contemporaneous sources like panegyrics and petition responses. Constantine comes across as a supremely pragmatic ruler. He reforms some marriage laws to protect young brides and is concerned about mistakes in status that could deprive a person born free of their free status but never questions slavery or the notion that people are born into fixed statuses itself. His conversation experience is a little more nuanced as well. Early experiences seem to indicate that he wasn’t sure which god was speaking to him, either Apollo or a personal warrior god. The idea of a personal god for the emperor was not particularly new, as a predecessor took sol invictus as his. Eventually Constantine became convinced that the god helping him win battles was the Christian God. There’s some suggestion that Constantine may have adopted monotheism to distance his reign from Diocletian’s. A particularly fascinating argument the book makes is that in the famous moment that Constantine has his soldiers paint the chi-rho in their shields may not have been linked with Christianity at all. The chi-rho could have stood for Christ or simply luck (in Greek they’re apparently similar), and only record of the story of Constantine’s famous dream was not contemporaneous. Constantine is shown as a ruler, who learns from his mistakes, first blundering by reacting harshly the donatist controversy before trying to resolve the Adrian controversy through a more peaceful council at Nicaea where he proposed a compromise.

The book is shorter than it seems, and it is a work of serious historical scholarship. Parts of it are dense (prepare to learn a lot about the period, its complex politics and law. As an aside, I particularly liked a response to a petition setting aside a contract as immoral. A predecessor to public policy?) but interesting historically. A great biography about a great figure show less

For an emperor so late in the saga of the Roman Empire, Constantine gets a surprising amount of attention and is up there with the early Julio-Claudian emperors in inhabiting, in however misunderstood, inaccurate, and mutated form, a place in the minds of the putatively educated western public. They know he saw a vision of the cross floating in the sky, heard the words “Conquer, in my name”, and went on to win a major battle and converted to Christianity as the result. And Potter’s show more claim that he is father of the imperial Roman utterance most widely known, the Nicene Creed, is certainly true.

Of course, Constantine is most simply known as the man who officially made the Roman Empire Christian, and, given that he moved the imperial capital to the newly consecrated Constantinople, it’s fitting many histories of Rome end with his death though the western part of the empire limped on for another 137 years and the last vestiges died in the east in 1453.

I’m of two minds about this book.

Potter tries really hard to make this book user friendly. There is a map of the empire with all the post-Diocletian political sub-divisions noted if not any cities. There are some informative pictures of archaeological ruins and recreations. There is a time line that starts with the capture of the Roman emperor Valerian by the Persians in 260 and emperor Julian’s death in 363. There is a dramatis personae which you will appreciate when trying to keep Constantius, Constantine, Constantia, and Constantus straight or multiple church men named Donatus or Eusebius. Though the book has no index, Potter makes his chapters so short and specifically titled that you can usually find what you are looking for by searching chapter titles. The price of organizing chapters that way is that sometimes Potter deviates from a strictly chronological account.

There is a concluding appendix called “Finding Constantine” and that gives a clue to what makes this book somewhat problematical for the casual reader. Potter is interested in correcting some mischaracterizations of Constantine and his reign from the founder of Christianity’s long anti-Semitic streak as John Carroll argues in Constantine’s Sword, the suppresser of Christian truths as in Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, or the low-born, usurping bastard who killed his wife Fausta and son Crispus and converted to Christianity in Eusebius of Caesarea’s very influential The Life of Constantine – the main source of the cross in the sky story.

Potter is having none of that. He places Constantine’s proclamations on the Jews in context to show their vicious rhetoric was somewhat stock and matched by things he said about other Christians, typical of a Roman magistrate of the time, and, most importantly, not backed up by large-scale persecution of Jews (except when they pursued circumcision of converts). Whereas Brown sees a sinister corruption of Christianity with paganism to water down the truth, Potter sees Constantine learning from his successor Diocletian’s politically destabilizing and futile persecution of Christians. And, as for Eusebius’ cross in the sky, Potter is having none of it.

In fact, given the relative brevity of the book and wealth of footnotes, this book, in the end, seems intended more for an audience keyed into the many disputes and mysteries of Constantine than casual students of Roman history. Our sources from the period are not that good. There are histories written long after the fact, some judicial codes from the time, and the somewhat useful accounts of Eusebius – who knew Constantine – and Constantine’s tutor Lactantius. We are unsure of the dates of some of Constantine’s military campaigns or when, how, and why Fausta died or why Crispus was executed.

A lay reader could almost get a sense of Constantine the man – his temper, his shortcomings, his ambition, his genuine desire to do justice of a sort for his subjects, his religious conviction – by reading that appendix or the epilogue chapter which sums up the man and the differing interpretations of him through history.

However, I did find some things of value in the rest of the book, in particular the influence, for good and bad, of Diocletian’s example on Constantine, to see the importance of loyalty in his personal relationships – learned from a father who did not forsake the product of an earlier, less socially connected marriage, and the sense of political turmoil and oppression dimly glimpsed through repeated judicial edicts trying to curb the power of the rich in legal proceedings, and Constantine’s insistence the classes remain separate – particularly in regards to the forbidden marriage of the free to slaves or children sold into slavery.

So, not an easy read but there are a few nuggets here for the non-specialist, and I suspect, if you are a specialist, Potter’s probably argues a good case. show less