Category Archives: Ancient world

Constantine: Unconquered Emperor, Christian Victor

Posted on by

In Istanbul, on the north side of Divan Yolu, the street that follows the course of the Mese or ‘Central Way’ of old Constantinople, stands a decayed porphyry stump known as Çemberlitaş, the ‘Hooped Column’. In its heyday it would have been much more splendid, for it was, according to Blue Guide Istanbul (6th ed. 2011), ‘erected by Constantine to commemorate the dedication of the city as capital of the Roman Empire on 11th May 330. It stood at the centre of the Forum of Constantine, a colonnaded oval portico adorned with statues of pagan deities, Roman emperors and Christian saints, and thought to have been the inspiration for what Bernini later built in front of St Peter’s in Rome.’ What is also interesting about the column is the statue that would have crowned it, a colossal likeness of Constantine as Sol Invictus, the Unconquered and Unconquerable Sun, with the orb of the world in his hand and a crown of brazen sunrays glittering on his head.

In his Hymn to God the Father, John Donne makes use of a popular metaphysical pun:
…swear by Thyself, that at my death Thy Son
Shall shine as he shines now…

Paul Stephenson, Quercus 2009. Paperback August 2011. ISBN: 978-1-84916-002-5

The transference of pagan sun of the heavens to Christian son of God, victorious over death, is something that happened long before Donne’s time. And Constantine’s adoption of the sun/son cult and his public portrayal of himself as brazen victor were significant and deliberate—at least Paul Stephenson thinks so. But why? Was it because he was sincere in his Christian faith? Or was it simple political expediency? Biographies have been written that seek to prove both these theses. Stephenson’s argument is slightly different. Constantine’s devotion to Christ is not what turned Christianity into the majority faith of the Eastern Empire. He is neither the hero that the partisan Christian historian Eusebius sought to portray (4th century) nor the villain that the apostased Catholic convert Edward Gibbon depicts (18th century), with sour scorn, as using ‘the altars of the church as a convenient footstool to the throne of the empire’.

Instead, Stephenson focuses on something else: the army. Constantine grew up in an age when emperors were raised high and then capriciously felled by their barracksmen. The military had enormous power, which, in the right hands, could be cleverly channelled. For Stephenson, Constantine used the army as the driving force and ‘chief instrument of his political will’, aggressively adopting the Victor persona, something which the army accepted wholeheartedly because of what Stephenson calls the ‘established Roman theology of victory’. After the decisive Battle of the Milvian Bridge, when Constantine defeated his rival Maxentius and sent him to his death in the Tiber waters, floundering helplessly in his heavy armour, the bringer of that victory was Christ. We need not trouble ourselves with how, with whether Constantine really did have a vision of a Cross. The fact is that from then on it was Christ and not Zeus or Sol who became the emperor’s patron deity and it was under Christ’s banner that the imperial legions fought.

Constantine’s mother had been a Christian but the world into which her son was born was a pagan one. Christ, like any other god, was a divine being to be flattered and appeased. Constantine’s devotion to his god was not that of a pious Christian as we would understand the term today. Nor was it simply a cyncial political stunt. The truth falls somewhere in between, and Constantine’s reign is, Stephenson thinks, ‘a case study in the interaction of faith and power.’

Readable and convincing, the book presents a portrait of a great soldier and propagandist, a man who believed his earthly power and success were due to the intervention of the god of the Christians. Thus it was that he adopted that cult as his personal totem. He certainly never heard or believed that the meek were blessed and would inherit the earth.

Reviewed by Annabel Barber

Full Circle: How the Classical World Came Back to Us

Posted on by

by Ferdinand Mount, published by Simon & Schuster 2010, in paperback April 2011

There’s a brilliant new idea on every page of Ferdinand Mount’s meandering, fascinating comparison of various aspects of the modern world with those of Classical times.  And like all good original thinking, when so well expressed, the ideas seem obvious after the event: similarities between Roman bath culture and modern spa-going, between ancient gyms and the modern worked-out body beautiful, between stuffed dormice and modern foodyism, even between the pre-Christian Eastern mystery religions of the Roman Empire and, well, the post-Christian Eastern mystery religions of the Western world.

And many of the ideas merit a book in themselves: for example, I was not familiar with Vaihinger’s post-Kantian arguments for ‘as-if’ Christianity (it’s not true but you’ll have a nicer time if you behave as if it was), an interesting idea which we will hear more of as the arguments of what Mount calls the ‘anti-God botherers’ (Dawkins and his fellow-travellers) rumble on.

It is probably a relief that he ducks the issue of slavery altogether.  You do not have to be a Hegelian Marxist to realise that some ancients could be pretty free to do all sorts of things because many had no freedom at all.  Nor a Christian fundamentalist to appreciate that Christianity with its then new idea of the equality of souls spelled the decline and eventual abolition of ancient world slavery.  But comparisons between ancient world slavery and modern world “globalisation’ made elsewhere are wrong, even though the benefits of free trade are indeed one of the reasons why the western world does again have a substantial middle class, free to hang around in gyms, spas and restaurants and rediscover all the 2,000-year-old pleasures Mount so wittily describes.

And he does bang on about sex. I am not sure how interesting a point it is that the ancients were promiscuous and that so are many in the 21st-century West. Much more fun on the subject (and not much to do with the ancient world) is Mount’s account of the evolution of ideas about sex in the 20th century, particularly the tediousness of the Bloomsbury group’s infantile musings on the subject, which they thought so grown-up compared to those of the straight-laced Victorians to whom they felt so eminently superior.  I think Mount’s point is that the conclusion of the attempt to glorify copulation, with its apogee in the sexual “revolution” of the 1960s, succeeded, by its ubiquity, only in trivialising it.  Back to where it was in ancient times.

Extracting unified themes from the thousand years of rapid intellectual experiment and development from the rise of Athens to the fall of Rome, and comparing those themes to those of our own day is not always easy.  For example, while Mount does find a Greek philosopher with some remarkably Popperian ideas about scientific discovery, it is not clear that Romans, never seriously interested in new inventions or in the advance of science, really had much in common with the 21st century in terms of  scientific attitudes.

But these are quibbles. As I say, brilliant, a fascinating idea on every page. Here I have covered about one and a half ideas inadequately; he has 385 pages of them.  I think I will read it again.

Reviewed by Tom Brompton

Blue Guides publish Sites of Antiquity: from Ancient Egypt to the Fall of Rome, 50 Sites that Explain the Classical World.

Comments on Sites of Antiquity: from Ancient Egypt to the Fall of Rome

Posted on by
p_sitesofantiquity

50 Sites that Explain the Classical World

Historian Charles Freeman’s beautifully-illustrated account of the evolution of the Classical World follows its development, mainly around the shores of the Mediterranean but with sites from as far afield as the sands of Syria and icy northern Britain.

View the book’s contents, index and some sample pages, and buy securely from blueguides.com here »

Familiar face

Posted on by

Displayed on its own in a glass case in one of the later rooms of the excellent Archaeological Museum in Aghios Nikolaos, Crete, is an arresting clay head. It was found near Siteia, where it had been left at a shrine as a votive deposit. The young man’s lips are slightly curved in the famous ‘Archaic smile’. They would originally have been painted red, his eyebrows black and his enormous eyes probably dark as well. His features call to mind those of someone very famous. A frivolous idea? Perhaps. But once it’s occurred to you, it’s hard not to stroll the museum’s halls without ‘Pretty Young Thing’ ringing in your head.

The new edition of Blue Guide Crete is published February 2010.

A day trip to Ostia Antica from Rome – highly recommended

Posted on by

Ostia is spectacular, the picturesque remains of a working port town cover an enormous area of red-brick and marble ruins on the banks of the (now scarcely visible) river Tiber. It gives much more of a feel for life in the Roman empire than yet another nutty emperor’s palace. (Not that some of those aren’t pretty spectacular too.)

Wandering along the deserted streets with weeds growing through the flagstones, sand blowing over the mosaics, and long grasses and wild flowers in the ruins, often shaded by umbrella pines, one also gets a sense of the “Romantic” that drew the 18th and 19th century travellers to Italy to write bad poetry about the fall of empires etc etc.

To get there from Rome you take the train (or is it a metro – it doesn’t spend much time underground?) from the railway station variously described as Pyramide (on the outside of the station building), Porta Ostiense (on the map), or Porta San Paolo (within the trains themselves). We found it easy and clean, takes about 20 minutes and the regular €1 metro (ATAC) ticket or Rome pass seems to work.

(Note that Ostia is covered in both the new Blue Guide Central Italy as well as in Blue Guide Rome.  More extensively it appears in the former.)