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Authors: John Julius Norwich
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concentrated along the eastern borders: the Sarmatians around the lower Danube, the Ostrogoths to the north of the Black Sea and - most menacing of all -the Persians, whose great Sassanian Empire by now extended from the former Roman provinces of Armenia and Mesopotamia as far as the Hindu Kush. Less than seventy years before, in ad 260, the Roman Emperor Valerian had actually been taken prisoner by the Persian King
1 The Constantinian walls actually followed a line a l ittle over a mile inside the Theodosian walls that we know today. No trace of them survives above the ground.
Shapur I and had spent the rest of his life in captivity, suffering the ultimate indignity of being regularly used as the royal mounting-block. In 298, admittedly, Galerius had settled the score by gaining a decisive victory over King Narses, sealing it with a forty-year treaty of peace; but this treaty had only a dozen years more to run, and after its expiry a renewal of warfare was a virtual certainty. In such an event what possible part, it might be asked, could Rome be expected to play? The plain truth was that the focus of the Empire - indeed, of the whole civilized world -had shifted irrevocably to the East. Italy had become a backwater.
There were other, less material considerations too - among them a widespread belief that Rome's days were numbered. The Sibylline oracle had prophesied - in one of those appalling puns so beloved of the ancients -that the mighty Roma would one day be reduced to a rhume or mule-track, and many people feared that the end of the city would also bring about the end of the world. This idea had been developed in several literary works, among them the Divine Institutes of Lactantius - who, during his years as tutor to the Caesar Crispus, would have had countless chances of discussing it with the Emperor himself; and Constantine, who was even by the standards of his day an unusually superstitious man, may well have believed that by founding - in the name of Christ the Saviour - a 'New Rome' in which the spirit of the old would somehow be immanent, he might also be giving the entire world a new lease of life.
This superstitiousness was still more in evidence when the time came for the city's consecration. Only after agonizing discussions with his augurs and astrologers did the Emperor designate, as the most auspicious day for the ceremony, 4 November 328, 'in the first year of the 276th Olympiad, when the sun was in the constellation of the Archer and at the hour dominated by the Crab'. The rites then performed - in which we know that the pagan High Priest Praetextus and the neo-platonist philosopher Sopater both played an important part - were by no means exclusively Christian; the contemporary accounts leave us with a clear impression that Constantine was once again hedging his bets, seeking blessings from all possible sources in the hope of securing a blanket benediction for the city that was to bear his name. There is even a hint of the same attitude in those famous words quoted above, 'I shall continue until he who walks ahead of me bids me to stop.' Who, one is tempted to ask - and once again Gibbon's phrase is irresistible - who was 'this extraordinary conductor'? Constantine, so far as we know, never identified him - perhaps because he was not too sure himself.
The members of the imperial suite whose questions prompted so gnomic a reply can be forgiven their concern; for the walls that the Emperor so confidently traced - running some two and a half miles, in a sweeping convex arc, between points now approximately marked by the Orthodox Patriarchate on the Golden Horn and the Samatya Gate on the Marmara shore - enclosed an area well over five times more extensive than its predecessor. Clearly a city of such a size would take many years to create; the New Rome, like the Old, could not be built in a day. But Constantine had already decreed that the ceremony of formal dedication should coincide with his silver
1 The Constantinian walls actually followed a line a l ittle over a mile inside the Theodosian walls that we know today. No trace of them survives above the ground.
Shapur I and had spent the rest of his life in captivity, suffering the ultimate indignity of being regularly used as the royal mounting-block. In 298, admittedly, Galerius had settled the score by gaining a decisive victory over King Narses, sealing it with a forty-year treaty of peace; but this treaty had only a dozen years more to run, and after its expiry a renewal of warfare was a virtual certainty. In such an event what possible part, it might be asked, could Rome be expected to play? The plain truth was that the focus of the Empire - indeed, of the whole civilized world -had shifted irrevocably to the East. Italy had become a backwater.
There were other, less material considerations too - among them a widespread belief that Rome's days were numbered. The Sibylline oracle had prophesied - in one of those appalling puns so beloved of the ancients -that the mighty Roma would one day be reduced to a rhume or mule-track, and many people feared that the end of the city would also bring about the end of the world. This idea had been developed in several literary works, among them the Divine Institutes of Lactantius - who, during his years as tutor to the Caesar Crispus, would have had countless chances of discussing it with the Emperor himself; and Constantine, who was even by the standards of his day an unusually superstitious man, may well have believed that by founding - in the name of Christ the Saviour - a 'New Rome' in which the spirit of the old would somehow be immanent, he might also be giving the entire world a new lease of life.
This superstitiousness was still more in evidence when the time came for the city's consecration. Only after agonizing discussions with his augurs and astrologers did the Emperor designate, as the most auspicious day for the ceremony, 4 November 328, 'in the first year of the 276th Olympiad, when the sun was in the constellation of the Archer and at the hour dominated by the Crab'. The rites then performed - in which we know that the pagan High Priest Praetextus and the neo-platonist philosopher Sopater both played an important part - were by no means exclusively Christian; the contemporary accounts leave us with a clear impression that Constantine was once again hedging his bets, seeking blessings from all possible sources in the hope of securing a blanket benediction for the city that was to bear his name. There is even a hint of the same attitude in those famous words quoted above, 'I shall continue until he who walks ahead of me bids me to stop.' Who, one is tempted to ask - and once again Gibbon's phrase is irresistible - who was 'this extraordinary conductor'? Constantine, so far as we know, never identified him - perhaps because he was not too sure himself.
The members of the imperial suite whose questions prompted so gnomic a reply can be forgiven their concern; for the walls that the Emperor so confidently traced - running some two and a half miles, in a sweeping convex arc, between points now approximately marked by the Orthodox Patriarchate on the Golden Horn and the Samatya Gate on the Marmara shore - enclosed an area well over five times more extensive than its predecessor. Clearly a city of such a size would take many years to create; the New Rome, like the Old, could not be built in a day. But Constantine had already decreed that the ceremony of formal dedication should coincide with his silver
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