The Sources for Constantine

Everything asserted about Constantine descends from a small body of deeply interested witnesses: Eusebius, the bishop who eulogized him; Lactantius, the sober Christian rhetorician who lived through the persecution; Zosimus, the pagan who wrote to blame him for Rome’s decline; the Latin panegyrists who flattered him to his face; and the mute but honest evidence of coins, laws, and inscriptions. This file lays out the source situation, because the disputes in every later section turn on it.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

Why the Sources Come First

Constantine is at once one of the best- and one of the worst-documented figures of antiquity: abundantly attested, but by witnesses so partisan that almost every important claim about his inner life is contested. The Church’s veneration does not depend on resolving these disputes, but honest history requires naming them; and the method the repository applies to hagiography — pin each claim to its earliest named and dated attestation, and weigh the interest of the witness (METHODOLOGY §3.5, §4.2) — applies with special force here, where a bishop and a pagan describe the same emperor as, respectively, a saint and a monster.

Eusebius of Caesarea: The Panegyric

The fullest source is Eusebius of Caesarea (c. 260–339), the great church historian and, in his last years, an admirer and correspondent of the emperor. Two of his works are central. The Ecclesiastical History, in its final (Book 10) form, celebrates the Constantinian peace and preserves key documents, including the terms of the 313 settlement (Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 10; trans. NPNF II/1). The Life of Constantine (Vita Constantini), left unfinished at Eusebius’s death in 339, is not a biography in the modern sense but a panegyric in four books, cast as an encomium and modeled in part on the biblical portrait of Moses — praising the emperor as God’s chosen servant and passing over in near-silence whatever did not serve that portrait (Eusebius, Life of Constantine; the classic modern edition and commentary is Cameron and Hall, 1999, whose introduction analyzes the work’s genre and reliability; Barnes, Constantine and Eusebius, 1981, ch. 11). The Vita’s value is uneven: it is our source for the daytime vision (Section 03) and quotes or paraphrases genuine imperial documents whose authenticity has been confirmed where papyri survive (notably by the P. Lond. fragment of the letter to the provincials), but it is also the source most shaped by the will to sanctify, and its silences — above all its total silence on the deaths of Crispus and Fausta — are as eloquent as its praise (Cameron and Hall, 1999, introduction; Barnes, Constantine and Eusebius, 1981; and see Crispus and Fausta). Eusebius must therefore be used as what he is: a well-informed but panegyrical insider, corroborated where possible and discounted where his interest is plain.

Lactantius: The Near-Contemporary Christian

The Lactantius of De mortibus persecutorum (On the Deaths of the Persecutors), written c. 313–315, is in several respects the more valuable witness. A Christian rhetorician who had taught at Nicomedia and lost his post in the persecution, and who later tutored Constantine’s son Crispus, Lactantius wrote close to the events, in Latin, with a polemical but concrete grasp of the tetrarchic politics he had watched at first hand (Lactantius, De mortibus persecutorum, ed. and trans. Creed, 1984, introduction; Barnes, Constantine and Eusebius, 1981, ch. 1). His theme — that the persecutors all died horribly by God’s judgment — is frankly providential, but his narrative of the edicts, the court intrigues, and the campaign of 312 is early, detailed, and often confirmable. It is Lactantius who gives the dream before the Milvian Bridge and the sign on the shields (Section 03), and Lactantius who preserves the text of the 313 letter restoring Christian property (De mortibus persecutorum 48). Because he wrote a generation before Eusebius finished the Vita and had less motive to sanctify the emperor’s whole life, Lactantius is often the control against which Eusebius is checked.

Zosimus: The Hostile Pagan

Against these stands Zosimus, a pagan historian of around 500, whose New History (Historia Nova) explains the decline of Rome as the punishment of the gods for the empire’s abandonment of the old cults — and makes Constantine the villain of the story (Zosimus, New History 2; trans. Ridley, 1982). Drawing on the earlier lost pagan historian Eunapius, Zosimus presents Constantine as a murderer driven to Christianity by guilt: it is Zosimus (with the later Zonaras) who gives the fullest hostile account of the deaths of Crispus and Fausta and the tale that pagan priests refused to purify Constantine of the killings while a Christian promised him forgiveness (Zosimus, New History 2.29; and see Crispus and Fausta). Zosimus is late, tendentious, and demonstrably unreliable on chronology; but precisely because his bias runs opposite to Eusebius’s, he is a necessary corrective — where a hostile pagan and an adoring bishop agree on a fact, that fact is secure, and where they diverge, the divergence itself is data (Paschoud, ed., Zosime: Histoire nouvelle, Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1971–89, on Zosimus’s sources and reliability; Barnes, Constantine and Eusebius, 1981).

The Panegyrics, Coins, and Laws

Around these narrative sources lies a body of harder evidence. The Latin Panegyrics (Panegyrici Latini) include several speeches delivered before Constantine between 307 and 321, contemporary and datable, which show how the emperor wished to be seen at each stage — including a famous panegyric of 310 that credits him with a vision of Apollo, before the Christian visions, a fact of the first importance for the history of his religious self-presentation (Panegyrici Latini VI(7).21, the Apollo vision of 310; trans. Nixon and Rodgers, In Praise of Later Roman Emperors, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994; and see The Diverging Accounts). The coinage tracks his religious iconography year by year: the god Sol Invictus, the Unconquered Sun, remains on Constantine’s coins until about 325, long after the Milvian Bridge — a fact any account of his conversion must reckon with (Bruun, Roman Imperial Coinage VII, London: Spink, 1966; Lenski, Cambridge Companion, 2012, ch. 4). And the laws preserved in the Codex Theodosianus, together with inscriptions, give the emperor’s public acts directly, unmediated by any biographer’s theology (Barnes, Constantine and Eusebius, 1981, on the legal evidence; the Arch of Constantine at Rome, dedicated 315, whose inscription credits the victory vaguely to “the prompting of the divinity,” instinctu divinitatis — neither pagan nor plainly Christian — is a monument of the same ambiguity).

The Method This Compels

From this source situation the compendium draws its working rules. No single witness is taken at his own valuation: Eusebius is discounted where his panegyric interest is plain and trusted where documents confirm him; Zosimus is used as a hostile control, not a neutral report; Lactantius is weighed as the earliest and often soundest narrative; and the coins, laws, and panegyrics are given the authority of contemporary, less interested evidence. The result is an account that is honest about its own uncertainty — most sharply at the two points where the sources most diverge and matter most: the vision before the Milvian Bridge (Section 03) and the finding of the True Cross (Section 07). In both, the divergence of the sources is not an embarrassment to be smoothed away but the very thing to be reported (METHODOLOGY §4.2).

References

Barnes, Timothy D. Constantine and Eusebius. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981. (The standard critical reconstruction; on all the sources.)
Bruun, Patrick M. The Roman Imperial Coinage, vol. VII: Constantine and Licinius, A.D. 313–337. London: Spink, 1966.
Cameron, Averil, and Stuart G. Hall, trans. and comm. Eusebius: Life of Constantine. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999. (Introduction on genre and reliability.)
Lactantius. De mortibus persecutorum. Ed. and trans. J. L. Creed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984.
Lenski, Noel, ed. The Cambridge Companion to the Age of Constantine. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.
Nixon, C. E. V., and Barbara Saylor Rodgers. In Praise of Later Roman Emperors: The Panegyrici Latini. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.
Paschoud, François, ed. Zosime: Histoire nouvelle. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1971–89.
Zosimus. New History. Trans. Ronald T. Ridley. Canberra: Australian Association for Byzantine Studies, 1982.