The Conscience of an Emperor

Constantine the Great, by Michael Grant (1993) sets out to tackle the challenge of the Roman Emperor who legitimated Christianity. The book pursues the lofty goal of providing an objective historical perspective on the man Constantine and his reign.

The rear cover lauds Grant as "perhaps the foremost living classicist." Within the first few chapters the book verifies this description with thorough knowledge of the Greek and Latin sources from the first four centuries AD. It makes piercing observations that cut through many of the generalizations offered in the cursory education many of us receive about this epoch.

The text exposes Constantine as a complex person--infinitely more varied and human than images of marble busts and gold coinage icons suggest. It persistently follows the wide-swinging pendulum of a ruler who could at once seek unification of the Christian Church and have his own wife and son killed. The book wrestles magnificently with the bugbear of historicity, straining to reach into the depths of ancient writers' biases to draw out gleaming gems of certainty.

Yet I sensed that the Holy Grail of objectivity proved too great a burden for the book to bear. Even as it works exhaustively through every document that hints at the character of Constantine, the writing cracks under the effort. In spite of the book's outspoken defiance of bias, sweeping statements about Constantine's motives appear: jarring chords of unfounded certainty in a symphony of erudite qualifications. Take, for instance, the motives behind the killing of the emperor's wife, Fausta. After noting carefully the inadequate source material, our text concludes that Constantine killed her because of her violation of his "puritanical" sense of sexual morality.

This "puritanism"--itself an anachronism for the era under examination--Constantine's Christian faith, and the killings of family members seem to pose the greatest difficulty for the book. The temptation either to render judgment or explain the tension proves too much to resist. The text seems haunted by the need somehow to answer clearly the conundrum of a Christian ruler who took cruel and--by our standards--unjust measures. The fissures in an objective picture of Constantine grow wide by the end of the book: so wide, in fact, that statements slip out like, "There are, and remain, certain absolute standards, and by his death-dealing Constantine offended signally against them."

Herein Grant's writing may come closest to the life of Constantine. Just as Constantine's life seems torn between the ruthless nature of imperial politics and the confession of Christianity, Grant's writing appears torn between the twin desires of today's historian: the desire for objectivity and the desire for some non-random evaluation of the past. Perhaps, like Constantine the Great, whose motivations and morals remain an enigma buried in seventeen hundred years of history, the book about his life is both child and victim of its time.

~ emrys