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Constantine the Emperor, by David Potter
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No Roman emperor had a greater impact on the modern world than did Constantine. The reason is not simply that he converted to Christianity, but that he did so in a way that brought his subjects along after him. Indeed, this major new biography argues that Constantine's conversion is but one feature of a unique administrative style that enabled him to take control of an empire beset by internal rebellions and external threats by Persians and Goths. The vast record of Constantine's administration reveals a government careful in its exercise of power but capable of ruthless, even savage, actions. Constantine executed (or drove to suicide) his father-in-law, two brothers-in-law, his eldest son, and his once beloved wife. An unparalleled general throughout his life, planning a major assault on the Sassanian Empire in Persia even on his deathbed. Alongside the visionary who believed that his success came from the direct intervention of his God resided an aggressive warrior, a sometimes cruel partner, and an immensely shrewd ruler. These characteristics combined together in a long and remarkable career, which restored the Roman Empire to its former glory.
Beginning with his first biographer Eusebius, Constantine's image has been subject to distortion. More recent revisions include John Carroll's view of him as the intellectual ancestor of the Holocaust (Constantine's Sword) and Dan Brown's presentation of him as the man who oversaw the reshaping of Christian history (The Da Vinci Code). In Constantine the Emperor, David Potter confronts each of these skewed and partial accounts to provide the most comprehensive, authoritative, and readable account of Constantine's extraordinary life.
- Sales Rank: #235310 in Books
- Published on: 2015-08-01
- Released on: 2015-08-01
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 6.10" h x 1.10" w x 9.20" l, .0 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 384 pages
Review
"A vividly detailed and energetically told biography." --Publishers Weekly
"The interested reader could find no better starting point for exploring the man and the era than David Potter's Constantine the Emperor." --The Wall Street Journal
About the Author
David Potter is Francis W. Kelsey Collegiate Professor of Greek and Roman History and Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of Greek and Latin at the University of Michigan. His books include Theodora, The Victor's Crown, Emperors of Rome, and Ancient Rome: A New History.
Most helpful customer reviews
48 of 55 people found the following review helpful.
More for a specialist than general audience.
By Randy Stafford
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 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 Church and the Jews, A History, 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 Life of Constantine (Clarendon Ancient History Series) - 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 probably argues a good case.
[Review copy provided by publisher.]
15 of 18 people found the following review helpful.
Constantine as Emperor First, Christian Second
By Ken Burton
If you are looking for exciting historical fiction based on the life of Constantine, this book is NOT what you want, but if well-written, heavily documented professional history is your taste, this is it. This biography sticks closely to the available primary sources, which are of course much limited by the passage of time. Secondary sources are sometimes used to fill gaps, but only when they are consistent with the primary sources and with the broad-brush view of Constantine that Potter develops. The Emperor is presented as a highly competent warrior-administrator who values greatly his faith in the "Christian God," but remains understanding and supportive of those whose religion continues to center on traditional pagan polytheism so long as they honest lives grounded in integrity, hard work, and loyalty to the Emperor. Potter's is clean and easy to follow, and the book is complete with a Time Line,a Dramatis Personnae and an index to supplement the narrative.
17 of 21 people found the following review helpful.
The Best Biography of Constantine Available
By Arch Stanton
This book is the best biography I've seen on Constantine. Such a famous emperor is bound to get many biographies but unlike many other famous figures there has yet to be a penultimate book on him. Most books on the man miss the point of the man to one degree or another. Many bios (such as Constantine: Unconquered Emperor, Christian Victor, and Constantine's Sword) focus on what he's best known for today (ie. converting the empire to Christianity). Others (like The Life and Times of Constantine the Great) offer brief adventure novel-ish accounts of his reign. Others (such as Constantine the Great: The Man and His Times and The Roman Revolution of Constantine) have the same goal as this one and attempt to portray the man as he was, with varying degrees of success. But I don't think that any of them come as close to the heart of the man as this one.
Potter's approach when considering motivation and intent is to examine the evidence written the closest to the time in question. He places a lot of focus on Constantine's laws and rescripts since these were written during Constantine's life. Most of the ecclesiastical and historical sources were written well after his death. All of them had a bone to grind of one sort or another. The ecclesiastical historians were keen to prove that Constantine was the devout and persecutory emperor that they wanted while the pagan ones wanted to show how bad Constantine was for the empire.
This gives Potter a rather different perspective than most biographies on the man. His Constantine is an emperor first and a Christian second, and often a distant second. Most of his ethics were conservative Roman more than Christian and he cited examples of previous emperors more than he did Biblical figures. This comes through in his concern for protecting the lower classes (never an exclusively Christian concern) and his harsh attitudes towards slaves. His Constantine is a deeply devout man who was convinced he had a god on his side, but who is never the less a Roman through and through. His religious policy (which most ecclesiastical historians consider confused) was actually as simple as could be: he wanted everybody to get along and serve him. Christians who rocked the boat were treated just as harshly as radical pagans.
As to this book's problems there are quite a few. It is probably not the best beginners book on the man. For that I'd recommend Grant's or Kousoulas' books. This book seems to assume a basic knowledge of the events described. For example, the description of the battle of the Milvian Bridge is minimal and it seems to be a rather unimportant event judging from the focus given to it. He seems more interested in what others say about the fight than the battle itself. His focus on Constantine is often vague. You understand what was happening around him, but often not what it would have meant to the man. The first part of the book is better understood as a dual biography of Constantine and Diocletian while the rest of the book seems more a book about important trends during Constantine's reign than a proper biography per se. Far too often he deals with this by ending the chapter on an out of the blue comment about what Constantine was thinking at that moment in time. He has some good insights to Constantine's personality but he seems uncertain how to incorporate that within his traditional historical structure.
Potter also displays an unfortunate tendency to be easily sidetracked. This is a consistent feature of the book but the most random sections have to do with the making of eunuchs and the local tax situation of Oxyrhynchos. These come out of the blue and have nothing to do with anything else that he is discussing. These sections are (I gather) there to give a feel for the world that he lived in but they are often distracting and rather clumsy. I do have to wonder if some of these were thrown in as space-takers to bring the book up to an amusing total of 306 pages, thus matching the year Constantine became emperor. I see a lot of reviewers blasting these (and they are annoying) but they're usually short and obvious and so don't completely sidetrack your ability to follow the book.
These are some pretty serious problems but they aren't enough to damage my appreciation for the book. It analyzes how Constantine perceived of his duties in the context of the situation within his lifetime rather than the situation that later writers wanted to believe. This alone is enough to make me forgive a lot. Then too the book is usually an easy read when it doesn't go off on sidenotes and it is helped in this by having short chapters. I wouldn't recommend this as anybody's first book on Constantine, but it's an excellent one to read if you want to understand the way that Constantine was understood in his own time. If it isn't the penultimate biography that I've been waiting for then it's at least a valid attempt. Well done.
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