Download Raymond Van Dam. Remembering Constantine at the Milvian

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discourse (p. 8) but regularly records oratio recta and
oratio obliqua without commenting on why the usage
matters (e.g., pp. 53, 65, 74, 76, 99, 103, 132). In general
the book would benefit from scholarship since the “linguistic turn” of the mid 1980s, but Adler relies on earlier scholarly views.
The final chapter contains a careful catalogue of conclusions, the most important of which may be that the
original audiences must not have recoiled when their
historians included speeches critical of Rome (pp. 168–
169). Generally speaking, Adler has brought forward
provocative subject matter, but one could wish that he
had expanded our thinking more.
JANE D. CHAPLIN
Middlebury College
RAYMOND VAN DAM. Remembering Constantine at the
Milvian Bridge. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge
University Press. 2011. Pp. xiii, 296. $90.00.
Constantine’s victory at the Battle of the Milvian
Bridge in 312 C.E. is a famous episode in both the history
of the Roman Empire and that of Christianity. In the
usual overview, Constantine felt slighted when he was
not made emperor by the other tetrarchs (or college of
emperors) upon the death of his father Constantius in
the summer of 306. His father’s army hailed him as Augustus, and later Constantine received official recognition as Caesar (in the tetrarchy the title of a junior
emperor). Constantine ultimately invaded Italy to fight
Maxentius (another Caesar who was the son of a tetrarch and Constantine’s brother-in-law). Their forces
met at the Milvian Bridge outside Rome on October 28
of 312. According to the standard narrative, which follows the church historian Eusebius, Constantine had a
vision of a cross in the sky and (in Greek) the message
that translates into English as “conquer by this,” followed by a dream in which Christ appeared to him and
commanded him to display the sign that Eusebius describes as the Greek letters Chi and Rho superimposed
one on the other. Constantine had his troops put the
sign on their shields, made a battle standard of it, and
won the battle. A few months later in 313 Constantine
and the Emperor Licinius issued a law, often called the
“Edict of Milan,” that granted toleration for Christianity. Thus, the Battle of the Milvian Bridge stands as
a “turning point” in the career of Constantine and in the
history of Christianity (which would become the de
facto official religion of the empire by the end of the
fourth century). Because of the seeming importance of
the battle, modern historians have explored motivations and explanations for this event (as well as the vision/dream) that accompanied it. For instance, the
eighteenth-century Edward Gibbon saw Constantine’s
faith going through a slow development, while in the
mid-nineteenth century Jacob Burckhardt perceived
Constantine as a Machiavellian politician who used
Christianity to build his power base. In this stimulating
new book, Raymond Van Dam, no stranger to scholars
of late antiquity, closely re-examines the primary
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sources for the event and argues that many authors
changed and “suborned” their texts and that Constantine manipulated his own narrative of these events in
reaction to those changes. As the title suggests, this
book is about the reception, descriptions, and memories of the Battle of the Milvian Bridge—which Van
Dam argues do not always convey what actually occurred.
The book starts with a timeline that is distinctively in
reverse chronological order (foreshadowing Van
Dam’s argument about the constructed memories of
our sources). Chapter one suggests “the past did not
generate fixed memories; instead, memories constructed a past” (p. 9). In chapter two, Van Dam surveys
medieval and modern echoes of Constantine and the
Milvian Bridge (ranging from Clovis, to the Donation
of Constantine, to Benito Mussolini’s march on Rome).
Chapter three treats pagan views of Constantine (such
as those of Zosimus and Julian) and then introduces the
major church historians who treat Constantine (Eusebius, Evagrius, Socrates, Sozomen, Theodoret, and Rufinus). In chapter four, Van Dam develops the relationship between Constantine and the memory of the vision
and battle as described in Eusebius’s Life of Constantine
(Vita Constantini ). He suggests that “The account of
the emperor’s vision and dream in [Eusebius’] Life
hence represented three distinct layers of particular circumstances: Eusebius’ remembrance of Constantine’s
memories of events from long ago” (p. 57). The relationship between Constantine’s memory and Eusebius’s descriptions is developed further in chapter five,
which stresses how Eusebius changed his story over the
course of decades in the different editions of his Ecclesiastical History (Historia Ecclesiasticae). Chapter six
argues that Constantine changed his memory over time
and was influenced by Lactantius’s description in his
Death of the Persecutors (De Mortibus Persecutorum),
the arch of Constantine, and the Latin Panegyric of 313.
In chapter seven, Van Dam develops evidence from the
poet Poryfrius, Constantine’s interaction with the
church over Donatism, the lost arch at Malborghetto,
and the gigantic statue of Constantine in Rome, suggesting that “the emperor’s memories about his vision,
his dream, and the military standard were not a source
for Eusebius’ account but rather a consequence of hearing Eusebius’ account of his monuments at Rome” (pp.
200–201). Chapter eight marks an end to the critical
analysis of the sources, but it challenges the construction of a new “master narrative” because all these
sources “had their own agendas, which they could promote,” and “the lesson should be the realization that
our modern narratives are likewise constructed” (p.
219). In chapter nine, Van Dam presents an examination of Maxentius as an emperor trying to follow the
principate model of the early empire to curry favor with
the elite of Rome, but whose reign was the last gasp of
that model. Finally, in chapter ten, Van Dam recalls the
ancient Roman legend, preserved by Livy, of Horatio
Cocles defending a bridge against an Etruscan invasion
and hypothesizes that Maxentius may have been trying
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Reviews of Books
to emulate Horatius’s defense of Rome when he
marched out against Constantine.
This book is well researched and written in a dynamic
fashion. Van Dam clearly knows the primary and secondary sources well. Although he cites the anonymous
Origo Constantini Imperatoribus, he does not develop
analysis of this unusual source from the late fourth or
early fifth century, which describes the battle without
religious implications. Van Dam could have wrestled
more explicitly (p. 12, n. 18) with the argument of Peter
Weiss that Constantine had only one vision (in 310) and
that all the sources were describing that. Although
clearly influenced by postmodernism, Van Dam writes
so well that he can snare the reader. He is surely correct
that Eusebius changed his description of the event in
different editions of his works. The point that Constantine’s own memory was shaped by Eusebius, Lactantius,
and other sources is provocative, and criticism of
sources is always useful to historians. It is not impossible that Lactantius, who had survived Diocletian’s
persecution and may have been at Constantine’s court
at the time of the event as the tutor of Constantine’s
eldest son, was reporting the official court line about
the battle when he wrote two to three years later. Lactantius’s description of Constantine’s sign may have
been an attempt to describe the Chi-Rho, but it is also
similar to symbols of late Roman solar monotheism.
The similarity may have been deliberate on Constantine’s part, as recently suggested by H. A. Drake. So,
perhaps we should view the interaction between Constantine and the primary sources as more of an intellectual dialogue than Constantine borrowing from
them. In conclusion, Van Dam’s book is a fascinating
exercise that will provoke its own scholarly dialogue for
years to come.
ROBERT M. FRAKES
Clarion University
FLORIN CURTA. The Edinburgh History of the Greeks, c.
500 to 1050: The Early Middle Ages. (The Edinburgh
History of the Greeks.) Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 2011. Pp. vii, 365. $135.00.
This very learned and detailed investigation represents
an advance in the field. Florin Curta has undertaken an
ambitious and urgently needed study of a very difficult
and controversial subject and historical era: “the emergence of the economic and social structures in Greece
between c. 500 and c. 1050” (p. 8), and his book reflects
wide-ranging reading and reflection. Curta has written
extensively about ethnicity and demographic change in
late antique and medieval southeastern Europe, and he
knows the larger historical, archaeological, and numismatic contexts. While the paucity of written (literary
and epigraphic) sources is one challenge, Curta introduces much valuable numismatic and sigillographic evidence, and the chosen chronological span is a reasonable one.
There are, however, some questions about other basics. The resulting synthesis of detailed information
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about Greeks in what is today’s mainland Greece and
nearby islands gives little attention to Greeks in Anatolia. Who were Greeks, and what was Greece? Not all
Greeks were located in mainland Greece or the Aegean
islands. There is no entry in the large index for Armenians, even though they intermixed with Greeks in Anatolia and the Balkans.
Among the book’s major conclusions are that an economic contraction began ca. 620 C.E. (p. 97); identities
were much more fluid than previously imagined, as
Curta discusses similarities and differences in archaeological evidence associated with a range of social and
ethnic groups; ethnicity was a measure of the cultural
distance between inhabitants of the Byzantine Empire
and barbarians (p. 295); there is no evidence for continuity between sixth-century aristocrats in Greece and
“military men of the late seventh century” (p. 231); militarization of aristocratic identity and values went hand
in hand with competition for imperial titles (p. 231);
and nevertheless ethnic boundaries were important (p.
290).
Curta consciously investigates arguably the most contentious topic of Byzantine historiography in the past
sixty-five years: aspects (in southeastern Europe) of the
origins, nature, and chronology of the Byzantine
“theme” system (military corps and their military corps
districts). That entails risks. He also touches on another
venerable and highly (almost equally) contentious issue: the continuity or non-continuity of the Greek people and the Greek language. Curta believes political
and ethnic factors have been much exaggerated in the
history of the Greeks for that period (p. 10). Although
the answer may require a military explanation, Curta
does not demonstrate mastery of the latest research and
conclusions in this contested sphere. There is no historical consensus on military and social institutions in
this poorly documented era. Military structures are not
necessarily synonymous or identical with economic and
social ones.
Curta argues for a new interpretation that emphasizes the role of the army, especially for sixth and seventh-century evidence (p. 92). He believes coin hoards
are related to military movements in the late sixth century, but he is not a military historian; there are difficulties here. He offers a hypothesis, not a conclusively
proven fact. Byzantine military institutions are especially obscure. Curta needs to explain military dimensions of his broader hypothesis more explicitly. The presentation is too vague and does not fit the latest
scholarly interpretations of the Byzantine theme system. The military institutional technical term thema/
themata or “theme” may not have appeared until the
early ninth century. Curta, however, argues for the
emergence of the “theme” of Hellas in the Byzantine
Empire in the late seventh century (pp. 110, 125). The
book contains many useful maps but, with the exception
of the first two illustrations on fourth-, fifth-, and sixthcentury fortifications in Greece, there are no maps of
putative military administration and related structures
in the territories he chose to investigate (pp. 276–277).
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