Over the course of the fourth century, Christianity rose from a religion actively persecuted by the authority of the Roman empire to become the religion of state-a feat largely credited to ...Constantine the Great. Constantine succeeded in propelling this minority religion to imperial status using the traditional tools of governance, yet his proclamation of his new religious orientation was by no means unambiguous. His coins and inscriptions, public monuments, and pronouncements sent unmistakable signals to his non-Christian subjects that he was willing not only to accept their beliefs about the nature of the divine but also to incorporate traditional forms of religious expression into his own self-presentation. InConstantine and the Cities, Noel Lenski attempts to reconcile these apparent contradictions by examining the dialogic nature of Constantine's power and how his rule was built in the space between his ambitions for the empire and his subjects' efforts to further their own understandings of religious truth.
Focusing on cities and the texts and images produced by their citizens for and about the emperor,Constantine and the Citiesuncovers the interplay of signals between ruler and subject, mapping out the terrain within which Constantine nudged his subjects in the direction of conversion. Reading inscriptions, coins, legal texts, letters, orations, and histories, Lenski demonstrates how Constantine and his subjects used the instruments of government in a struggle for authority over the religion of the empire.
Failure of Empireis the first comprehensive biography of the Roman emperor Valens and his troubled reign (a.d. 364-78). Valens will always be remembered for his spectacular defeat and death at the ...hands of the Goths in the Battle of Adrianople. This singular misfortune won him a front-row seat among history's great losers. By the time he was killed, his empire had been coming unglued for several years: the Goths had overrun the Balkans; Persians, Isaurians, and Saracens were threatening the east; the economy was in disarray; and pagans and Christians alike had been exiled, tortured, and executed in his religious persecutions. Valens had not, however, entirely failed in his job as emperor. He was an admirable administrator, a committed defender of the frontiers, and a ruler who showed remarkable sympathy for the needs of his subjects. In lively style and rich detail, Lenski incorporates a broad range of new material, from archaeology to Gothic and Armenian sources, in a study that illuminates the social, cultural, religious, economic, administrative, and military complexities of Valens's realm.Failure of Empireoffers a nuanced reconsideration of Valens the man and shows both how he applied his strengths to meet the expectations of his world and how he ultimately failed in his efforts to match limited capacities to limitless demands.
Failure of Empire is the first comprehensive biography of the Roman emperor Valens and his troubled reign (a.d. 364-78). Valens will always be remembered for his spectacular defeat and death at the ...hands of the Goths in the Battle of Adrianople. This singular misfortune won him a front-row seat among history's great losers. By the time he was killed, his empire had been coming unglued for several years: the Goths had overrun the Balkans; Persians, Isaurians, and Saracens were threatening the east; the economy was in disarray; and pagans and Christians alike had been exiled, tortured, and executed in his religious persecutions. Valens had not, however, entirely failed in his job as emperor. He was an admirable administrator, a committed defender of the frontiers, and a ruler who showed remarkable sympathy for the needs of his subjects. In lively style and rich detail, Lenski incorporates a broad range of new material, from archaeology to Gothic and Armenian sources, in a study that illuminates the social, cultural, religious, economic, administrative, and military complexities of Valens's realm. Failure of Empire offers a nuanced reconsideration of Valens the man and shows both how he applied his strengths to meet the expectations of his world and how he ultimately failed in his efforts to match limited capacities to limitless demands.
Failure of Empire is the first comprehensive biography of the Roman emperor Valens and his troubled reign (a.d. 364-78). Valens will always be remembered for his spectacular defeat and death at the ...hands of the Goths in the Battle of Adrianople. This singular misfortune won him a front-row seat among history's great losers. By the time he was killed, his empire had been coming unglued for several years: the Goths had overrun the Balkans; Persians, Isaurians, and Saracens were threatening the east; the economy was in disarray; and pagans and Christians alike had been exiled, tortured, and executed in his religious persecutions. Valens had not, however, entirely failed in his job as emperor. He was an admirable administrator, a committed defender of the frontiers, and a ruler who showed remarkable sympathy for the needs of his subjects. In lively style and rich detail, Lenski incorporates a broad range of new material, from archaeology to Gothic and Armenian sources, in a study that illuminates the social, cultural, religious, economic, administrative, and military complexities of Valens's realm. Failure of Empire offers a nuanced reconsideration of Valens the man and shows both how he applied his strengths to meet the expectations of his world and how he ultimately failed in his efforts to match limited capacities to limitless demands.
The ancient city was a complicated financial undertaking. Cities were at once property owners and revenue-producing entities. In the former capacity they owned both real and movable wealth, including ...considerable amounts of land in their neighboring territories and at times much farther afield. These properties were usually leased out to contractors or tenants in exchange for rents, which were in turn deployed to cover the expenses of city services, the maintenance of public slaves, the cost of civic festivals, and the upkeep and repair of publicly owned buildings. Such buildings included both secular and sacred architecture and could be extensive
Constantine Develops NOEL LENSKI
Constantine and the Cities,
01/2016
Book Chapter
We are fortunate to possess as many of Constantine’s writings as we do. While all are highly mannered and each crafted to the exigencies of individual audiences, they offer at least some ...understanding of how the emperor constructed his own narrative. From these it is clear that an important part of that story was the notion of transformation.¹ This comes out most clearly in hisOration to the Assembly of the Saints,where Constantine laments: “I dismiss all that the awful sway of fortune imposed upon the random presence of ignorance and consider repentance to be the greatest salvation. I
In the previous chapter, we examined Constantine as a figure in a continuous state of self-refashioning. He made and remade his image to suit changing circumstances, to adapt to chance occurrences, ...and to respond to political and military exigencies. We should not, however, lose sight of the fact that there are also many constants in Constantine’s public persona that must be taken into account. Indeed, some aspects of his self-representation—as well as his self-construction—were remarkably long lived. In this chapter we will examine four of these: his unflagging obsession with the power of light, his enduring belief in
Civic politics in the East operated according to slightly different norms than in the West. To be sure, rivalries between neighboring polities arose in both places, and these were often mediated ...through the emperor. But in contrast with most western cities, the polities of Rome’s eastern domains had been formed centuries before the arrival of Roman authority in the region and had developed their own traditions of self-governance and interurban engagement that remained remarkably resilient down to the fourth century. Archaeologists D. Cherry and C. Renfrew coined the phrase “peer polity interaction” to describe the sorts of horizontal relationships that
Opposing Christians NOEL LENSKI
Constantine and the Cities,
01/2016
Book Chapter
Resistance to Constantine’s religious agenda did not arise from pagans alone. Constantine had only barely announced his conversion publicly when he became aware of dissent in the Christian community ...of North Africa. Probably in 308, a controversy had broken out there over episcopal succession that would prove agonizingly long lived and disturbingly virulent.¹ This region, it must be remembered, had suffered more from the Great Persecution than any other in the West. Although our evidence indicates that only the first of Diocletian’s four persecutory edicts—ordering the destruction of churches and the confiscation of scriptures and sacred vessels—was ever
It has long been agreed that Roman government tended to implement policy in response to problems and petitions rather than working in preplanned and proactive ways. With his foundational work on the ...Roman emperor, F. Millar demonstrated this brilliantly, and his ongoing study of documents from Late Antiquity proves that this approach to rule continued to prevail down through the fifth century.¹ Emperors governed above all through a system of petition and response in which their subjects brought problems to their attention, and the ruler—or his charges—then devised solutions in answer to these pleas. Well over a thousand
