Life of Constantine (review)

Eusebius of Caesarea. Life of Constantine. Translated by Averil Cameron and Stuart G. Hall. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999. Pp. xviii + 395. $95, cloth; $35, paper.

Eusebius of Caesarea's Life of Constantine (Vita Constantini) remains one of the most important sources for the career and policies of the first Christian emperor. Strangely, in view of this text's significance and the large body of English-language scholarship on Constantine, there has been no new English translation of the work since 1890, when one appeared in the Nicene and post-Nicene Fathers series. In this welcome volume, the authors rectify the oversight by providing a new translation of and commentary on the Life, based on the 1992 Greek edition of F. Winkelmann.

In the extensive introduction that precedes the translation and commentary, the translators survey the attribution of the text to Eusebius and the date and circumstances of its composition. Hall and Cameron support the attribution to Eusebius; they also argue that the irregularities within the text result from at least two major revisions of it during Eusebius' lifetime. One of these revisions is likely to have occurred after Constantine's death in 337 and the rehabilitation of Athanasius of Alexandria with the purpose of encouraging Constantine's sons to continue the ecclesiastical policies of their father. The authors then discuss the sources that Eusebius uses in the work, which include his own writings, imperial documents, secular histories, scripturalcitations and models, secular citations, and Eusebius' own firsthand knowledge of Constantine. The authors outline the plan of the Vita, often criticized as haphazard, and characterize its literary genre as a unique though imperfectly synthesized blend of imperial encomium, bios. and history.

They give a summary of the Vita's presentation of Constantine's personality and of the significant events of his career (many of the more notorious of which, such as the execution of his son Crispus and the mysterious death of his wife Fausta in 326, are intentionally eliminated from Eusebius' account). They evaluate what the Vita and other sources can tell us about Constantine's understanding of his imperial mission. The authors then consider the historical value of the Vita and its later reception in Christian historiography; they also include a brief examination of the manuscript and translation history of the text. The chapter headings for the text that exist in the manuscripts are not original, but as they often provide interesting information, Hall and Cameron offer translations of them at the end of the introduction. They include their own divisions of the text's content in their translation of the Vita itself. These are indicated by italics, as are all the Constantinian documents included in the Vita. After the translation and commentary, the volume concludes with an up-to-date bibliography of relevant scholarship in all major European languages and a detailed index.

This volume provides a fine introduction to the Life of Constantine in a format that is user-friendly both with regard to organization of content and graphic design. The translation is clear and comprehensible, often capturing the exalted tone of Eusebius' florid rhetoric. The commentary helpfully assesses the historicity of Eusebius' accounts of specific events and how certain themes in the text serve the various literary purposes of the work. The book is a goldmine of bibliographical sources on particular topics in the Vita, for example, on Constantine's building programs in Jerusalem and elsewhere. The authors include a judicious selection of material evidence from Constantine's reign (such as coins, mosaics, a map, and building plans) to support their commentary. One can, of course, always quibble with individual points of translation, commentary, or editing; perhaps the most distracting thing I found in this volume was the occasionally mystifying use of capitalization, which the commentary sometimes, but not always, clarified. Overall, however, this volume will prove an enormously useful tool for scholars and students of church history and late antiquity in general.

Kelley McCarthy Spoerl, St. Anselm College

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