Remembering Constantine at the Milvian Bridge (review)

Remembering Constantine is both a critical reexamination of a famous historical moment and a thoughtful experiment in historical writing. The moment, Constantine's victory at Rome's Milvian Bridge, has too long served historians, in Van Dam's view, as simple shorthand for that emperor's conversion and Christianity's triumph. The experiment is an attempt to write history in reverse, forestalling the impulse that encourages us to harmonize our sources and to fit our facts to a master narrative that marches forward in concert with time (219-23). The result, however, is a study whose scrutiny of the evidence for the conflict decided on October 28, 312 does not so much reject narrative as allow it to proliferate, embracing multiple tales whose untidy assembly well illustrates several fundamental historical and historiographic axioms worthy of the attention of this journal's readers.

Van Dam's most ambitious aim here, as in his The Roman Revolution of Constantine (2007), is to write a kind of late antique history that requires Christianity to share the spotlight with other issues. To view the episode of the Milvian Bridge as primarily about "Constantine and Christianity," Van Dam warns, is to collude with a brand of scholarship that has too facilely made later Roman history the equivalent of "early Christian studies" (222). In its run-up and aftermath, Van Dam argues, the battle at the Milvian Bridge was more obviously a contest between the representatives of two competing conceptions of empire and rulership: one Tetrachic, military, and frontier oriented; the other Republican (that is Augustan), civilian, and focused upon Rome. Religion mattered, of course, but primarily as part of the age's discourse of power (e.g., 158, 244-47). Van Dam's recent Rome and Constantinople (2010) developed these same themes to quite good effect, offering a provocative reading of his title's two potent symbols of empire over the longue durée, and they have force here.

Undercutting Christianity and conversion at the Milvian Bridge, however, requires grappling with the shade of Eusebius. That struggle pervades this book and how we score its falls will prove a crucial measure of the study's success. It is especially the account of Eusebius's Vita Constantini (1.27.1-41.2) that shaped subsequent reception and interpretation of the Milvian Bridge, for therein are found all the signature ingredients: the heavenly sign, the dream, the labarum, the victory, the erection of Christian monuments in Rome, and the emperor's newfound dedication to the Christian god. Though a relatively late composition (ca. 337-339 c.e.), Eusebius's account has carried weight because, according to the bishop, he heard much of it from Constantine himself. It is, however, this very claim—buttressed by close examination of all earlier representations (in various media)—that encourages Van Dam to interrogate memory's role in the forging of this tradition. The memory in question, however, is not only the collective memory that now so often occupies scholarly attention, but also Constantine's own later "memories" of a battle that many parties—orators, poets, senators, sculptors, rhetoricians, and bishops—had scrambled to co-opt and interpret in its wake. By the time he told Eusebius of the battle, Van Dam asserts, Constantine's own understanding of events was so subject to conscious and unconscious revisions, encouraged by what he himself had read, heard, and seen in the intervening years and by the directions his rule and image had since taken, that even the emperor's avowed "memories" (irrespective of Eusebius manipulation of them) cannot be considered an uncontaminated source for the events of 312.

In a sense, the implications of this claim inspire Van Dam's decision to tell his story as "a backward narrative" (17). One way historical analysis and writing might resist the tyranny of teleology while foregrounding the unruly contingency of events, Van Dam hopes, is to strip away the layers rather than build them up. So it is that a book that antes...