Constantine, the Once and Future King

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Though the rule of Constantine I from 306 to 337 CE represented a sea change in the ancient world, the emperor's path to consolidating power and securing his legacy was hardly a straightforward one. In this book, Elizabeth DePalma Digeser uses material culture and textual evidence to tell the story of Constantine's rise to power and how his image and ideology developed into the foundation of Christian autocracy in late antiquity. Drawing on panegyrics, inscriptions, and archaeological evidence from cities such as Trier, Vienne, and Autun, each chapter reconstructs events through the perspectives of those who shaped and interpreted them—officials, propagandists, and clergy—to reveal how belief in Constantine's divine favor emerged. Digeser tells a multifaceted, bottom-up story of everyday life in the late ancient Roman Empire, combining narrative reconstruction and close material and textual analysis to show how imperial image-making in Gaul forged an enduring synthesis of Christian autocracy with Roman imperial rule.

Elizabeth DePalma Digeser is Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara, founding editor of the journal Studies in Late Antiquity, and author of The Making of a Christian Empire: Lactantius and Rome and A Threat to Public Piety: Christians, Platonists, and the Great Persecution.