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A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more.
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.
“Elizabeth DePalma Digeser's wonderful book offers our first close-up of those earliest and most formative years in the reign of Constantine. Building on the latest interpretive methods, it shows how much can be gained by reimagining the foundation of Constantine's rule as a series of narratives told by the people who witnessed its beginnings.”—Noel Lenski, author of Constantine and the Cities: Imperial Authority and Civic Politics
"Marvelously inventive! With careful attention to the material record and deft use of historical theory, Digeser does what no other scholar can, opening a new window onto the life of Constantine by visualizing his early career in Gaul, before the Milvian Bridge, before his famous vision, before his investment in Christianity. Her approach captures what most biographies miss: a sense of presence, and with it a novel understanding of Roman power as it was created and experienced."—Ellen Muehlberger, author of Things Unseen: Essays on Evidence, Knowledge, and the Late Ancient World