We can say two things about the intentions of the shadowy men who organized the coup in January 350 that resulted in the overthrow and assassination of the Western Roman emperor Constans I. The first is that the conspirators almost certainly believed that by removing an unjust, extravagant and capricious ruler, they would produce a better world. The second is that their actions instead ultimately proved disastrous for themselves, for many of those closest to them, and for both the province of Gaul in particular and the Western Roman Empire more generally. The fate of Magnentius and his fellow conspirators thus presents a cautionary tale about how the loftiest of ends can be tainted and degraded in the course of getting and holding power.

The most striking feature of the conspiracy that overthrew Constans I was the prominence of the men who organized it. The central figure seems to have been not Magnentius himself, but rather Marcellinus, the comes rei privatae (Count of the Emperor’s personal revenues) for the Western Empire. The comes rei privatae was the Empire’s principal financial officer. [1] His ministry was responsible for operating and collecting rents from existing state properties; seizing and distributing properties that were confiscated by or escheated to the state; and arranging for the sale of state property and making cash payments from the imperial treasury.

Nothing specific is known about Marcellinus’s career before his role in the conspiracy against Constans. But the government of the Western Empire was relatively stable during Constans’ reign, and it is improbable that such a widespread and successful plot could have been organized by a relative newcomer to the upper ranks of the imperial administration. Marcellinus thus seems likely to have held his position for a number of years, becoming progressively more disenchanted with Constans’ spendthrift behavior and his increasingly erratic ways. As the official responsible for managing the state’s properties, Marcellinus’s ministry would have been the one most directly affected by Constans’ practice of lavishing benefices upon his personal favorites. In addition, the emphasis that Magnentius’s coinage subsequently placed on his efforts to restore the prosperity of Gaul’s cities suggests that economic concerns were a particularly important factor for the conspirators. Marcellinus’s position in the imperial administration would have made him particularly sensitive to such considerations.

Marcellinus’s subsequent career under Magnentius further indicates that he was not simply a civil bureaucrat, but possessed prior military experience as well. Magnentius chose him to suppress the revolt of Nepotianus at Rome in the summer of 350, and the effectiveness and ruthlessness with which Marcellinus carried out that assignment does not suggest a purely bureaucratic background. He also exercised a field command at the climactic battle of Mursa in September 351. Given his apparent combination of civil and military experience, it is somewhat surprising that Marcellinus did not himself seek to assume the imperial purple in place of Constans.

This is particularly true because Magnentius’s own semi-barbarian origin made him an unpromising candidate for the throne. Flavius Magnus Magnentius was born around 303 C.E. to a British father and a Frankish mother, supposedly in Amiens (Ambiana). His father was a craftsman who may have come to Gaul as part of the entourage of Constantine’s father, the Augustus Constantius Chlorus. Julian claimed in his Panegyric on Constantius that Magnentius’s mother was a slave who belonged to the imperial family. Her most memorable characteristic was her reputation (and apparent skill) as a soothsayer.

As a young man, Magnentius lived among a Gallic tribe called the Laeti, where he acquired a Latin education before entering the army under Constantine. He distinguished himself and presumably caught the Emperor’s eye. Magnentius was old enough to have participated in Constantine’s final campaign against Licinus in 324 and to have fought at the climactic battles of both Adrianople and Chrysopolis. As a rising young officer, he may also have participated in Constantine’s campaigns against the Alemanni on the Rhine in 328 and in the large-scale operations against the Goths on the Danube in 332. Finally, given Magnentius’s subsequent high status under Constans, it is very plausible that he was one of the officers who engineered the ambush along the banks of the Alsa in which Constantine II perished during his war with Constans in the spring of 340.

We do know that Magnentius successively held the positions of Protector and then Comes rei militaris for the western Roman army. At the time of the coup In January 350, he commanded two elite legions, the Joviani and the Herculiani, which served as the Western emperor’s personal guard. The conspirators presumably chose Magnentius to assume the position of Augustus because he had a strong personal following among the troops, suggesting that he was a charismatic commander with a proven history of success. His subsequent record in the field against Constantius confirms that he was audacious, aggressive, and a hard fighter.

Significant information is available about one other conspirator. Fabius Titianus belonged to an important Roman senatorial family. After holding positions in Sicily and as proconsul of Asia, he was one of the two consuls named for the year 337, indicating that he was held in high regard by the Emperor Constantine. He served as urban prefect for the city of Rome from the fall of 339 until the winter of 341, then became praetorian prefect of Gaul. He held that post until at least late 349 and very likely through the date of the coup. Later, while serving Magnentius as an ambassador to Constantius, he denounced the Emperor and his family for causing the impoverishment of the cities, suggesting that he was another who may have been impelled to join the conspiracy by economic concerns.

That high-ranking, well-established figures as Marcellinus, Magnentius, and Fabius Titianus were willing to risk everything by organizing a coup underlines the seriousness of Constans’ misgovernment during the final years of his rule. All three men had lengthy records of service to and patronage from the imperial family, and Titianus in particular seems to have enjoyed a close association with Constans’ father. With the possible exception of Magnentius, personal ambition could have played little role in inducing these already important military and civil officials to plot against Constans. By joining in the conspiracy and then upholding the cause of a usurper, these men were putting their public positions, such wealth as they had accumulated, and their very lives at risk. Certainly, the safer and easier course would have been bearing with whatever humiliation and frustrations were the price of continued service to Constans, or, in the alternative, simply retiring to a private station. The commitment to the common welfare that inspired their coup d’etat therefore commands respect – even as it must weighed in the balance against the terrible price that the Empire in general and Gaul in particular ultimately paid as a result of their actions.

Opening Moves

Once Constans was hunted down and killed, the Roman world became a giant chessboard across which the conspirators and their legitimist opponents in the imperial family scrambled to seize the commanding positions. Since his victory over Constantine II in the civil war ten years earlier, Constans had possessed the largest part of the Empire, ruling a domain that stretched from Hadrian’s Wall in the north of England to the borders of Thrace, the southern capes of Greece, and the cultivated lands of Roman Africa. Most of that enormous territory was now up for grabs.

Within five weeks after the conspirators first declared themselves at Augustodunum, Magnentius mustered his army, crossed the Alps in the dead of the winter, and advanced across the fertile plains of northern Italy. His objective was the passes through the Julian Alps that controlled the routes leading into Italy from Illyria and the east. In early March, he reached Aquileia near the head of the Adriatic, and this city served as his principal forward base for the next two years. He also secured Emona (modern Ljubljana, in Slovenia) at this time. Other troops marched south into the Italian peninsula, and on February 27 Magnentius reappointed Fabius Titianus to his previous position as praefectus urbi Romae . This was a shrewd gesture to bridge the possible divide between Magnentius, the provincial northern military man with barbarian roots, and the great Roman aristocratic families. But Titianus at most spent a short time at Rome before rejoining the usurper’s entourage at Aquileia; Magnentius obviously considered him too indispensable an adviser to send him on detached duty for long.

Vetranio: A Question of Loyalty

Magnentius had moved swiftly to occupy Italy and to secure its eastern approaches, but in one respect he could not move quickly enough. When news of the Augustodunum coup spread across the Empire in the mid-winter of 350, it quickly became apparent that the ultimate fates of Magnentius and Constantius might well be determined by the attitude of the legions posted along the middle Danube in Pannonia. Those legions were under the command of Vetranio, an elderly and rough-hewn general who possessed a solid military record, an unpretentious manner, and great personal popularity with his troops. Born of peasant stock in Upper Moesia (modern Serbia), Vetranio was a simple soldier who rose through the ranks and was so wholly lacking in education that he remained illiterate even after he succeeded to one of the Empire’s most important military posts. Upon this rough-hewn and unsophisticated soldier’s decision – to throw in with Magnentius; to stand by Constantine’s sole surviving son; or to chart his own course – could well turn the fate of the Empire.

Constantius and his advisers recognized this, but they were far away in Syria and were wholly occupied at that moment with the task of repelling a massive Persian assault upon the upper Mesopotamian frontier fortress of Nisibis. In this extremity, an unlikely emissary from the imperial family made her way to the military camp of the Pannonian legions.

Constantia, or Constantina, was Constantius’s elder sister, born c. 312. As a young woman, she played a major part in the dynastic plans that the aging Emperor Constantine was spinning for the next generation of the imperial house. In 335, her father arranged for Constantia to marry Hannibalianus, the son of Constantine’s half-brother Dalmatius the Censor. This marital union of the two main branches of the imperial family was clearly intended to help heal a long-standing rift that Constantine feared could otherwise prove problematic after his death. Constantine appointed Hannibalianus governor of Pontus and Roman Armenia and assigned him the title Rex Regum, suggesting that the Emperor may have planned to place him and his daughter on the prestigious but precarious throne of the border state of Armenia once he successfully concluded his planned campaign against the Persians.

Within less than three months after Constantine died, however, the intra-family fratricide that he feared came to pass notwithstanding his efforts. In August 337, a military uprising in Constantinople claimed the lives of Hannibalianus and nine other men who were either members of the families of Constantine's two half-brothers, or closely associated officials of the imperial court. (See “Bloodbath in the Palace,” an earlier post in this series.)

History does not tell us what role Constantius himself played in the military pogrom that removed so many of his close relatives – whether he fomented the revolt, or was instead merely a helpless and horrified bystander as the troops eliminated the superfluous imperial relatives that they feared might otherwise waste their lives in future civil wars. Still less is it possible to know exactly how Constantia reacted to the insurrection and the murder of her new husband. After Hannibalianus’s death, however, she left Constantinople and returned to Rome, where she lived in relative seclusion and quiet on an imperial estate located on the Via Nomentana a few miles outside the city for the next twelve years. Constantia may have simply wanted to return to the city where she had spent her childhood and youth, but her action may also reflect genuine grief at the loss of her husband and perhaps some degree of estrangement from her brother Constantius.

But whatever bitter feelings may have existed between Constantia and her brother, she was still one of the surviving children of Constantine the Great and as such retained the rank and prestige of an Augusta. Her position had its uses in the desperate situation that now confronted Constantius. We do not know whether some communication passed between the Eastern Emperor in Antioch and Constantia’s residence; indeed, she moved with such celerity that she may have acted entirely on her own initiative.

By March 1, barely six weeks after the coup in Augustodunum, Constantia had journeyed from Rome across the Adriatic Sea and the mountains of Illyria to the camp of the Danubian legions at Sirmium on the Save River. If she got there ahead of Magnentius’s envoys, she did not beat them by much. For a time, the matter hung in the balance. Magnentius’s envoys almost certainly included some military men, who would have worked their contacts within the Danubian legions and tried to spread disaffection against Constantius. A royal princess like Constantia, who had grown up in Rome, well away from the frontiers, and who had now lived in semi-retirement from the imperial court for a dozen years, undoubtedly faced significant disadvantages in trying to counter the influence of Magnentius’s envoys. The only real high cards she had to play were her own prestige as a daughter of Constantine the Great and the continuing pull that the legitimacy of the imperial house exercised upon the loyalties of the simple and impressionable Vetranio.

In the end, these assets proved enough – but just barely. For while Magnentius’s envoys may have succeeded in subverting the rank-and-file of the Danubian soldiery, Constantia managed to win the battle for Vetranio’s own allegiance. Magnentius’s envoys, perhaps fearing that they were losing this battle of wits and guile, may have been responsible for whipping up a demonstration by the troops in an effort to force Vetranio’s hand and make him join with Magnentius. It was a moment of enormous danger for Constantius and the imperial house. But Constantia faced up to this terrifying challenge with remarkable shrewdness and sang-froid. Recognizing that at the moment neither she nor Vetranio could sway the troops to accept an outright declaration in favor of Constantius, she instead engineered an alternative solution that kept the loyalties of the Danubian legions in play until Constantius himself could arrive with his eastern troops.

Constantia and Vetranio thus staged a ceremony at which he responded to the outcry of the troops by agreeing to accept the purple himself. Constantia then confirmed Vetranio’s legitimacy by placing a diadem upon his head – one that, according to the fifth century historian Philostorgius, Constantius had personally sent to Vetranio’s camp. Vetranio then addressed Magnentius’s envoys with encouraging words – some sources say he even agreed to an alliance – but all of this seems to have been a mere shadow-play. The reality was that the loyalty of the Danubian legions and the adherence of the Illyrian provinces remained in a state of suspense for the remainder of the year. This state of neutrality was hugely beneficial to Constantius, who was still tied up dealing with the Persian threat on the Empire’s eastern frontier. Vetranio’s own assumption of the purple meant that Magnentius’s legions were unable to continue their march eastwards across Illyricum, through the strategic pass of Succi, and on to Constantinople itself. [2]

[To see a superb coin portrait of Vetranio and other examples of his coinage, click here.]

The Revolt of Nepotianus at Rome (June 350)

Just three months after Constantia successfully maneuvered to prevent Vetranio and his legions from joining Magnentius’s side in the impending civil war, other members of the imperial family tried to stir up trouble for the usurper in Italy. In addition to Constantia, several other members of the imperial family were still living at Rome. The most prominent of these was Eutropia, one of Constantine the Great’s younger half-sisters by his stepmother Theodora. She had married into the Nepotianii, a prominent and respected family that produced a consul in 301 and that – perhaps as a result of its imperial marriage alliance – had another one in 336.

On June 3, 350, Eutropius’s son Julius Nepotianus, who was then living in the countryside outside Rome, declared himself in revolt against Magnentius and was proclaimed Augustus by a motley collection of followers. Nepotianus’s insurrection seems to have germinated from conspiratorial discussions at the suburban villas of the great senatorial families in the campagna and the Alban hills, beyond the scrutiny of Magnentius’s local agents. The contemporary historian Sextus Aurelius Victor, who may well have been living and working in Rome at the time as a member of the imperial bureaucracy, reports that Nepotianus’s support came from common people who “had been corrupted” (presumably through cash payments by Nepotianus and his associates), and that his military force consisted mainly of armed gladiators. The gladiators would themselves have been slaves owned by wealthy senators, and the common people who followed Nepotianus were probably a mix of clients, slaves, and agricultural laborers of his family and its allies, along with other members of the rural proletariat and even common bandits who were willing to fight for adventure, pay or the hope of booty.

The bloody and short-lived venture that resulted was clearly organized by men with more fortune, connections and self-confidence than military skill or political capacity. The handful of Nepotianus’s coin portraits that have come down to us show him as a man mature in years, if not perhaps in sagacity. His coins depict him as strikingly handsome, with a large, square head, a sharply defined, elegant nose, and a full head of wavy hair – but there is something pompous and a little vacant about his expression. The overall impression is of a middle-aged social lion who was about to discover that the world of power politics demanded skills of a very different character from those involved in throwing and attending high-society parties.

Zosimus and Aurelius Victor provide the most information on Nepotianus’s revolt, but their accounts are incomplete and partly contradict each other. Zosimus reports that Nepotianus

“collected a mob of lawless men who had abandoned themselves to brigandage and vagrancy and approached Rome, sporting senatorial garb. But Anicetus, who had been appointed praetorian prefect by Magnentius, armed some of the plebs and led them forth from the city to do battle with Nepotianus. A crisp battle ensued in which the Romans were routed without much trouble owing to their inexperience and disarray. The praetorian prefect, seeing them in flight and fearing for the city, closed the gates. Nepotianus’s soldiers pursued and slaughtered all of them as they had no means of escape.”

(II, 43). The insurrection clearly caught Magnentius’s local representatives by surprise. No regular troops were available to defend the city, and the scratch defensive force that Anicetus hastily assembled lacked even basic military experience. Although both of the opposing forces were hastily organized and undisciplined, Nepotianus’s gladiators made short and bloody work of the terrified urban plebs, accustomed to cheering for or against these champions from the stands of the Flavian ampitheatre, who must have been terrified when they found these hardened professional killers advancing upon them with cruel smiles and murder in their eyes.

Anicetus seems to have been no military man himself, for he led from the rear, perhaps from one of the towers or gates along the 12-mile circuit of walls that the Emperor Aurelian had built to defend the imperial capital some eighty years earlier. Zosimus is silent about Anicetus’s fate, but Aurelius Victor indicates that he, too, was murdered in the course of Nepotianus’s revolt. He may have been killed by the distraught relatives of some of those whom he had abandoned to be slaughtered beneath the city’s walls, or perhaps he was captured and executed when the city soon afterwards fell to Nepotianus and his confederates.

Once he and his ill-assorted collection of rebels, adventurers and opportunists occupied the city, Nepotianus initiated a reign of terror. A general proscription followed of anyone who was deemed to have too willingly accepted the Magnentian regime, perhaps accompanied by some private score-settling as well. Aurelius Victor, who produced his history barely a decade later, wrote that Nepotianus’s “brutish nature was so destructive to the Roman people and the senators that everywhere the houses, squares, streets and temples were filled with gore and corpses like tombs.” (42, 7) Even aside from all other considerations, this was a foolhardy way to manage affairs when it was clearly only a matter of time before Magnentius dispatched seasoned legions across the Appenines to suppress the revolt.

Those troops, led by Magnentius’s able and ruthless minister Marcellinus, reached Rome before the end of the month and drowned the revolt in blood on June 30. Nepotianus was slain, and his severed head paraded around the city on a lance. Many of his adherents were killed in the fighting, while plenty of others were felled by the equally savage proscription that the vengeful Magnentians unleashed in their own turn after the city was secured. Among its victims was Constantius’s aunt and Constantine’s half-sister Eutropia. That many other prominent figures in Roman society met their deaths in the Magnentian purge is suggested by a reference from Bishop Athanasius of Alexandria. Some years later, when forced to defend himself against charges of having conducted a treasonable correspondence with Magnentius, he asked rhetorically,

“What sort of opening would I affix to my letter if I had written to him? . . . . ‘We admire your slaughter of those who received us nobly in Rome [i.e., during Athanasius’s exile there between 339-342], the emperor’s aunt of blessed memory, the aptly named Eutropia, Abuerius that noble man, the faithful Sperantius, and many other good men?’”

After the bloody suppression of Nepotianus’s revolt, Magnentius devoted the rest of the summer to consolidating his new regime. Heretofore, he had continued to issue coins in both his own name and in that of Constantius as his senior colleague, a reflection of his desire to reach an accommodation with the Eastern emperor. Now, believing perhaps that his earlier course had suggested that his regime was weak and impermanent, he ceased issuing coinage in Constantius’s name. He proclaimed his younger brother Decentius Caesar at Milan, and his mints soon began issuing coins in Decentius’s name as well. He also took time to celebrate his nuptials with a young girl named Justina, said to be a great-granddaughter of Constantine. (Her father, surnamed Justus, was probably the son of Vettius Justus, consul in 328, and a daughter of the Caesar Crispus. Justus, who had held the governorship of Picenum on Italy’s Adriatic coast, was put to death by Constantius in 352 or 353 for having allowed his daughter to wed Magnentius.)

Sometime during this period, Magnentius also rescinded the prohibition of pagan sacrifice that Constans had imposed upon Italy in 341. Magnentius and his confederates may thereby have hoped to solidify their support among the pagan senatorial class in Rome, as well as appealing to other non-Christian elements both in their own sphere of the Empire and in that of Constantius. The measure was a limited one, however, perhaps authorizing sacrifices only after dark. That seems to be the import of a subsequent enactment by Constantius in 353 that ordered the prohibition of the “nocturnal sacrifices allowed on the authority of Magnentius.”

Magnentius and the Dissident Eastern Bishops

During the last ten years of Constans’ life, his relationship with his brother Constantius had been anything but amicable. For the two surviving sons of Constantine the Great were riven by the same religious differences that divided Christendom as a whole in the mid-fourth century. Constans was a staunch Nicene Christian, while Constantius was equally committed to the Arian doctrine. [3] Beginning in the late 330's, Constantius tried to impose his version of orthodoxy on the eastern part of the Empire by deposing Nicene bishops – including Paul of Constantinople and Athanasius of Alexandria – from their sees. Constans responded with an escalating series of measures: first by providing a safe haven for the refugee churchmen; then by insisting upon a church council at Serdica in the Balkans in 343 in an effort to resolve the issue peaceably; and finally, in 345, by threatening to go to war with his brother if the Nicene bishops were not restored. Because Constantius was already embroiled in a difficult war on his eastern frontier with the Persians, he had little choice but to assent to his younger brother’s terms. Both Paul and Athanasius, among others, were restored to their sees in 346 – but Constantius chafed at his enforced acquiescence to Constans’ demands.

Three years later, when the Persian War had quieted down again, Constantius once more moved to depose Paul and Athanasius. Paul, the more vulnerable of the two churchmen, was the first to be targeted. In the spring or summer of 349, he was denounced, probably by Macedonius, a long-time rival for the see of Constantinople, and Constantius dispatched his praetorian prefect, Flavius Philippus, to the capital with instructions to arrest Paul. To avoid trouble with the populace of Constantinople – which had lynched another imperial official who was sent to remove Paul on an earlier occasion in the late 330's – Philippus proceeded discreetly. On his arrival in the city, he sent an innocuous message to Paul, asking to meet him at the Baths of Zeuxippus, which were located on the opposite side of the public square known as the Augustaeum from the original version of the great church known as the Sancta Sophia where the bishop lived and preached. When Paul arrived at the baths, expecting to discuss some routine public business, Philippus instead placed him under arrest. Paul was swiftly conveyed from the baths through the adjoining grounds of the imperial palace and down to one of the small harbors along the Sea of Marmara, where he was packed aboard a ship and taken away. Paul was subsequently tried and condemned by a council of Arian bishops, probably meeting at Nicaea or Nicomedia in Asia Minor. The unfortunate prelate was then dispatched in chains to the Emperor’s camp on the Persian frontier at Singara, where he may have been compelled to work at hard labor improving the defenses of this border fortress. Paul was afterwards dragged along with the Emperor’s retinue from Singara to Emesa in Syria (the modern Homs), where the decision was taken to confine him in the remote castle of Cucusus in the Tarsus mountains.

With Paul out of the way, the Emperor next moved against Athanasius. Charges were brought against him in the latter part of 349 before another council of Arian bishops, this time meeting in the eastern sub-capital of Antioch. Athanasius remained in Alexandria, but dispatched a written defense to the council that later became known as his Defense Against the Arians. He was, unsurprisingly, condemned, but actually removing him from his episcopal chair presented greater challenges than in the case of Paul. Athanasius could count on the support of the mass of the Alexandrian populace, which he cultivated with the shrewdness of a nineteenth-century Tammany Hall political boss. Moreover, he had influential and powerful friends in the west: Julius, the Bishop of Rome, who had received and supported him during his previous exile from 339-346, and of course the western Emperor Constans himself.

Athanasius, an astute diplomat, very likely dispatched letters to Julius, Constans, and his other supporters in the west seeking support once the Council of Antioch convened. That such a letter went to Constans, and was received at the western court either just before or just after the palace revolution of January 350, is strongly suggested by subsequent events.

A plea for support from Athanasius would have presented Magnentius and his counselors with an irresistible opportunity. If Egypt could be brought into Magnentius’s camp, the balance of power between the two halves of the Empire would swing dramatically in favor of the Westerners. Constantius would then face a three-front war, caught between the Persians to the east and the possibility of separate advances by Magnentius’s forces from the south through Africa and the west through the Balkans. And because Constantinople depended heavily on Egyptian grain to feed its population, the eastern capital could be starved and thrown into chaos if Egypt passed into Magnentius’s hands.

Africa, Tripolitania and possibly Cyrenaica had all been part of Constans’ share of the empire, and the first two provinces, at least, accepted Magnentius as his successor by the summer of 350. The task of establishing Magnentius’s authority along the southern shores of the Mediterranean was entrusted to two military men, Valens and Clementius. Soon, they were given a further mission: escorting a pair of Gallic bishops, Maximus and Servatius or Sarbatius of Tongres, on an embassy to Constantius that proceeded by way of Alexandria.

Constantius later charged that these ambassadors had carried a letter from Magnentius to Athanasius. Although Athanasius vigorously disputed the allegation, it is entirely plausible that Magnentius wrote to Athanasius to assure him of the continued support of the Western court. Presumably, his ambassadors also received instructions to discretely assess whether Athanasius might be willing to openly break with the eastern Emperor while they were in Alexandria. Just such a message is known to have gone from Magnentius to Paul of Constantinople in his mountain prison – an ill-advised initiative that proved fatal to the unhappy bishop when the letter was intercepted. Constantius’s praetorian prefect Philippus ordered Paul’s jailers to starve him to death. They threw him into “a very confined and dark place,” Athanasius wrote later, and deprived him of any food. Paul lasted for six days, and then his guards – who either tired of waiting for his demise or perhaps decided on a final act of mercy – put an end to his suffering by strangling him.

Athanasius was more fortunate. In the first part of 350, Constantius dispatched Philippus – who functioned as something of an angel of death in religious matters – from Syria to Alexandria with instructions to remove Athanasius as bishop and replace him with George the Cappadocian. But before the praetorian prefect could carry out these instructions, the news of Constans’ deposition and death reached the east. Constantius immediately recognized that for the present, at least, the last thing he needed was instability in Egypt. So he ordered Count Asterius and the imperial notarius Palladius to hasten to Alexandria with orders overruling Philippus’s instructions. He also armed these envoys with a conciliatory letter to Athanasius, urging him “to teach the people as befits a bishop, to conform to the established religion and according to custom to spend your time in prayers with them, and not to believe any rumors which may reach you. For it is our resolve that, in accordance with our wishes, you be bishop in your own place for all time.”

Athanasius doubtless harbored no illusions about the sincerity of the Emperor’s assurances. But Magnentius was still far away, while the civil and military power of Constantius were near at hand. Athanasius accordingly made the shrewd assessment that as long as Magnentius’s revolt continued in the West, he probably had little to fear from Constantius. If Magnentius ultimately prevailed in the civil war, Athanasius could surely come to terms with him at that time. On the other hand, if Constantius ultimately defeated Magnentius, Athanasius was still likely to have substantial advance warning of any new moves against him by the Eastern emperor.

When the ambassadors of Magnentius reached Alexandria, Athanasius therefore made a public show of rebuffing their overtures and reasserting his loyalty to Constantius. He appeared before a great crowd of Alexandrians in the presence of the military dux Felicissimus, Count Asterius, Palladius the notary, and other imperial officials and announced, “Let us pray for the safety of the most pious Augustus Constantius.” In response, the assembled crowd – perhaps primed by Athanasius’s agents – shouted, “Christ, come to the aid of Constantius” and offered prayers for the Eastern emperor’s well-being.

In private, Athanasius may have spoken rather differently to the Western usurper’s envoys. Constantius certainly suspected as much, as shown by his subsequent charge that Athanasius had engaged in a treasonable correspondence with Magnentius. For the present, however, their hollow and insincere rapprochement served each man’s immediate interests. Egypt did not rebel against Constantius, and Athanasius retained his position as the head of the great church of Alexandria.

[To be Continued]

Notes:

[1] Gibbon and some other writers state that Marcellinus was the Count of the Sacred Largesses (comes sacrarum largitonium), but Jones’s Prosopography of the Later Roman Empire disputes this (at 546), citing Zosimus II.42.2. In a memorable passage, Gibbon explains the significance of this curious title, and the importance of this office:

“The extraordinary title of count of the sacred largesses was bestowed on the treasurer-general of the revenue, with the intention perhaps of inculcating, that every payment flowed from the voluntary bounty of the monarch. To conceive the almost infinite detail of the annual and daily expense of the civil and military administration in every part of a great empire, would exceed the powers of the most vigorous imagination. The actual account employed several hundred persons, distributed into eleven different offices, which were artfully contrived to examine and control their respective operations. . . . . Twenty-nine provincial receivers, of whom eighteen were honored with the title of count, corresponded with the treasurer; and he extended his jurisdiction over the mines from whence the precious metals were extracted, over the mints, in which they were converted into the current coin, and over the public treasuries of the most important cities, where they were deposited for the service of the state. The foreign trade of the empire was regulated by this minister, who directed likewise all the linen and woollen manufactures, in which the successive operations of spinning, weaving, and dyeing were executed, chiefly by women of a servile condition, for the use of the palace and army. Twenty-six of these institutions are enumerated in the West, where the arts had been more recently introduced, and a still larger proportion may be allowed for the industrious provinces of the East.”

[2] The events in Vetranio’s camp in the late winter of 350 are admittedly subject to varying interpretations. Eutropius assumes that Vetranio’s assumption of the purple was genuine, although his own description of Vetranio’s character suggests otherwise: he characterizes him as “an upright man, of morality severe as that of the ancients” (Book X, 10). Philostorgius (at least as we have him in the ninth century epitome by Photius) sends mixed signals, stating both that Constantius sent the diadem to Vetranio and that he subsequently “deprived him of his imperial robe.” And the misogynistic Gibbon is only too willing to believe the worst of both Vetranio and Constantia, stating that Vetranio “soon betrayed a want of firmness, or a want of sincerity; and his ambition derived a specious pretence from the approbation of the princess Constantina. That cruel and aspiring woman, who had obtained from the great Constantine her father the rank of Augusta, placed the diadem with her own hands on the head of the Illyrian general; and seemed to expect from his victory the accomplishment of those unbounded hopes of which she had been disappointed by the death of her husband Hannibalianus.” [Ch. XVIII; Volume II (J.B. Bury ed.) at 248.] Bury and other nineteenth century historians have generally taken the view – based in part on an analysis of his coinage – that Vetranio remained loyal to Constantius throughout, although it was necessary for him to dissemble in order to ride out the temporary passions of his troops.

[3] Beginning at least as early as the second half of the third century, eastern Christians of a philosophical bent began debating the question of whether God the Father and Jesus the Son had both always existed, or whether the Father had created the Son at some later point before the moment when the world itself was created and time began. In the second decade of the fourth century, Arius, a priest of Alexandria, began preaching the doctrine that Jesus had not always existed, but was instead created by God out of nothing. His doctrine met with bitter opposition from Alexandria’s bishop at the time, Alexander (313-328), and Alexander’s brilliant and combative personal secretary, a young archdeacon named Athanasius. They contended that the Jesus the Son was made of the same substance as the Father and thus had always existed in the Father. From the perspective of Alexander and Athanasius, Arius’s doctrine transformed Jesus the Son into a second and inferior god who was less than fully divine. Conversely, Arius believed that Alexander’s teaching effectively made Jesus into a second god who was co-equal with his Father.

Because nothing in the Scriptures addressed this esoteric and highly theoretical question, the debate between these two opposing views proved quite difficult to resolve. At the Council of Nicaea in 325, Arius’s position was rejected and the position of Alexander and Athansius was enshrined in the Nicene Creed. By the time of his death a dozen years later, however, Constantine himself had moved far in the direction of Arianism, and his son Constantius remained a committed Arian for his entire life. Arianism was dominant in most of the Empire’s Eastern provinces, and it became the form of Christianity adopted by most of the Germanic tribes that later invaded and dismembered the Western Empire. The Arian doctrine was not decisively defeated within the Church itself until the Council of Constantinople in 381, and it remained accepted by the Visigothic kings of Spain until the last quarter of the sixth century.

Sources:

Athanasius of Alexandria, History of the Arians , at I, 1-7 (www.ccel.org/fathers2/NPNF2-04/Npnf2-04-47.htm)

Timothy D. Barnes, Athanasius & Constantius: Theology and Politics in the Constantinian Empire (1993), at 52-53, 97-106, 212-17

Michael DiMaio, Jr., Smoke in the Wind: Zonaras Use of Philostorgius, Zosimus, John of Antioch, and John of Rhodes in his Narrative on the Neo-Flavian Emperors , in 58 BYZANTION 230 (1988)

Eutropius, Abridgement of Roman History (www.ccel.org/p/pearse/morefathers/eutropius_breviarium_2_text.htm), Book X

Edward Gibbon, The Decline & Fall of the Roman Empire IJ.B. Bury ed.), at II, c. 18, pp. 244-259

A.H.M. Jones, et al., I>The Prosopography of the Later Roman Empire, Volume I, A.D. 260-395, passim

Philostorgius, Ecclesiastical History (Epitome by Photius), Book I, 22-26

Socrates Scholasticus, The Ecclesiastical History (www.ccel.org/fathers2/NPNF2-02/Npnf2-02-05.htm)

Warren Treadgold, A History of the Byzantine State and Society (1997), at 35-44

A. A. Vasiliev, History of the Byzantine Empire: Volume One (1952), at 54-57

Sextus Aurelius Victor, Lives of the Caesars (H.W. Bird ed. 1984), c. 42

Zosimus, Historia Nova, at II, 42-54