Secrets of the Dead

Historical Note

My first major encounter with Constantine the Great was an undergraduate essay titled ‘Did Constantine feel he had a divine mission, and, if so, was it Christian?’ This book is, in a way, an extended attempt to engage with that same question.

Paul Stephenson’s recent biography of Constantine warns us how hard it is to be sure about the details of his life. ‘The written sources do not exist or are partial; they have not been preserved or have been preserved by design; they have been altered or miscopied; they cannot simply be mined for data.’ The best contemporary source, Eusebius’s Life of Constantine, was written by a churchman with a very particular agenda and focus. Constantine’s selective editing of his own history, described in this novel, was a real process. With that caveat, I’ve tried to be as accurate as possible regarding what the sources say about the history behind this book.

Most of the main characters in the historical narrative really existed. Publilius Optatianus Porfyrius was a poet, exile, and twice Prefect of Rome, who did actually write poems with secret messages which survive in many copies. Eusebius of Nicomedia was one of the principal churchmen of Constantine’s reign, ringleader of the Arian faction during the Arian controversy, and later Bishop of Constantinople. You get some idea of the way he played power politics from the fact that within ten years of the Council of Nicaea (which was, after all, a defeat for him) all his leading opponents had ended up dead or in exile. Asterius the Sophist was a Christian who lapsed during the persecutions, was excommunicated, but remained active in church circles as an éminence grise of the Arian faction. Aurelius Symmachus was a Neoplatonist philosopher and politician from an eminent family of pagans. Flavius Ursus became Consul the year after Constantine’s death, and is presumed to have been high up in the military command. Biographical details for all of them are incomplete, and I’ve used a novelist’s licence to fill in the gaps.

The members of Constantine’s family featured in the novel also all existed, and met more or less the fates described. Constantine’s campaign of damnatio memoriae was so effective that the truth of what happened to Crispus and Fausta will always remain a mystery: my account follows the most widely circulated version of events.

One minor change I’ve made from the standard historical usage is the way I refer to Constantine’s second son. He’s more commonly known as Constantine II, but in a novel which already features one Constantine, two Constantiuses, a Constans and a Constantiana, it seemed less confusing to call him by his first name, Claudius.

Bishop Alexander is a fictional creation, composited from aspects of Eusebius of Caesarea and the Christian writer Lactantius, who tutored Crispus. The ‘quotes’ from Alexander’s book in chapter eighteen are borrowed from Lactantius’s Divine Institutes. Gaius Valerius is also fictional, though you can trace his career path in the lives of other men.

As for Constantine, he remains one of the most significant, elusive and challenging figures in all history. His success in uniting the Roman Empire, almost for the last time, was extraordinary, though fleeting. His founding of Constantinople created a city that remained an imperial capital into the twentieth century. But his achievement in taking Christianity from a suspect cult to a world religion is as relevant today as in his lifetime. Almost seventeen hundred years after the battle of the Milvian Bridge, the faith he adopted remains the world’s biggest religion. And wherever there’s a church, chances are you’ll hear the creed he called into being at Nicaea being recited, still the great unifier of Christianity.

The question posed in my undergraduate essay – did Constantine have a Christian mission? – is unanswerable. The imagery and narrative of Christianity, imperial Rome, Hercules, Apollo, the Unconquered Sun and other contemporary cults overlap so much that it’s impossible to draw clear lines; I don’t imagine Constantine did.

In the end, Constantine infuriates us for the same reason that Christianity angers its detractors: the painful gap between noble ideals and compromised reality. Constantine lived his life in that gap. How we judge him depends, ultimately, on how we judge ourselves.