Chapter 5, “The Supply of Food to Constantinople,” discusses the supply, distribution, preparation, and consumption of food to the capital, noting the importance of the relationship between the urban center, its hinterland, and the empire’s distant provinces.

During the formative period of disputation over the theology of Arius, the emperor Licinius ruled over the eastern Roman provinces. The emperor Constantine was directly involved in the doctrinal controversy only after his victory over Licinius in 324. But Constantine’s engagement in imperial politics had already shaped his thinking about theology. In imperial successions sons were sometimes promoted but also sometimes overlooked. Emperors introduced a new five-year cycle for calculating taxes and often held annual consulships. Emperors identified with deities such as Jupiter and Hercules. At the Council of Nicaea, Constantine was hence ready to debate with bishops over the theology of Father and Son, the annual date of Easter, and the simultaneous divinity and humanity of Jesus Christ. One bishop who attended the council was Eusebius of Caesarea, whose panegyric equated the emperor with the Son of God. Constantine himself strengthened the association by funding churches in honor of Jesus’s nativity and resurrection in the Holy Land and by publicizing a story about his own vision of a cross in the sky. The Council of Nicaea had been a crucible for the formation of both a theology of God and a political philosophy of a Christian emperor.

Years afterward constantine remembered the battle at the Milvian Bridge as the moment when he had first used a military standard constructed in the shape of a cross. Before the battle, he claimed, both he and his army had witnessed a vision of the cross in the sky, and Jesus Christ himself had appeared in a dream to explain the vision and direct him to build a battle standard. In his Life of Constantine Eusebius subsequently embedded those memories in a religious context and transformed the vision and the battle into moments of conversion to Christianity, of the emperor personally and of the empire in general. In this process of remembering and recording, however, both emperor and bishop had furthermore tried to forget someone else. During the battle outside Rome another emperor had also been present. But when Maxentius had fallen into the Tiber River, he had at the same time slipped into oblivion.

Constantine's memories and Eusebius' reinterpretation of those memories have set the tone for modern scholarship too, and overlooking Maxentius has reinforced the notion that the battle was all about Constantine and Christianity. In contrast, focusing on Maxentius offers an opportunity to avoid highlighting Christianity. The confrontation between these two emperors instead emphasized other consequential trends. One concerned the orientation of the Roman empire. Maxentius symbolized the conventional importance of Rome as the capital, while Constantine represented the increasing significance of frontier zones, in particular in the north along the Rhine and the Danube.

After analysis and interpretation, a new narrative. So far, however, this critique of ancient accounts of the battle at the Milvian Bridge has challenged the expectation of a new master narrative of the battle and its consequences in two related ways.

One is the emphasis on the constructed nature of the early accounts of the battle and its aftermath. The anonymous orator of 313, the designers and sculptors of the arch at Rome, the rhetorician Lactantius, the bishop Eusebius, the poet Porfyrius, the panegyrist Nazarius, and Constantine himself all had their own agendas, which they could promote through the medium of discussing the battle or the emperor's vision. For modern historians one important implication of this focus on the construction of ancient texts should not be simply a reverse emphasis on deconstruction, as if it were possible, through careful scrutiny, to find true details or an accurate basic framework behind the ancient authors' agendas. Too often positivism is hypercritical and hypercredulous at the same time. Instead, the lesson should be the realization that our modern narratives are likewise constructed. We historians need to acknowledge that we are both scholars, reading and interpreting ancient texts, and authors, writing and constructing new texts.

The second challenge to writing a new narrative is chronology, or rather, the direction of the chronology. So far the discussion in this book has proceeded essentially backward, starting with modern scholarship, withdrawing to medieval and Byzantine perspectives and then to historical accounts derived from some of the earlier accounts, retreating to very early accounts, and finally examining some of the immediate reactions.

Eusebius' account of constantine's vision and dream before the battle at Rome in his Life of Constantine has become powerfully influential among modern historians. This is an odd outcome. Eusebius was still revising Life when he died probably in May 339, more than twenty-five years after the battle. He was the bishop at Caesarea in Palestine and hence knew little about events at distant Rome. He clearly used his biography of the emperor to promote a theological and political agenda about the nature of Christian emperorship. Late, far away, sectarian, partisan: Eusebius' account should have struggled to become so significant.

The redeeming factor of his account of the vision and the dream was the declaration that he had heard it directly from Constantine himself. Eusebius claimed to be recording the memories of an eyewitness. But this assertion in turn raises another set of issues about the dating of Constantine's recollections, the reliability of Eusebius' reporting, and the accuracy of his interpretations. Constantine recalled his memories for Eusebius and other bishops for specific reasons at a specific moment long after the battle; Eusebius subsequently recorded the emperor's stories for different reasons at a different moment after the emperor's death. The account of the emperor's vision and dream in Life hence represented three distinct layers of particular circumstances: Eusebius' remembrance of Constantine's memories of events from long ago.