David S. PotterBesprekingen

While I'm giving this book four stars, I do have the sense that it ends on something of a whimper, as Potter takes you from the rise of Rome as an imperial power, with the First Punic War, ending with the reigns of Antoninus and Marcus Aurelius; men who cemented the image of the Roman Empire as one of the best of all possible worlds. The issue that Potter wrestles with is that the Roman republic never developed a good way of disciplining its military "contractors," once it became clear that a militia army was insufficient, and it is out of that mix of business and elite competition that the imperium emerged. Although Potter has insights to impart on every page, and offers intelligent critiques of the sources that have come down to us, I'm left with the impression that he attempted to do too much in the page count allotted to him.

A pretty academic but readable biography by a serious scholar. It turns out that contemporaneous information about Constantine is relatively sparse despite his outsized role in the history of Rome and Christianity.

As a result, the early years of Constantine are a blur, and mostly describe his probable experiences in Diocletian’s court. The biography draws from panegyrics (long poems celebrating his achievements) and Constantine’s responses to petitions from around the empire. It reveals an world where people had fixed legal duties and obligations to their communities, much of the petitions were seeking for exemptions from these costly obligations.

The author tries hard to not “back out” Constantine’s life from his conversion. Hence the title “emperor” and reliance on contemporaneous sources like panegyrics and petition responses. Constantine comes across as a supremely pragmatic ruler. He reforms some marriage laws to protect young brides and is concerned about mistakes in status that could deprive a person born free of their free status but never questions slavery or the notion that people are born into fixed statuses itself. His conversation experience is a little more nuanced as well. Early experiences seem to indicate that he wasn’t sure which god was speaking to him, either Apollo or a personal warrior god. The idea of a personal god for the emperor was not particularly new, as a predecessor took sol invictus as his. Eventually Constantine became convinced that the god helping him win battles was the Christian God. There’s some suggestion that Constantine may have adopted monotheism to distance his reign from Diocletian’s. A particularly fascinating argument the book makes is that in the famous moment that Constantine has his soldiers paint the chi-rho in their shields may not have been linked with Christianity at all. The chi-rho could have stood for Christ or simply luck (in Greek they’re apparently similar), and only record of the story of Constantine’s famous dream was not contemporaneous. Constantine is shown as a ruler, who learns from his mistakes, first blundering by reacting harshly the donatist controversy before trying to resolve the Adrian controversy through a more peaceful council at Nicaea where he proposed a compromise.

The book is shorter than it seems, and it is a work of serious historical scholarship. Parts of it are dense (prepare to learn a lot about the period, its complex politics and law. As an aside, I particularly liked a response to a petition setting aside a contract as immoral. A predecessor to public policy?) but interesting historically. A great biography about a great figure

"Uno reveló ser un matricida. Otro se dedicó a luchar como gladiador. Dos ejercieron de filósofos. E incluso hay uno al que la Iglesia Ortodoxa tiene por santo y rinde veneración. Tan diversas personalidades comparten una circunstancia: la de ser emperadores romanos.» David Potter desgrana, con un gran talento narrativo, un enorme conocimiento del período y no poco sentido del humor, la vida de los hombres más poderosos de su tiempo, dueños de gran parte del mundo conocido, y los sitúa en su contexto histórico para entregarnos una panorámica extraordinaria de la Roma imperial.

After reading 'The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire' I was looking for another, deeper dive into the post Roman, early Christian era. David Potter's book was solid. It wasn't mind-blowing, but it delivered probably more facts than I was fully prepared for. This is a book that might not compete well against the narrative historians of this period, but I think it is solid academic work.

Can't seem to get into it yet, but will try again.

I love history books that unspool in seemingly endless detail past eras and disputes. This is not to everyone's taste, but what I have often found is that a deeper understanding emerges from this detail. Only when one is immersed in the contradictions, arguments and irrationalities of a period can one induce a pattern in the behavior.

This is exactly the sort of book that attempts to do just that, through detailed discussion of the legal and bureaucratic machinery that allowed Constantine (and many of his predecessors and co-rulers) to rule a vast and stable empire over decades, we come to understand how Constantine helped create the foundations of Christianity and along with it eighteen centuries of western civilization. He was building for the future, but not for our future. He was concerned with his legacy and his religion but in a far more immediate and instrumental way than we have tended to think of him. He created a structure to ensure Christianity could work in the Roman system and as a result created a system that allowed it to exist after the Roman system came apart.

Overall a valuable book and although the writing is was not always scintillating (as one would expect in dealing with property law rulings in Roman Asia Minor or the like)it is well worth the effort it requires.

This biography is a serious work for readers who seek to learn of the life of Constantine in great detail. This should come as no surprise, as it is published by Oxford University Press.

Given that biographies are so often written with political or private agendas, I was very concerned from the book's introduction that the author wrote it to promote his particular religion. (Potter dedicates his book to two colleagues "for the greater glory of the Holy Cross"). Such concerns appear to me to be unjustified. In fact, the author puts no stock in the popular myth that Constantine saw a cross in the sky that inspired him in battle and led him to make Christianity the state religion.

I would recommend this work to readers of a scholarly bent and others with avid interests in the time period; others may find it rather dry. In fact, the ideal reader should already know something of the subject, since the author alludes to controversies that will be unfamiliar to the uninitiated.

This book is the Emperor Constantine for the twenty-first century. If you think about our modern era, we are technocratic giants: scientists can tell us exactly how much of each chemical constituent it takes to make a human being. Unfortunately, we seem to be getting further away from understanding that spark which transforms a few Euros worth of chemicals into a living, sentient person.

Writing the biography of a long dead person does, of course,have many challenges - there is no film footage of Constantine in battle; his relatives, friends and work colleagues have all been placed in the earth many moons ago; the only sources left are literary. Constantine's most notable biographer was Eusebius, but he would go on about the Emperor seeing crosses in the clouds; and that is not good enough in our rational era. Professor Potter uses more obscure references to Constantine to build a believable picture of life in the fourth century Roman Empire. This book has many, many facts that I did not know about both Constantine and life in those times, and is an interesting read: it is just a pity that the author manages to calculate the constituents of Constantine to within millionths of a gramme, but never captures the spark.

I love reading historical biographies. If you do too, this could be the book for you. However, WORD OF WARNING: This is a very difficult read. It was very wordy and tough to get through. You may also want a general knowledge of the Byzantine Empire before you begin. If you are a history buff and have the commitment, go right ahead. If you want something light, look elsewhere.

Dense, but fantastic.

David Potter has written a fascinating account of how Emperor Constantine incorporated the early Christian Church into the Roman Empire. Although a bit dry in parts, this fairly short book is definitely worth reading because the subject is so interesting.½

I did not know much about Constantine before I read this book. The fist 70 pages or so lay out a background so that helped. Overall, it was a good, if difficult, read. It talks a lot about how Constantine ran his empire and not so much about the mythology surrounding his conversion to Christianity. I would recommend it for anyone seriously interested in that era, though not for an introduction or for a casual reader.

Potter's intention is announced in his title. Instead of the usual emphasis on the emperor's role in the history of Christianity, his main concern is with the administration of the empire.

Special attention is paid to the elaborate network of statuses, laws, rules, and regulations. They are notably similar to those of the Chinese empire of about the same time, and also in many ways similar to early modern Europe.

Of special interest is that many of the illustrations are of coins of the times. The coinage is very good evidence of what the emperors actually looked like, what public monuments looked like, and the propaganda.½

While I certainly enjoyed the book, I can see that if someone was not very well-acquainted with the foundations of the Byzantine Empire, they might find the book difficult. Furthermore, readers might be a bit thrown off by the number of chapters you have to work through before you get to the subject of Constantine himself. While I found some of these chapters helpful, others seemed to be a bit superfluous. I particularly liked the author's approach to debunk many commonly-held myths surrounding Constantine. Overall a good read, which I enjoyed, but if you are not familiar with the era, you may want to arm yourself with a general primer prior to approaching this book.½

Much has been made about Constantine's conversion to Christianity over time. Potter's book is an attempt to place that conversion back into the late Roman Empire, attendant with all the politics, intrigues, and motivations of this period. He makes his case well and the end result is not quite a biography of Constantine but a rendering of the landscape in which the infamous conversion takes place.

I have to say book on the Roma/ Byzantine empire are usually my bread and butter but this one was a tough read. That is not to say that Potters book is bad just that it is every dense and probably not one that would be of interest to the casual reader. Potter has done is research and there is a lot to digest which might make it hard for the lay person. However, there are some nuggets of information that I particularly like such as the legal cases of Diocletion and the state of the empire during his rule.

Overall the book is very informative but a tough read and could use an index and better bibliography to make it a little more accessible for the non academic reader.

This was well formatted and written for any historical nonfiction addict. The information was clear and concise without being dry in tone. I really enjoyed reading it. I won it as an Early Review copy and I'm glad I did. I would definitely recommend this book to anyone interested in historical books.½

This biography of Constantine is not for the general history reader. While quite scholarly, it is filled with the names of officers and others with what seems to be little point. There are details galore, but the overall picture and meaning is often lacking. I love history and thought I knew a little about Constantine, but the numerous Constantines, Constantiuses, Maxentiuses, Maximilians seemed to go on without end.

This book is well written and quite thorough, but not at all accessible for the lay reader with little previous knowledge of Roman history.

I'm giving a high score, since it does seem to be a good book; I just want to make clear that a non-historian (like me) will likely find it very, very difficult reading.

Giving this three stars. I enjoyed this book, however I was a history major and keep up with academic readings. This was not terribly accesible to the lay reader, though it seems a major attempt was made to make it so. There is a plethora of detail and a thorough background to Constantine's world and era which was interesting, but would be difficult for the off the street reader to wade through. This makes the life of Constantine easier to understand, though, and grounded it in a picture of the Roman political world. LIke other reviewers I was initially worrried that this would be heavily biased towards a Christian Hero picture of Constantine, and was pleasantly surprised when it was not. I recommend this for readers who enjoy immersing themselves in an era when reading history.

I received this uncorrected proof copy through the Early Reader's program. It contained the usual number of typos and omissions (no index.) I was a little worried from the introduction that this would be "Christian" oriented version where Constantine sees the cross and immediately converts (a much-loved myth) then leads the empire into holy bliss by making Christianity the official religion (he didn't.) I was pleasantly surprised to find Potter does a good job of putting Constantine's conversion and subsequent actions on behalf of Christianity in the context of the times. Like many "biographies" set in the poorly document centuries of Late Antiquity and Early Byzantine there is more information about the times than the life of Constantine. The first third of the book is dedicated to the time of Diocletian and Constantine's father and much of the following two thirds is given over to laws (used to show Constantine's thinking and moral compass) and lists of various bureaucrats (which don't show up again and could have been skipped.) Potter approaches the subject of Constantine's execution of his oldest son and supposed culpability in his empress' death with sensitivity. He presents and assesses the sources and doesn't take sides, leaving the reader to make up their own minds.

As someone who has read a lot in this time period, I found this book useful and well researched. But, I feel the casual reader would find it tough going.

For an emperor so late in the saga of the Roman Empire, Constantine gets a surprising amount of attention and is up there with the early Julio-Claudian emperors in inhabiting, in however misunderstood, inaccurate, and mutated form, a place in the minds of the putatively educated western public. They know he saw a vision of the cross floating in the sky, heard the words “Conquer, in my name”, and went on to win a major battle and converted to Christianity as the result. And Potter’s claim that he is father of the imperial Roman utterance most widely known, the Nicene Creed, is certainly true.

Of course, Constantine is most simply known as the man who officially made the Roman Empire Christian, and, given that he moved the imperial capital to the newly consecrated Constantinople, it’s fitting many histories of Rome end with his death though the western part of the empire limped on for another 137 years and the last vestiges died in the east in 1453.

I’m of two minds about this book.

Potter tries really hard to make this book user friendly. There is a map of the empire with all the post-Diocletian political sub-divisions noted if not any cities. There are some informative pictures of archaeological ruins and recreations. There is a time line that starts with the capture of the Roman emperor Valerian by the Persians in 260 and emperor Julian’s death in 363. There is a dramatis personae which you will appreciate when trying to keep Constantius, Constantine, Constantia, and Constantus straight or multiple church men named Donatus or Eusebius. Though the book has no index, Potter makes his chapters so short and specifically titled that you can usually find what you are looking for by searching chapter titles. The price of organizing chapters that way is that sometimes Potter deviates from a strictly chronological account.

There is a concluding appendix called “Finding Constantine” and that gives a clue to what makes this book somewhat problematical for the casual reader. Potter is interested in correcting some mischaracterizations of Constantine and his reign from the founder of Christianity’s long anti-Semitic streak as John Carroll argues in Constantine’s Sword, the suppresser of Christian truths as in Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, or the low-born, usurping bastard who killed his wife Fausta and son Crispus and converted to Christianity in Eusebius of Caesarea’s very influential The Life of Constantine – the main source of the cross in the sky story.

Potter is having none of that. He places Constantine’s proclamations on the Jews in context to show their vicious rhetoric was somewhat stock and matched by things he said about other Christians, typical of a Roman magistrate of the time, and, most importantly, not backed up by large-scale persecution of Jews (except when they pursued circumcision of converts). Whereas Brown sees a sinister corruption of Christianity with paganism to water down the truth, Potter sees Constantine learning from his successor Diocletian’s politically destabilizing and futile persecution of Christians. And, as for Eusebius’ cross in the sky, Potter is having none of it.

In fact, given the relative brevity of the book and wealth of footnotes, this book, in the end, seems intended more for an audience keyed into the many disputes and mysteries of Constantine than casual students of Roman history. Our sources from the period are not that good. There are histories written long after the fact, some judicial codes from the time, and the somewhat useful accounts of Eusebius – who knew Constantine – and Constantine’s tutor Lactantius. We are unsure of the dates of some of Constantine’s military campaigns or when, how, and why Fausta died or why Crispus was executed.

A lay reader could almost get a sense of Constantine the man – his temper, his shortcomings, his ambition, his genuine desire to do justice of a sort for his subjects, his religious conviction – by reading that appendix or the epilogue chapter which sums up the man and the differing interpretations of him through history.

However, I did find some things of value in the rest of the book, in particular the influence, for good and bad, of Diocletian’s example on Constantine, to see the importance of loyalty in his personal relationships – learned from a father who did not forsake the product of an earlier, less socially connected marriage, and the sense of political turmoil and oppression dimly glimpsed through repeated judicial edicts trying to curb the power of the rich in legal proceedings, and Constantine’s insistence the classes remain separate – particularly in regards to the forbidden marriage of the free to slaves or children sold into slavery.

So, not an easy read but there are a few nuggets here for the non-specialist, and I suspect, if you are a specialist, Potter’s probably argues a good case.

To place my comments in context, let me note that in the last year I have read Pagans and Christians by Robin Lane Fox and The Closing of the Western Mind by Charles Freeman, among other books relevant to this time period and therefore have a certain basic familiarity with the general history of this time. Keeping in mind that this is an uncorrected ARC with many errors (non-capitalized names, repeated or missing words and phrases), I found this book to be less readable than the other two. Especially at first, the recitation of names, places and dates had me turning back constantly to try to understand the context or the relationships between them. While both of the others are definitely scholarly works, and P&C can definitely be dry, this book seemed less accessible. I think this may be from the author's evident decision to say nothing that could not be backed up from documentary evidence, and I do commend him for his clear delineation when he occasionally steps in to justify certain elaborations from this data or when there is conflicting data. But it is focused so closely on the details of the Empire, the person of Constantine and his administration of the empire that sometimes the big picture is lost in the trivia. One example of this close focus is that while Helena is described several times as being extremely close and influential on Constantine, she is hardly present at all in the book. I think that the mountain of details without prose bridges to give one time to recover amongst them will limit the appeal of the book, but it is definitely a strong scholarly account of Constantine's life based upon a multitude of sources.

Constantine is best-known to Christians as the emperor who converted to Christianity and made it the official religion of the empire. In this book, Potter demonstrates that the story is much more complex. He examines the decades before Constantine came to power, both to set the stage for the key events in Constantine's rule and to show how the young Constantine learned from the successes and failures of his predecessors.

Potter describes Constantine's coming to power and consolidating his rule over the entire empire. On the famous conversion to Christianity at the battle of Milvian Bridge, Potter argues that it was not a sudden conversion, but a more gradual process. In particular, as a young man Constantine witnessed how persecution of minority religions can backfire, so he was prone to be more accepting of those religions.

This book is well-written, although it is not light reading. It includes a helpful Timeline and list of Dramatis Personae at the back of the book, and an extensive bibliography and notes. (The galley copy this review is based on did not yet have the index, but the final version will have one.) I recommend it for advanced students of the Roman Empire, or as supplementary reading for church history.

Is there a lawyer in the house?

Such a question becomes important in assessing this new book on Constantine the Great, the third founder of Christianity (following Jesus and Paul).

That Constantine is worthy of biography is not open to question, and that there is need for a new biography is certainly also true. And the level of scholarship in this production is not open to question. As for the level of interest... that's where the lawyers come in.

Despite the title, this isn't really a biography of Constantine. It is a history of the Roman Empire in the period from about 285 (when Diocletian assumed the Principate) to the death of Constantine half a century later. And, frankly, the result sometimes gets bogged down in legal details. There are whole chapters on the Roman legal system and on particular court cases -- material that I do not doubt is valuable in its proper field, but which simply distracts us from Constantine. Those seeking information about that Emperor may be sadly disappointed. This problem seems particularly severe in the first half of the book.

Also, author Potter strikes me as rather dogmatic about things that we can't really be dogmatic about. For instance, he denies the real existence of the Edict of Milan. He may well be right on this point -- but the sources, as he himself admits, are somewhat contradictory about just what the Edict contained. Such a high level of certainty about topics where our sources are inadequate (which described just about everything in this period) are not confidence-inspiring.

Part of the problem may be that the version of this book sent out to Early Reviewers lacked an index. In a book this dense, this is a very severe defect. I was forever wondering, "Am I supposed to remember who this person is?" In the absence of an index, I couldn't check. So I may have gotten more thoroughly lost than a reader who had the final version of the book.

I suppose the conclusion must be this: For the scholar, this book (once it has an index) will be very useful. For the ordinary reader... the best advice might be to be prepared to skip around a little.½