Constantine, the first Catholic emperor.(Religion)

THE BEST-KNOWN HISTORIAN of the Roman empire is the Englishman Edward Gibbon (1739-94), who produced the masterly History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. This work was influential for generations of young English university students, helping to shape their attitudes to society, empire and religion through its learning and elegance. The celebrity Tory politician and former editor of London's Spectator, Boris Johnson, in his recent spirited defence of classical studies The Dream of Rome, is a bright and breezy exponent of Gibbon's enthusiasm for paganism.

Although briefly a Catholic himself as a youth, Gibbon became bitterly anti-Christian and wholly sympathetic to the pagan empire, explaining its decline in the West as the "triumph of barbarism and religion" and claiming that the Byzantine empire in the East until the capture of Constantinople by the Muslims in 1453 "subsisted one thousand and forty-eight years in a state of premature and perpetual decay".

However, the subject of this talk is not Gibbon, but the Emperor Constantine the Great, who gave religious freedom to the Christians after 280 years of intermittent persecutions. He, more than any other individual, was responsible for the rise of the Christian religion to public prominence and then political dominance. While Christian writers often list ten great persecutions corresponding to the ten plagues inflicted on the Egyptians as the Jews escaped under Moses to begin their long pilgrimage to the Promised Land, the truth is not so simple, as many of the persecutions before 250 AD were local and sporadic. But persecutions and martyrs were real and the Christians, when not persecuted, were a distrusted and disadvantaged minority.

Despite his general thesis Gibbon acknowledged the achievement of Constantine, who was born about 280 in the city of Nis, modern Serbia, and ruled as co-emperor from 306, and sole ruler, alone and supreme, from 324 until his death in 337. "After a tranquil and prosperous reign," Gibbon judged, "the conqueror [Constantine] bequeathed to his family the inheritance of the Roman empire, a new capital, a new policy and a new religion; and the innovations which he established have been embraced and consecrated by succeeding generations". With some justification his first biographer and contemporary, Bishop Eusebius of Caesarea, the first Christian historian, saw him as a new Moses. Unfortunately he was not only ruthless but on occasion tyrannical and murderous,

Christians generally, with the exception of the narrower forms of Protestantism, have been generous to the memory of Constantine. In Eastern Christianity he has been venerated as a saint and named "the Thirteenth Apostle", although the West has never canonised him, being mindful of his violence and his ferocity as a military leader in the eighteen battles needed to consolidate his rise to power.

He is well remembered in Catholic Rome, with a beautiful equestrian statue by Bernini in the northern approach to St Peter's Basilica (balanced on the other wing by a statue of Charlemagne, who was consecrated in St Peter's as the first Emperor of the new Holy Roman Empire by Pope Leo III on Christmas Day 800). The Arch of Constantine erected by the Roman Senate in 315 and decorated with reliefs from earlier imperial monuments stands in good repair at the southern end of the Roman Forum, although he spent little time in the old capital city.

Certainly Bernini's statue, sculpted approximately 1300 years after Constantine's death, depicts a more benign and sympathetic figure than the massive face now on Rome's Capitoline Hill taken from a huge column which used to dominate the towering barrelled vaults of the Baths of Maxentius. Nothing comparable to them in size was built for 1200 years in the West until Michelangelo designed the cupola for St Peter's, and studied them for his purposes.