784 EPILOGUE
major platonist in Alexandria.^21 In Constantinople the bishop went after the
Nestorians and Arianists orders. All perceived rivals of the church were
slaughtered—classical neoplatonists, Christian and pagan gnostics, and Jews,
as well as the "heretical" orders within the Christian compass.
After Constantine, a votary to the pagan sun god, converted to Christianity
in 306, the Roman Empire possessed its first Christian monarch. As Emperor
Constantine I he continued fighting brutal wars among other self-acclaimed
emperors in order to consolidate a greater Rome, whose new center would be
Byzantium (later Constantinople). But before Constantine could establish the
Eastern Roman Empire in Byzantium he had many civil wars to attend to, the
last of which resulted in his victory in 324 over Licinius, a competing claimant
to the title of emperor. General Licinius was Constantine's sister's husband and
his ally in wars against the other western pretenders to the throne. When there
were only two claimants left, Constantine and Licinius, Constantine defeated
Licinius in decisive battles at Adrianople and Anatolia, and executed him and
his son. When Christianity became the state religion, replacing the Roman
gods whose highest deity had been humanly embodied in the emperor, the
churches and monasteries ceased being persecuted and thereafter received fa-
vors. In 330 Constantine officially moved the center of the empire to the city of
Byzantium, which he rebuilt as Constantinople.
Despite the triumph of Constantine over the Roman gods, the internal
doctrinal disputes in Christianity that had preceded its political triumph
never ceased. Apart from the outsider gnostics, whom the Church saw not as
Christians but as Satanists, there were the Roman bishops (a disagreement
that was to culminate in the great schism of Orthodox Constantinople and
Catholic Rome), the Nestorians, the Donatists, and the Arians, among others,
who also demonized each other. The Arians under Bishop Arios of Alexandria
claimed that Christ was not divine but a created being. To quell dispute, Con-
stantine optimistically convened the first ecumenical Council of Nicaea (now
Iznik, Turkey) in 325. Despite such accomplishments as the Nicaean Creed,
which condemned Arianism and affirmed the equality of the trinitarian son
and father, the doctrinal struggles only intensified. The wavering neophyte
Constantine was finally baptized on his deathbed by an Arian bishop.
During his life in Rome of the East, the emperor took the role of Chris-
tianizing his adopted city of Constantinople seriously. Though unbaptized, he
- For a discussion of Hypatia see Mary R. Lefkowitz and Maureen Fant, Women's Life in
Greece and Rome, 107-12.