Roman Art at the Art Institute of Chicago

In some ways this is among the last coins of the classical age of Rome. In words and images it harks back to the glory days of the Roman Empire, introducing no obvious innovations in iconography or titulature. That was just about to change. The main novelty of this coin lies in the denomination, which reflects the restructuring of the coinage in the face of extreme inflation. We will look at that first, then note several subtle clues to deeper messages in this coin.

Constantine began his rule while the Tetrarchy, established by Diocletian in A.D. 293, was still in place. In order to better defend Rome’s far-flung borders, Diocletian had first appointed a co-augustus in 286. Diocletian then created the Tetrarchy to expand on that success and to regularize the succession. He set up two senior emperors (augusti, of which he was one) and two junior colleagues (caesars), forming a college of four rulers who ruled, theoretically, as one. The idea was that at an opportune time, Diocletian and his co-augustus Maximianus would retire, the two caesars would step up and become augusti in their turn, and two new caesars would be appointed, eliminating the bloody scrambles for power that had been the norm since midcentury. Diocletian and Maximianus retired in 305, succeeded by their caesars (now augusti) Galerius and Constantius I Chlorus; the new caesars were Valerius Severus and Maximinus Daia. But when in A.D. 306 the augustus Constantius died after a successful campaign in Britain, his caesar, Severus, was snubbed by the army. Constantius’s troops (in good late-imperial fashion) acclaimed his son Constantine imperator. This upset the careful and tenuous balance of power among the remaining augustus Galerius and the two junior caesars, Severus and Maximinus Daia; and before long the retired Augustus Maximianus, his disaffected son Maxentius, and a few newcomers like Licinius were also up in arms.

The critical moment, in retrospect, was the defeat on October 28, A.D. 312, of Maxentius by Constantine at the Milvian Bridge, where the Via Cassia enters the city of Rome from the north. At that battle, Constantine’s army fought under a new standard (the labarum) marked with the chi-rho monogram2 as a talisman of the favor promised to them by the Christian God. Constantine attributed his victory over Maxentius’s superior forces to the help of Christ, and he immediately began public declarations of his benevolence toward the forbidden religion. The Edict of Milan promulgated by Constantine and (reluctantly) Licinius in 313 ended the persecution of Christians across the empire. He split the empire with Licinius, who married Constantine’s sister and became augustus of the East (after fighting his own rivals there). However, territorial aggression by Constantine, and Licinius’s retraction of the toleration he had been forced to offer Christians, soon undermined this détente. In A.D. 324 Constantine defeated Licinius at the battle of Chrysopolis (modern Scutari, directly east of what was to become Constantinople). By this action he reunited the whole empire under a sole ruler for the first time since Diocletian had shared the role of augustus with his colleague Maximianus in A.D. 286.

Even before becoming sole ruler, Constantine attempted to address the soaring inflation that had plagued the empire since the crises of the third century.3 Aurelian in the 270s and Diocletian in the 290s had both attempted to restore the gold and silver coinage to earlier standards of purity, if not weight, and to stabilize the silvered bronze and bronze coins (nummi) of various denominations that served as the actual money in circulation for everyday transactions. Due to the scarcity and rise in price of precious metals, however, the restored silver coinage of Diocletian (the argenteus) was discontinued by around A.D. 310–13,4 and by 309 Constantine was constrained to lower the weight of the gold coinage, creating the solidus (“solid bit,” minting 72 coins to the pound) that we have here.5 (The heavier aureus continued to be struck at 60 to the pound in the wealthier East by Licinius; its career and Licinius’s ended at the same time.)

Gold coinage and silver medallions in this period seem to have been used primarily for donatives and congiaria (ceremonial distributions of coins to the legions and to the urban plebeians, respectively). By the time of Constantine, donatives were more restricted and modest than in the heyday of imperial expansion, a mere five solidi per person.6 The recipients would generally not spend these coins as currency: since the skyrocketing rate of inflation meant that a single silver argenteus of Diocletian would already have been worth large bags full of nummi, any silver or gold would be banked, buried, and kept for emergencies. Hoards of gold and silver from the late third to early fourth century illustrate this fact. The lack of circulation helps explain the remarkable absence of wear on gold coins and silver medallions of the era. Another way to safeguard or to bequeath a donative was to eventually incorporate coins into jewelry for men and women, such as pendants or belts (see fig. 24.1, fig. 24.2, and fig. 24.3); this coin shows signs that it may once have been so mounted.7 The value of this coin, in terms of the economy of the period, gives a breathtaking sense of what it meant to receive one as a donative. Given the ratio in commodity price of silver to gold, this solidus would have equaled roughly 1,389 denarii communes.8 Despite its apparent lack of useful correspondence to the other coinage of the era, Constantine’s solidus seems to have been “right-sized” for the needs of the era, since it remained the standard gold coin in the Eastern Roman Empire (Byzantium) until the eleventh century. Indeed, Constantine’s solidus has been called the most important evolution in the monetary system of late antiquity, providing a stable model for gold coinage used not only for military pay and imperial gift-giving but eventually for general civilian mercantile purposes as well, especially in the Mediterranean area.9

The iconography of this coin holds some surprises. One would expect the first Christian emperor’s coins to illustrate his religious adherence after the Edict of Milan, but Constantine’s coinage displays only indirect allusions to Christianity, and only in areas he directly controlled. Licinius, despite his grudging acceptance of the Edict of Milan, used only traditional Roman images on his coins, while Constantine’s mints after A.D. 313 experimented with ways to incorporate the symbolic language of both pagan and Christian culture. Not only was Christianity a minority religion, but many of Constantine’s important supporters were pagans, and early in his career he could not afford to offend.10 Examples of convincingly Christian symbols are few and extremely timid: the use of the chi-rho or a cross as part of a mint mark, for example. On a rare silver medallion (minted in A.D. 315 at Ticinum/Pavia as a donative, probably for his decennalia) the chi-rho appears at the base of the plume on Constantine’s helmet—barely visible to the naked eye—and he carries a cruciform standard.11 What may be the boldest Christian symbol appears only in A.D. 327, well after the defeat of Licinius, on a rare bronze coin from Constantinople itself—from a new mint in a new city that was founded by Constantine as a Christian city, in direct contrast to Rome. It shows the labarum transfixing a supine serpent, just as described by Eusebius in his Life of Constantine.12 Also sometimes interpreted as indicative of the emperor’s religiosity is the “heavenward gaze,” described by Eusebius regarding the famous colossal portrait of Constantine from the Basilica of Maxentius.13 He specifies that after the Council of Nicaea (A.D. 325), Constantine directed that his image in this “posture of prayer” be put on the gold coins. Despite Eusebius’s comments, the “heavenward gaze” was not a novelty. It was already to be seen in portraits of the tetrarchs, of contemporary philosophers, and even of some earlier rulers such as Commodus, and ultimately derived from Hellenistic portraits of Alexander the Great.14 At any rate, that gaze does not appear on this coin.

Constantine’s reverses, for the most part, are carefully neutral regarding religious allegiance, even after 324. We must keep in mind that although Constantine made it legal to be Christian, he did not and could not make it mandatory; it would be nearly a century before a Roman emperor dared to order the pagan temples closed and the ancient sacrifices abandoned.15 Scholars disagree over the degree to which Constantine tolerated the survival of pagan religious practice, but it seems clear that while he deplored and probably forbade blood sacrifice, it was nearly impossible and definitely impolitic to enforce this.16 He did confiscate some temple treasuries, but recognized the social and traditional utility of other pagan establishments. On Constantine’s coins, references to providence, victory, and the glory of the army take the place of specific deities. Mars and Jupiter are indeed invoked as protective figures (e.g., Iovi conservatori) until A.D. 324, and Sol Invictus, the unconquered sun (to which cult Constantine was drawn early in his life), remains on the coins until at least A.D. 317. But the latter was already widely assimilated to Christian symbolism, and the former could be interpreted more as allegories of martial valor than of actual pagan gods.17 Besides, it is not at all clear what Christian symbols he could have put on the coins. Since early Christianity had developed under the shadow of outlawry, visual manifestations of the new religion were safely ambiguous, sharing pictorial conventions with long-established pagan usage. An explicitly Christian iconography had yet to evolve. The chi-rho, labarum, and heavenward gaze could all be interpreted in non-Christian ways.

The most suggestive evidence regarding Constantine’s religious leanings may be what is not on his coins. Shortly after this coin was minted, the conventional headgear of the rulers, the laurel wreath, was suddenly replaced by the plain or rosette diadem. This happened in A.D. 325, that is, after the Council of Nicaea called by Constantine to address the unrest occasioned by the heresy of Arius. The laurel wreath of victory had decked the brows of Greco-Roman gods, goddesses, heroes, and emperors on coins for at least 800 years; it may have carried too strong an association with pagan rulers and gods to be comfortable on the head of the emperor who could convene an ecumenical council. Negatives are hard to prove, however, and the absence of the laurel wreath, like the absence of the usual array of deities, is only suggestive. Like the heavenward gaze, it may just as well have signaled Constantine’s assimilation to Alexander the Great who, like himself, had conquered the East. (Interestingly, the Romans had shunned the diadem until then, since it connoted abhorred ideas of kingship or tyranny.)18 Constantine’s sons and successors would make free use of the labarum, the upward gaze, and eventually a whole panoply of Christian symbols on their coins, but the issues of Constantine himself do not offer much evidence of this pivotal moment in Western history.

Constantine’s victory over Licinius at Chrysopolis in September A.D. 324 inaugurated a number of changes, in the empire and in the coinage. As the sole ruler of the empire, Constantine prepared to celebrate his vicennalia, his twentieth year of reign, which would begin on July 26, 325. Before that, he raised his sons Crispus and Constantine (II) to the rank of augustus, and his youngest, Constantius, to the rank of caesar, while conferring the honor of augusta on his wife, Fausta, and his mother, Helena. With new access to the greater wealth of the East he not only struck coins such as this solidus, but also restored the churches destroyed by Licinius and began the reconstruction of the ancient city of Byzantium, renaming it after himself: Constantinople. He spent most of the year in the vicinity, except perhaps for a brief spell of time in Antioch, which this coin suggests he visited late in the year A.D. 324 to early in 325; the mark SMAN* in the exergue (beneath the image) identifies the mint of Antioch.19

The reverse of this coin proclaims A[D]VENTVS AVGVSTI N[ostri], “the coming of our Augustus,” and suggests that this issue—one of the first to be minted after the defeat of Licinius—was to be used as a donative to the victorious troops.20 The adventus type was already quite old; typically, it represented the arrival of the emperor on horseback to the city in question, wearing armor, cape fluttering, arm raised in a gesture of greeting or benediction. In this instance, the emperor carries a scepter rather than the spear seen on some other issues; along with the fact that Constantine wears no armor on the obverse portrait, the military aspect is downplayed and an emphasis put on his imperial dignity. It should be noted that in 2006, an imperial scepter and other regalia were found carefully buried on the slope of the Palatine Hill near the Arch of Constantine. It is theorized that these are the regalia of Maxentius, hidden before Constantine’s victorious entry into Rome in 312.21 It is the only surviving scepter from the era (fig. 24.4). The adventus type would later find new life in Christian art, in scenes such as the entry of Christ into Jerusalem; in this example, it is more of a throwback to Trajan and other emperors of Rome’s golden age whose coinage reflected their beneficent entries into fortunate cities of their realm, which basked in the imperial presence. Adventus ceremonies were important as signifying that a city was a vital and appreciated part of the empire, and in turn that the emperor was a welcome and legitimate ruler.

The obverse portrait and inscription are fairly conventional; most of the excitement lies in knowing of the transformations that will reshape Rome (and the coinage) in the coming months. Still, a careful reading of the image is revealing. The coin presents a simple head of Constantine, facing right. He still wears the laurel wreath that had been the hallmark of Roman imperial coinage for nearly 350 years, but that would cease appearing on coins in just a few months. There is no indication of military or ceremonial garb; the cord of his wreath rests on the hint of a bare shoulder, suggestive of a heroic nude statue. His head is level and his eyes do not yet gaze heavenward, but rather look straight forward, with the military precision and no-nonsense mien that are so familiar from the third-century “barracks emperors.”

However, unlike the barracks emperors who preceded him and even unlike Diocletian, Constantine is clean-shaven and his visage is ageless and serene; he is the first emperor to so present himself in more than half a century.22 While his profile may appear quite stylized, art historians have been able to trace Constantine’s genuine physiognomy over his long career. His long nose, hint of a receding chin, and slightly fleshy jaw are apparent on this coin, as on other coin issues and in sculpture, such as the “Boar hunt” medallion on the Arch of Constantine, dedicated in A.D. 315. Significantly, they have also discerned in his coin portraits visual allusions not only to Alexander the Great but probably to Trajan and certainly to the first emperor, Augustus. The eternally youthful, idealized, and heroic features of the founder of the Pax Romana have clearly influenced Constantine’s portrait on this coin, especially compared to the scowling, stubbled, and (arguably) realistic faces of his third-century predecessors, and to the indistinguishable faces of the Tetrarchs. The evocation of the Augustan Golden Age is carefully calculated for political ends, and is supported by the revival of classical style in Constantine’s building programs. This deliberate manipulation of his portrait to look like himself while also reminding the viewer of Augustus23 can be seen as early as his victory over Maxentius in 312, while the Alexander-like details appear shortly after Constantine reunites the empire in 324, though not yet on this coin.24 The Roman tradition of realistic portraiture has its last great fling under Constantine. His sons and successors would adopt a more hieratic and schematic technique for their public images.

Besides the bare bones of his cognomen, Constantinus, the obverse inscription includes the initials P F, standing for pius et felix (dutiful and happy), typical of the inscriptions of the later Roman emperors (who were, generally speaking, neither). These names had been closely associated with the religious duties of the emperor as pontifex maximus, the “chief builder of bridges” between the Romans and the gods. As his convocation of the Council of Nicaea attests, Constantine still bore that duty, though he may have seen it rather differently than his predecessors had. AVG[ustus], the final part of the inscription, had been part of the official names of the emperors since it was first voted to Octavian Caesar by a grateful but cowed Senate in 27 B.C. However, since Diocletian’s radical reimagining of the title in A.D. 293, it had another connotation. As late as A.D. 310 there had been four augusti circling each other warily, while the coinage urged the providentia (foresight) of the multiple augusti; this coin, on the other hand, seems serenely to dismiss the possibility of rivals.

After this coin was minted, Constantine continued his preparations for his vicennalia. He provided Constantinople with a mint, convoked the ecumenical Council of Nicaea to settle the questions of heresy that had troubled the region, and headed off to Rome to wrap up a year of celebration. It was to be a terrible year, during which his son Crispus, his wife Fausta, his former colleague Licinius, and Licinius’s son would all be executed on his orders, on obscure charges. He would break with the Roman aristocracy and turn his back on the Eternal City, making Constantinople his new home and the new capital of a very different Roman world. It would endure as such until 1453.
Theresa Gross-Diaz