THE WESTERN SIDE OF A PEDESTAL, SHOWING THE HOMAGE OF THE VANQUISHED GOTHS.
FROM GROSVENOR’S “CONSTANTINOPLE.”

But the dominant cause of this war is to be found in political ambitions rather than in religious passions, and if we must declare who of the two was the aggressor, it is difficult to escape throwing the blame upon Constantine. Licinius was advancing in years. Even if he had not outlived his ambitions, he can at least have had little taste for a campaign in which he put all to the venture. Constantine, on the other hand, was in the prime of life, and the master of a well tried, disciplined, and victorious army. The odds were on his side. He had all the legions which could be spared from the Rhine and the Danube, and all the auxiliaries from the Illyrian and Pannonian provinces—the best recruiting grounds in the Empire—to oppose to the legions of Syria and Egypt. Constantine doubtless seemed to the bishops to be entering the field as the champion of the Church, but the real prize which drew him on was universal dominion.

This time both Emperors exerted themselves to make tremendous preparations for the struggle. Zosimus describes how Constantine began a new naval harbour at Thessalonica to accommodate the two hundred war galleys and two thousand transports which he had ordered to be built in his dock-yards. He mobilised, if Zosimus is to be trusted, 120,000 infantry and 10,000 marines and cavalry. Licinius, on the other hand, is said to have collected 150,000 foot and 15,000 horse. Whether these numbers are trustworthy or not, it is evident that the two Emperors did their best to throw every available man into the plain of Adrianople, where the two hosts were separated by the river Hebrus. Some days were spent in skirmishing and manœuvring; then on July 3, 323, a decisive action was brought on, which ended in the rout of the army of Licinius. Constantine, whose tactical dispositions seem to have been more skilful than those of Licinius, secretly detached a force of 5000 archers to occupy a position in the rear of the enemy, and these used their bows with overwhelming effect at a critical moment of the action, when Constantine himself, at the head of another detachment, succeeded in forcing a passage of the river. Constantine received a slight wound in the thigh, but he had the satisfaction of seeing the enemy driven from their fortified camp and betake themselves in hurried flight to the sheltering walls of Byzantium, leaving 34,000 dead and wounded on the field of battle.

Byzantium was a stronghold which had fallen before Maximin after a siege of eleven days, but we may suppose that Licinius had looked well to its fortifications with a view to such an emergency as that in which he now found himself. He placed, however, his chief reliance in his fleet, which was nearly twice as numerous as that of Constantine. Licinius had assembled 350 ships of war, levied, in accordance with the practice of Rome, from the maritime countries of Asia and Egypt. No fewer than 130 came from Egypt and Libya, 110 from Phœnicia and Cyprus, and a similar quota from the ports of Cilicia, Ionia, and Bithynia. The galleys were probably in good fighting trim, but the service was not a willing one, and the fleet was as badly handled as it was badly stationed. Amandus, the admiral of Licinius, had kept his ships cooped up in the narrow Hellespont, thus acting weakly on the defensive instead of boldly seeking out the enemy. Constantine entrusted the chief command of his various squadrons to his son Crispus, whose only experience of naval matters had probably been obtained from the manœuvres of the war galleys on the Rhine. But a Roman general was supposed to be able to take command on either element as circumstances required. In the present case Crispus more than justified his father’s choice. He was ordered to attack and destroy Amandus, and the peremptoriness of the order was doubtless due to the difficulty of obtaining supplies for so large an army by land transport only. Two actions were fought on two successive days. In the first Amandus had both wind and current in his favour and made a drawn battle of it. The next day the wind had veered round to the south, and Crispus, closing with the enemy, destroyed 130 of their vessels and 5000 of their crews. The passage of the Hellespont was forced; Amandus with the remainder of his fleet fled back to the shelter of Byzantium, and the straits were open for the passage of Constantine’s transports.

The Emperor pushed the siege with energy, and plied the walls so vigorously with his engines that Licinius, aware that the capitulation of Byzantium could not long be postponed, crossed over into Asia to escape being involved in its fate. Even then he was not utterly despondent of success, for he raised one of his lieutenants, Martinianus, to the dignity of Cæsar or Augustus—a perilous distinction for any recipient with the short shrift of Valens before his eyes—and, collecting what troops he could, he set his fleet and army to oppose the crossing of Constantine when Byzantium had fallen. But holding as he did the command of the sea, the victor found no difficulty in effecting a landing at Chrysopolis, and Licinius’s last gallant effort to drive back the invader was repulsed with a loss of 25,000 men. Eusebius, in an exceptionally foolish chapter, declares that Licinius harangued his troops before the battle, bidding them carefully keep out of the way of the sacred Labarum, under which Constantine moved to never-failing victory, or, if they had the mischance to come near it in the press of battle, not to look heedlessly upon it. He then goes on to ascribe the victory not to the superior tactical dispositions of his chief or to the valour of his men, but simply and solely to the fact that Constantine was “clad in the breastplate of reverence and had ranged over against the numbers of the enemy the salutary and life-giving sign, to inspire his foes with terror and shield himself from harm.”[[64]] We suspect, indeed, that far too little justice has been done to the good generalship of Constantine, who, by his latest victory, brought to a close a brilliant and entirely successful campaign over an Emperor whose stubborn powers of resistance and dauntless energy even in defeat rendered him a most formidable opponent.

Licinius fell back upon Nicomedia. His army was gone. There was no time to beat up new recruits, for the conqueror was hard upon his heels. He had to choose, therefore, between suicide, submission, and flight. He would perhaps have best consulted his fame had he chosen the proud Roman way out of irreparable disaster and taken his life. Instead he begged that life might be spared him. The request would have been hopeless, and would probably never have been made, had he not possessed in his wife, Constantia, a very powerful advocate with her brother. Constantia’s pleadings were effectual: Constantine consented to see his beaten antagonist, who came humbly into his presence, laid his purple at the victor’s feet, and sued for life from the compassion of his master. It was a humiliating and an un-Roman scene. Constantine promised forgiveness, admitted the suppliant to the Imperial table, and then relegated him to Thessalonica to spend the remainder of his days in obscurity. Licinius did not long survive. Later historians, anxious to clear Constantine’s character of every stain, accused Licinius of plotting against the generous Emperor who had spared him. Others declared that he fell in a soldiers’ brawl: one even says that the Senate passed a decree devoting him to death. It is infinitely more probable that Constantine repented of his clemency. No Roman Emperor seems to have been able to endure for long the existence of a discrowned rival, however impotent to harm. Eutropius expressly states that Licinius was put to death in violation of the oath which Constantine had sworn to him.[[65]] Eusebius says not a word of Licinius’s life having been promised him; he only remarks, “Then Constantine, dealing with the accursed of GOD and his associates according to the rules of war, handed them over to fitting punishment.”[[66]] A pretty euphemism for an act of assassination!

So died Licinius, unregretted by any save the zealous advocates of paganism, in the city where he himself had put to death those two hapless ladies, Prisca and Valeria. The best character sketch of him is found in Aurelius Victor, who describes him as grasping and avaricious, rough in manners and of excessively hasty temper, and a sworn foe to culture, which he used to say was a public poison and pest (virus et pestem publicum), notably the culture associated with the study and practice of the law. Himself of the humblest origin, he was a good friend to the small farmers’ interests; while he was a martinet of the strictest type in all that related to the army. He detested the paraphernalia of a court, in which Constantine delighted, and Aurelius Victor says that he made a clean sweep (vehemens domitor) of all eunuchs and chamberlains, whom he described as the moths and shrew-mice of the palace (tineas soricesque palatii). Of his religious policy we shall speak elsewhere; of his reign there is little to be said. It has left no impress upon history, and Licinius is only remembered as the Emperor whose misfortune it was to stand in the way of Constantine and his ambitions. Constantine threw down his statues; revoked his edicts; and if he spared his young son, the Cæsar Licinianus, the clemency was due to affection for the mother, not to pity for the child. Martinianus, the Emperor at most of a few weeks, had been put to death after the defeat of Chrysopolis, and Constantine reigned alone with his sons. The Roman Empire was united once more.