'That customary magnificence which is your due': Constantine and the symbolic capital of Rome

This dissertation examines the public monuments erected in Rome in the years surrounding Constantine's victory over Maxentius at the Milvian Bridge in October, 312. The Tetrarchic panegyrics, as well as the Tetrarchic Five-Column Monument erected in the Roman Forum, reveal the tensions brewing in Rome over the emperors' absence from the ancient capital. The acclamation of Maxentius was the direct result. Maxentius won the loyalty both of the praetorians and of the local elite by representing himself, through his numismatic imagery and extensive building campaign, as Rome's champion, as a new city-founder, and as the “protector of his city.” Constantine's projects in the city responded to the legacy of Maxentius by construing him as a tyrant, by systematically reinscribing his architectural benefactions so that they now redounded to Constantine's own glory, and by emulating first- and second-century imperial models of the civilis princeps. The Roman Senate largely followed suit, rewriting the embarrassing recent history of the civil war—in which Rome had fought on the losing side—by eagerly seconding the image of Maxentius as a tyrant from whom Constantine had mercifully liberated them. The construction of this narrative was not entirely smooth, however. From the point of view of the Roman elite, the city was once again ruled by an absent emperor who seemed to care little for the mos maiorum and for the imperial traditions of the caput mundi. Rome honored the new ruler in ways that ultimately had more to do with the emperor the Senate expected him to be rather than the one Constantine actually was. At the same time, these public monuments can be read as celebrations of Rome itself as much as of the emperor. Particularly noteworthy is the fact that both Constantine and the Senate articulated these complicated, layered messages not with brand new monuments but by reframing and renewing the material fragments of Roman imperial history with which the ancient capital was, by the early fourth century, overflowing.