EMPIRE INSIDE OUT: CELEBRATING CONSTANTINE'S VICTORIES BETWEEN ROME AND TRIER

Abstract

This article argues that Panegyricus Latinus XII(9), a speech performed before Constantine in Trier in 313 c.e. following his defeat of Maxentius the previous year, acted as a crucial localized act of communication to the emperor. Through a series of allusions and the careful presentation of his narrative, the orator made a case for the continued political and cultural importance of Trier within the newly expanded Constantinian empire.

INTRODUCTION

Constantine's defeat of Maxentius at the Milvian Bridge on 28 October 312 ranks as perhaps the most famous battle of Late Antiquity. Thanks to the twin efforts of Lactantius and Eusebius, it swiftly became remembered as the moment when Constantine publicly embraced Christianity.¹ It was also the subject of commemoration by a Gallic panegyrist who showed little interest in questions of religion, and who, none the less, provides our first extant account of Constantine's Italian campaign, his victory on the banks of the Tiber, and his subsequent celebrations in Rome: Panegyricus Latinus XII(9) delivered in Trier in 313.² In recent years, and in tandem with shifting attitudes towards the value of praise oratory as source material for imperial self-presentation, this Gallic speech has been yoked together with a later panegyric delivered by Nazarius in Rome—Pan. Lat. IV(10)—to investigate how Constantine sought to justify his attack on another Roman emperor and to celebrate Maxentius’ defeat unambiguously as a civil-war victory.³ This article argues that at its performance in Trier Pan. Lat. XII(9) was of less interest to its original audience as a source of imperial propaganda, and instead was recognizable as a crucial localized act of communication to the emperor. Its orator proffered answers to questions that the recent victory at Rome raised for Trier's position in the rapidly expanding Constantinian empire, and for longstanding conventions about the correct place to celebrate victory.

Section I sets out the historical circumstances in which Pan. Lat. XII(9) was performed, arguing that, after decades as a principal imperial residence and a de facto location for Constantine's recent victory celebrations, Trier now risked losing Constantine's attention and patronage. Sections II–IV argue that, within this historical context, the orator promotes Trier over Rome as both an appropriate abode and a celebratory space for Constantine via a combination of intertextual and narratological techniques. In so doing, he articulated provincial concerns at a crucial moment when the geopolitical relationship between the city of Rome and the provinces appeared ripe for realignment.

I. ROME, TRIER AND THE GEOPOLITICS OF VICTORY CELEBRATIONS

The day after Maxentius’ defeat on 28 October 312, Constantine entered Rome. He remained there for more than two months before returning by May 313 to Trier, the city in Gaul which had served as his base for the past six years and from where he had launched his Italian campaign the previous summer.⁴ Later in 313, an anonymous Gallic orator delivered Pan. Lat. XII(9) in Trier before Constantine as part of a triumphal celebration of the emperor's recent military feats. Eight years later, Nazarius delivered Pan. Lat. IV(10) before the Senate in Rome to mark the quinquennalia of Constantine's sons, Caesars Crispus and Constantine II, albeit without the presence of the emperor or the Caesars.⁵ Both orators took the defeat of Maxentius as their principal theme and offered a closely overlapping narrative that traced Constantine's campaign in northern Italy (Pan. Lat. XII[9]5.4–13, IV[10]21–7), the battle at the Milvian Bridge (Pan. Lat. XII[9]14.1–18.3, IV[10]27.5–30.3), and Constantine's subsequent celebrations in Rome, which included a triumphal entry and further festivities (Pan. Lat. XII[9]19.1–21.5, IV[10]30.4–35.5).⁶ Recent scholarship has often pointed to the consistency in detail and presentation in two speeches composed at significant geographical and temporal remove, treated that consistency as evidence of the orators’ reliance on court-sanctioned material, and has consequently used these speeches as a window onto Constantine's intended interpretation of his victory.⁷ The emperor sought to stress the tyranny and illegitimacy of Maxentius, portray the campaign of 312 as the liberation of Italy and Rome, and de-emphasize any negative connotations that may still have hung around the celebration of victory in civil war.⁸ In other words, they have been treated as examples of what Sabbah once termed ‘communication descendante’, the dissemination of imperially endorsed messaging rendered all the more potent because it was delivered through the seemingly independent mouthpiece of a local orator.⁹

Despite the broad similarities in content and theme, there are also significant divergences in detail that suggest our orator's use of court-generated material as a vehicle also for advice or requests from the local community to the honorand (‘communication ascendante’ in Sabbah's terminology).¹⁰ That the subtlest of variations on an imperially sanctioned theme were readily identifiable to court and wider audience alike becomes clear when one considers that even Pan. Lat. XII(9) was just the latest in a long sequence of speeches on the same topic delivered to Constantine during the ten or eleven months since his victory on the Tiber. Constantine heard speeches during his stay in Rome (Pan. Lat. XII[9]1.1). He arrived in Trier only by the end of May, and departed again by mid-summer for a campaign against the Franks on the Rhine (Pan. Lat. XII[9]25.21–2). That first arrival in late spring was an obvious moment for Trier, the site of so many previous Constantinian celebrations, to stage another series of speeches to mark the victorious aduentus of the emperor who had treated the city as his principal residence ever since his accession.¹¹ Our orator addressed him only upon his return from the Rhine in the late summer.¹² Those earlier speeches, although they do not survive, more than likely took the emperor's recent victories as their subject matter, allowing our panegyrist to play his variation upon their theme. And in the particular geographical and political contexts of Trier in 313, I suggest, there were two issues of pressing concern that the Treveri wished to raise with the emperor. The first relates to tensions that had been growing over the past thirty years between, on the one hand, Rome's place as the ideological home of victory and empire and, on the other, the reality that victory was frequently celebrated in the provinces; and second, and in more direct respect to Trier, the city's continued role as Constantine's residence.

During the Republic and the Early Empire the formal triumph in Rome had served as the ceremonial manifestation of an ideological configuration of space between distant war and urban celebration. The returning general marked the conclusion of warfare, the inception of peace, and his transition back to the civil realm, all in the celebratory presence of the urban population.¹³ The decentralization of power away from Rome from the third century onwards saw two important developments in triumphal ceremonial: the extension of the formal triumph in the City into other forms of imperial ceremonial elsewhere, notably the aduentus; and the multiplication of locations where victory could be celebrated (albeit not to the exclusion of Rome itself).¹⁴ Although the aduentus drew on the essential aspect of the traditional triumph as an act of arrival, and adopted its military procession within an urban context, it celebrated a generalized quality of imperial victoriousness rather than necessarily celebrating a single recent victory.¹⁵ As Ando has pointed out, the proliferation of this quasi-triumphal celebration in the provinces is indicative of the shift in status of provincial populations from ‘victims to subjects to residents to citizens, and hence gradually to beneficiaries of Roman militarism’, a shift that was largely complete by the early fourth century.¹⁶ But there is also evidence for celebrations of specific victories in the provinces that shared several of the accoutrements of the traditional (Roman) triumph. Indeed, from the Tetrarchic period onwards, Trier became a frequent location for provincial celebrations of specific victories. Earlier speeches among the Panegyrici Latini suggest that triumphs were staged in the city by Maximian in 287 and c.291, and by Constantius I in 297.¹⁷ By 313, Constantine himself had twice received the victory title Germanicus Maximus (in 307 and 308) for campaigns launched from Trier.¹⁸ Eutropius described the subsequent celebrations as a magnificum spectaculum, and a panegyrist in 310 recalled captured troops thrown to beasts during the games.¹⁹ As Eutropius’ brief description implies, the city's topography and sacred infrastructure mirrored that of Rome itself—in addition to an amphitheatre, it boasted a splendid new audience hall recently completed by Constantine and, crucially, a Capitolium, whose counterpart in Rome provided the traditional terminal point of the triumphal procession.²⁰

Even if triumphal celebration was in practice a frequent occurrence in Trier during the Tetrarchy and the early part of Constantine's reign, panegyrists maintained an ideological stance that deferred to Rome as the only appropriate place for such celebrations. Despite alluding to the ceremonies in Trier in 289, the orators of both Pan. Lat. X(2) and Pan. Lat. XI(3) conclude their speeches by expressing the hope that Maximian will subsequently celebrate his victories in Rome; and in the case of X(2) the orator conjures an imaginary Roman triumph in considerably more vividness and detail than he had earlier described the actual triumph in Trier (Pan. Lat. X[2]14.1–5, XI[3]19.4–5).²¹ Even in earlier Constantinian panegyric, Gallic orators frequently defer to Rome as the traditional place of triumph, either by repeatedly calling attention to Maximian's visit to Rome (Pan. Lat. VII[6]8.7–8) or by recalling traditional triumphal celebrations in the Vrbs (Pan. Lat. VI[7]10.5–6).²² Such a pose may not just be the result of rhetoricians’ traditionalism; Ando has argued that Maximian always intended the celebrations in Trier and elsewhere to be a prelude to his actual visit to Rome in 303 when he celebrated a joint triumph with Diocletian.²³ And Lange has suggested that Constantine only celebrated in Trier between 306 and 312 because he did not have access to Rome while Maxentius held it.²⁴ Celebrations in Trier were preliminary for more definitive triumphal celebrations in Rome itself.

Even if it were a place for preliminary celebration, Trier had benefitted from the presence of successive imperial courts. As noted above, Constantine's presence over the past six years had enriched the city with a magnificent set of new buildings, the praesentiae <tuae> munera (‘rewards of your presence’) as the orator of 310 described them (Pan. Lat. VI[7]22.5).²⁵ And a visiting orator from Autun the following year remarked with a twinge of jealousy that Trier more than other Gallic cities enjoyed Constantine's presence and had become the home of omnis imperii apparatus (‘the apparatus of the whole empire’, Pan. Lat. V[8]2.1).²⁶ How quickly things could change: the campaign of 312 and its celebration therefore presented a moment of reckoning for the city. It took Constantine to Rome for the first time in his reign, and not since the establishment of the Dyarchy had Gaul spent a winter without a resident member of the imperial college.²⁷ After successive Gallic panegyrists had maintained that Rome was the only rightful place for a triumph, Constantine did indeed celebrate a victory in Rome before he did so anywhere else. Questions must have abounded: would he return north again; or now that he controlled the whole of the West, would he become a Rome-based emperor as Maxentius had been for the past six years? His decision to stay in Rome until the new year must have been motivated by a desire to hold a consular processus in the city itself. Even though he entered the consulate for the third time on 1 January 313, this was the first occasion that he had done so in the traditional location.²⁸ If any of the coinage that Constantine had recently minted in Rome made its way to Gaul (perhaps in the pockets of the troops who returned with him, XII[9]21.3), it would not have assuaged concerns, bearing as it did the legend liberatori urbis suae ‘to the liberator of his own city’ (RIC VI Rome 303 and 304).²⁹ Rome, Constantine seemed to be saying, was now his preferred residence.³⁰

The orator of 313 could at least take solace in the peculiar phenomenon that, even if the celebrations in Rome were in the ideologically correct location, the civil-war campaign by which they had been achieved collapsed the traditional spatial distinction between limes and urbs as the place of conflict and celebration respectively. And, of course, he could be happy in the knowledge that Constantine had indeed decided to return to Trier, at least for the meantime.

II. THE EXORDIVM OF PANEGYRICVS LATINVS XII(9): IMITATIO AND AEMVLATIO BETWEEN ROME AND TRIER

Within these communicative and historical contexts, Pan. Lat. XII(9) makes a case for the continued importance of Trier to Constantine (examined in Section III), and, more radically, now as the proper place for triumphal celebration in place of Rome (in Section IV). There is no doubt that the orator of 313 tows the line in terms of acceptable and court-endorsed presentation of Constantine's victory: Maxentius is an illegitimate tyrant, Constantine's mission is to liberate Rome, and the emperor even appears to be imbued with Romanitas at the moment of his victory via a series of allusions to Virgil.³¹ But alongside this repetition and even development of standard Constantinian material, there is scope via the orator's use of allusion and the selection and orientation of the narrative to detect ‘communication ascendante’. That allusion both to contemporary panegyrics and to classical Latin authors is central to his agenda is signalled in the opening paragraph of his speech.

The exordium—the traditional place to establish an authorial persona—draws attention to the orator's position as the latest contributor in a series of speeches that had begun in Rome. It does so in such a way to question the relationship between the two cities both in terms of oratorical prowess and as a place of celebration (1.1–5):

[1] Vnde mihi tantum confidentiae, sacratissime imperator, ut post tot homines disertissimos, quos et in Vrbe sacra et hic rursus audisti, dicere auderem, nisi nefas esse ducerem … si is, qui semper res a numine tuo gestas praedicare solitus essem, haec tanto maiora pristinis silentio praeterirem per quae non pars aliqua seruata sed uniuersa sibi est res publica restituta? …

[2] neque enim ignoro quanto inferiora nostra sint ingenia Romanis, siquidem Latine et diserte loqui illis ingeneratum est, nobis elaboratum et, si quid forte commode dicimus, ex illo fonte et capite [et] facundiae imitatio nostra deriuat.

[3] sed quamuis conscius mihi infirmitatis ingenitae et inchoati potius studii quam eruditi, cohibere me silentio nequeo, quominus de recuperata Vrbe imperioque Romano [et] tandem ex diuturna conuulsione solidato et ipse aliquid coner effari, ut inter tantos sonitus disertorum mea quoque uox tenuis exaudita uideatur … .

[5] experiar igitur, ut possum, quamquam oppletis auribus tuis, ut sic dixerim, insusurrare, sine aemulandi fiducia cupidus imitandi.

[1] Where would I have found such confidence, O most sacred emperor, that, after you have heard so many and so eloquent men in the Sacred City and when you are here again, I would dare to speak, were I not to consider it wrong … if I, who have made it my habit to proclaim your deity's accomplishments, should pass over in silence these deeds that are so much greater than those of old, through which not some part but the whole of the state has been saved and restored?

[2] For I am not unaware how much inferior our abilities are to those of the Romans, since to speak Latin eloquently is inborn in them, whereas it is the work of toil for us, and if by chance we do speak well, our imitation derives from that fount and source of eloquence.

[3] But however conscious I am of my natural weakness and of a study only begun rather than mastered, I cannot restrain myself with silence and refrain from making my own attempt to say something about the recovery of the City and the establishment of Roman power at last after a longstanding upheaval, so that amid the thundering sounds of eloquent speakers my slender voice may appear to have been heard as well …

[5] Accordingly, although your ears have been filled up, if I may use the expression, I shall try as best I can to whisper into them, desirous of imitation without the boldness of rivalry.

On the surface, this opening statement seems to provide a typical aporia and captatio beneuolentiae in which the orator downplays his abilities in comparison to the magnitude of his task.³² Yet the particular twist given here to this otherwise commonplace gesture—that he is, dauntingly, the latest in a long series of speakers—draws attention to the reversal in the celebratory trajectory that had been apparent in the Tetrarchic panegyrics examined above. Now the Roman celebrations have formed the prelude to those in Gaul. And we are carefully reminded that Trier was both the beginning and the end of the campaign: those latest speeches are heard by Constantine now that he is here again (hic rursus, 1.1).

The exordium also questions the relationship between Rome and Trier, both for the nature of Latin oratory in general and the content of this speech in particular. The reference at 1.2 to Roman eloquence may sound like a deferential nod towards the City—imitation of Roman rhetorical prowess is the only way for Gallic orators to overcome their innate rusticitas.³³ And given the lack of specificity about the antecedent for ‘that fount and source of eloquence’, we may at first be forgiven for assuming that our orator imitated those contemporary homines disertissimi of the preceding sentence, who had been first to praise Constantine's victory in Rome, and in whose wake our orator now spoke. The orator thus praises his immediate predecessors by imitating them. But the careful listener would detect an allusion here to Fronto's description of Cicero, qui caput atque fons Romanae eloquentiae cluet (‘who is reputed to be the fount and source of Roman eloquence’, Ep. 4.3.3). ³⁴ Importantly, this calque for Cicero acts as a marker for a sustained set of allusions to the opening of Cicero's Pro Marcello throughout the exordium of XII(9).³⁵

Cicero opened his speech of 46 b.c.e. by declaring the end of his diuturni silentii (‘long silence’) and the resumption of his pristino more dicendi (‘old mode of speaking [that is, freely]’), explaining tantam enim mansuetudinem … tacitus praeterire nullo modo possum (‘in no way am I able to pass over such humanity in silence’); for, by Julius Caesar's recent restoration of the exiled Marcellus, non illius solum, sed etiam meam uocem et auctoritatem et uobis et rei publicae conseruatam ac restitutam puto (‘I think that my own voice and influence, as well as his, have been preserved and restored to yourselves and to the state’, Marcell. 1.1). He closed his exordium by declaring his sense of unfairness that he and Marcellus, even though both of them had previously opposed Caesar, had till now been treated so differently: nec mihi persuadere poteram nec fas esse ducebam uersari me in nostro uetere curriculo illo aemulo atque imitatore studiorum ac laborum meorum, ‘nor did I consider that it was right for me to pursue my old path of life, when he who had been the rival and the imitator of my scholarly pursuits and my toils had been separated from me’ (Marcell. 1.2).

The Pro Marcello was appropriate choice of intertext—although its title may suggest a judicial defence speech, it was in effect the first Latin panegyric to be addressed to a Roman autocrat.³⁶ In the wake of his defeat of Pompey at Pharsalus, Julius Caesar had emerged not just victor in a civil war but as unchallenged dictator, Rome's first permanent autocrat since the expulsion of the kings. Cicero, like Marcus Marcellus, had opposed Caesar, but made his first speech in the Senate since Caesar's victory to thank the dictator for his clemency in restoring Marcellus from exile. Following the techniques of Hellenistic kingship literature, Cicero praised Caesar's virtues and military accomplishments (both foreign and civil) in the first half of the speech, and urged the dictator to become the re-founder of the Republic in the second.³⁷ These themes of civil-war victory, clemency towards the defeated, and restoration of the state were germane in the context of 313.

These allusions have hitherto gone unnoticed, but they show our Gallic orator deploying substantial amounts of Cicero's phraseology, while significantly transposing the original and making it his own. The scale of Caesar's humanity that Cicero claims to be his motivation for speaking (tantam enim mansuetudinem) has become the imagined scale of confidence (tantum confidentiae) needed by our orator to address Constantine. For Cicero, it was his and Marcellus’ voice and influence that were preserved and restored for the state (meam uocem et auctoritatem … rei publicae conseruatam ac restitutam), whereas the state itself has been saved and restored by Constantine (seruata … sibi est res publica restituta). The final phrases of each exordium touch on the related themes of imitation and rivalry; however, whereas Marcellus (a onetime orator) had been the rival and imitator of Cicero's literary style and actions (illo aemulo atque imitatore studiorum ac laborum meorum), our panegyrist disclaims rivalry with other orators and instead desires that his account of Constantine's deeds be imitated—an account which, thanks to this opening paragraph, he suggests he presents in a Ciceronian style (sine aemulandi fiducia cupidus imitandi).

The exordium of Pan. Lat. XII(9) raises two possible forms of literary imitation set in two different time-frames, cued on the one hand by explicit statements of imitation of contemporaries (the homines disertissimi), and on the other by allusion to classical Latin (Cicero's Pro Marcello). The latter undercuts the former. If he contends that the height of Gallic eloquence lies in the imitation of the original Latin panegyrist, Cicero (and thus elides any need to imitate more recent examples of Roman rhetoric, including Constantine's Roman panegyrists), then our orator demonstrates that he is already a past master of his art. Even the label he applies to his recent predecessors proves his point: homo disertus is a typical Ciceronian phrase.³⁸ And the premise of the aporia was already mock-modest: in Late Antiquity, Gaul was revered as a centre of oratory (the Roman senator Symmachus, educated in Bordeaux, would later praise Gallicana facundia).³⁹ While claiming imitatio and renouncing aemulatio, he in fact practises both. By imitating Cicero he is already in a position to rival those contemporary Roman orators. It is noticeable, too, that the direction of imitation shifts over the course of the exordium from our orator's imitation of Roman (Ciceronian) Latin (1.1) to his desire to be imitated (presumably by future orators) (1.5). Our orator in Trier wishes to become himself the fons et caput of future Constantinian panegyric.

There is also a distinct mismatch between the style and the subject matter outlined in the exordium, which again plays on a distinction between Rome of the past and Rome of the present: if Rome had once provided the fons et caput for the eloquence which had flowed northwards to Gaul, the subject matter, defined by our orator as de recuperata Vrbe (‘on the recovery of the city’, 1.2), required a narrative of recent events that progressed in the opposite direction: Rome the fount of eloquence required to be saved by a campaign launched from Gaul. And our orator's choice of phrase here attracts attention. de recuperata Vrbe in itself sounds like a plausible title for a historiographical monograph, but it does not quite fit the tenor of contemporary imperial terminology. As we have already seen, Constantine's coinage minted in and around Rome during 312 and 313 advertised him as the liberator and restitutor urbis suae, officialized terminology that our orator does indeed know and reflect elsewhere in the speech, making his choice to define his subject matter programmatically here as urbs recuperata (rather than urbs liberata or urbs restituta) all the more striking.⁴⁰ Indeed, despite the prevalence of siege warfare and the capture and recovery of cities in antiquity, the phrase urbs recuperata is surprisingly rare in extant Latin. On all but one occasion, it refers to a single city and to one act of recovery: Rome in the aftermath of the Gallic capture in 390 b.c.e.⁴¹ The phrase originates with Livy, who also provides the principal extant narrative of the conflict. The formula urbs recuperata even becomes a temporal marker alongside the far more ubiquitous urbs condita in his subsequent narrative, cementing the recovery of the city from the Gauls as the second most seminal event in the city's history after its foundation.⁴² Camillus, Livy tells us, was even dubbed a new Romulus, the city's alter conditor (‘second founder’, Livy 5.49.7). On a charitable reading, our orator's recollection of Rome's recovery by Camillus fits neatly with Constantine's propaganda in relation to the city of Rome: Maxentius had presented himself as a new Romulus (an alter conditor), a role that Constantine was swift to appropriate for himself.⁴³ But, as with the allusion to Cicero, there are striking inversions at play here when we consider the context of the delivery of the speech: Rome in 312 was recovered not from Gauls by Romans but by Romans from Gaul.⁴⁴ And famously, in 390 b.c.e. the Romans had considered abandoning their newly recovered city and moving their capital to Veii, from where they had launched their attack to regain the urbs. ⁴⁵ Our orator sows enough ambiguity to raise the suggestion that it was again time to consider abandoning Rome in favour of a city that recently served as a base for victorious Roman generals.

III. WAR NARRATIVE FROM A GALLIC PERSPECTIVE

If the exordium staked a claim to Gallic panegyrists’ rivalry with, even superiority over, Roman victory oratory, the account of the campaign that follows advances a sustained case for the continued centrality of Trier for Constantine over Rome, a decoupling of traditional Romanitas from the contemporary city of Rome, and a rethinking of the traditional relationship between limes and urbs.

The opening sentence of the speech had established a teleology that what was begun in Gaul was necessarily to be completed there, and the narrative that follows is designed to reinforce this orientation. Toponyms are inverted to reflect a Gallic perspective: northern Italy (the province officially known as Italia Transpadana—‘Italy across the Po’) becomes cis Padum Italia (‘Italy on this side of the Po’, 14.1). Constantine's choice to leave Rome in 313 is presented as a return to ‘his’ Gauls (redieras in Gallias tuas, 21.5), in a conscious revision of Constantine's Roman urbs sua coinage. Fortunately for our orator, Constantine's campaigning did not end with the Milvian Bridge. In comparison to those panegyrists who had addressed the emperor in Rome and earlier in Trier, he could now praise Constantine's summer campaign of 313 against the Franks in terms that illustrated Constantine's indefatigable ability to keep on fighting, and his desire to pile victory upon victory (22.1). Comparison with Nazarius indicates the importance of this sort of narrative teleology to Constantine's orators: writing eight years later, Nazarius would invert chronology, placing his account of Constantine's Frankish campaigns of both 313 and 319 (Pan. Lat. IV[10]17) before his lengthy account of the Italian campaign of 312 (Pan. Lat. IV[10]19–37).⁴⁶ For Nazarius, Rome was to become Constantine's terminus; but the orator of 313, as we shall explore in more depth below, ensures a final victory celebration is held in Trier (Pan. Lat. XII[9]23.3).

The battle at the Milvian Bridge is the high point of the account, and Rees and Ware have argued that a series of allusions to Virgil's Aeneid here cast Constantine ‘as an epic, quintessentially Roman leader’.⁴⁷ Their most explicit example is the orator's address to the Tiber in the aftermath of the battle (sancte Thybri, quondam hospitis monitor Aeneae, ‘sacred Tiber, once adviser of your guest Aeneas’, 18.1), in which he praises the river's aid of Constantine by engulfing Maxentius, the ‘false Romulus’, in his waters (Pan. Lat. XII[9]18.1–2). By association, Constantine is cast in the role of Aeneas. Yet even here the orator sows further ambiguity. Ware compares this phrase to Virgil's depiction of the Tiber's appearance to Aeneas in a dream (Aen. 8.831–65), ‘advising him of the location of his future settlement, hic tibi certa domus (“here assuredly is your home”, Aen. 8.39)’.⁴⁸ Perhaps, then, our orator concedes Trier's place to the ancient capital of empire after all. But the form of our orator's direct second-person address to the river god and the presence of a vocative agent noun in apposition resemble more closely Aeneas’ prayer to the Tiber that he makes upon waking the following morning, which opens ‘o Thybri tuo genitor cum flumine sancto …’ (‘“O father Tiber, with your sacred stream …”’, Aen. 8.71–8) and concludes with a plea for the god's constant presence (adsis, 8.78). It is our Gallic orator, addressing the Tiber from afar and with a rare apostrophe who takes on the role (and the words) of Aeneas rather than Constantine. And in this same address to the river, the orator deploys two exempla to illustrate how the Tiber can aid or destroy those it perceives as enemies: the river was turbulent when it drowned Maxentius, but tu quietus armatum Coclitem reuexisti, tibi se placido Cloelia uirgo commisit (‘you were calm when you carried Cocles in armour, the maiden Cloelia entrusted herself to your stillness’). Of course, there is an explicit condemnation of Maxentius here—he was recognized as a threat to Rome by the city's river—but the choice of Cocles, the Republican hero who defended Rome from the Etruscan king Lars Porsenna at the battle of the Pons Sublicius in 509 b.c.e., disrupts the neat antithesis between exemplum and Maxentius. Cocles plunged into the Tiber only after he arranged the destruction of the bridge in order to frustrate Porsenna's crossing (Livy 2.10.4), just as Maxentius had done with the Milvian Bridge before Constantine's arrival (he died while retreating across a pontoon bridge).⁴⁹ In this configuration, Constantine plays the foreign hostile Porsenna to Maxentius’ Roman Cocles.⁵⁰

Even if the Virgilian allusions in chapters 17 and 18 imbued Constantine indirectly with Romanitas via connection with Rome's mythical founder, this association need not extend to the contemporary city and its inhabitants as the current home of the Empire. Despite the recovery of the City and depictions elsewhere in the speech of Constantine's clemency towards its inhabitants, our orator allows a hint of complicity with the tyrant to linger around the Romans and the Italians. The Senate, we are told, dedicated a statue of a god to Constantine, and a golden crown and shield to Italy, ut conscientiae debitum aliqua ex parte releuarent (‘to lessen in some part the debt of their conscience’, 25.4). Those gifts, we should note, do not cancel the debt entirely.⁵¹

Maxentius himself, the obvious object of invective, is deployed to confirm a particular definition of the emperor's military role between urbs and limites. The orator exploits Maxentius’ decision to remain in Rome while Constantine marched south, imagining his boast to his troops that se solum cum illis imperare, alios per limites pro se militare (‘he alone ruled with them, others campaigned on the limites for him’, 14.6). Once upon a time, this attitude would have been considered the norm; even Emperor Augustus in the latter part of his reign had been content to leave military campaigns to his generals.⁵² But rather than endorse an earlier imperial ideal of Rome-based emperorship, our orator embraces and normalizes the practice that true emperors campaigned themselves on the limites, as Constantine had been doing since 306.⁵³ And perhaps more specifically he sought to recall to Constantine's mind the words the young emperor had heard on his wedding day in Trier in 307: decet … te, iuuenis, indefessum ire per limites qua Romanum barbaris gentibus instat imperium, ‘you must, young man, traverse the limites tirelessly where the Roman empire presses upon the barbarian peoples’ (Pan. Lat. VII[6]14.1). In attacking Maxentius, our orator once again makes the case for Constantine's rightful place in Gaul.

In making the case for Constantine's residence in Gaul, he builds, albeit with more urgency, on the comments of his Gallic predecessors. Only three years earlier, the orator of Pan. Lat. VI(7) had issued a warning of what happened when Constantine left Trier to march south against another imperial opponent, Maxentius’ father, Maximian: ecce enim, dum a limite paulisper abscesseras, quibus se terroribus barbarorum perfidia iactauerat, ‘For recall the short time you were away from the limes. In what terrifying fashion did the barbarian perfidy vaunt itself’, Pan. Lat. VI(7)21.2.⁵⁴ On that occasion Constantine was praised for hurrying back to see off the threat from the Franks (Pan. Lat. VI[7]21.1). But even though it goes unmentioned at this point in the speech, the celebratory occasion in late 313 and Constantine's final res gestae covered by Pan. Lat. XII(9) prove that the warning of Pan. Lat. VI(7) still held. The Franks again took advantage of Constantine's absence to threaten Gaul; and their latest incursion was the cause for Constantine's summer campaign of 313, when ruperat fidem gens leuis et lubrica barbarorum (‘the fickle and flighty race of barbarians broke its faithfulness’, 23.3). Constantine may have winced if he detected the rebuke that his previous attempt to subdue the Franks was now called out as a failure: the orator of Pan. Lat. VII(6) had previously claimed with a sense of definitiveness totius gentis lubricam fidem timore uinxisti (‘you [that is, Constantine] have bound the flighty faithfulness of the whole race [of Franks]’, Pan. Lat. VII[6]4.2). Now those bonds, the allusion in Pan. Lat. XII(9) implies, have broken. Once again, allusion to earlier panegyrics delivered to Constantine in Trier enforce a message that not only is Trier, with its proximity to the limes, the rightful place for an emperor to be based, but it is also a city that requires the constant presence of Constantine.

IV. THE PLACE FOR VICTORY CELEBRATIONS

The orator of 313 challenges Rome's status as the rightful abode for an emperor in favour of Trier. In that claim, he continues a tradition begun by Gallic predecessors, but it was given an extra sense of urgency now that Rome itself lay under the control of Constantine.⁵⁵ More radically, however, given the earlier Constantinian and Tetrarchic panegyrics’ deferral to Rome as a place for triumph (discussed above), the orator of 313 builds a case for the normalized relocation of formal triumph away from Rome.

Comparison to Nazarius again reveals the power of selectivity and arrangement of material that was available to both orators. By choosing to make the Frankish campaign of 313 a prelude to the Italian campaign of 312, Nazarius could ensure that Constantine's entrance to Rome and his description of the victory celebrations formed the culminating action of his speech (IV[10]30.4–35.5). For Nazarius, Rome is the only place in which victory is celebrated. By comparison, Pan. Lat. XII(9) narrates a series of celebratory events in Milan, Rome and Trier that rob the Vrbs of its exclusive and final position. By and large, the orator of 313 and Nazarius follow the same sequence of events for the campaign of 312. But between the battles at Turin and Verona the orator of 313 pauses the military narrative for a set-piece description of aduentus at Milan (XII[9]7.5–8), which has no counterpart in Nazarius. The inhabitants rejoice for their security at the appearance of Constantine: auspicium uictoriae tuae pro consummatione metiebantur: non Transpadana prouincia uidebatur recepta, sed Roma, ‘they counted the beginning of your victory as consummation: it seemed that it was not the Transpadane provinces which had been recovered but Rome’, XII(9)7.7. This scene may not be a formal triumph but, in the eyes of the Milanese, Constantine has already won his campaign: the episode thus deprives the Milvian Bridge of its role as the decisive battle, and Rome as the sole place of victory celebration.

The care and nuance with which the orator of 313 depicts Constantine's triumphal entry into Rome on 29 October 312 also appears in higher relief when compared with Nazarius. Formally, Nazarius labels the event in Vrbem ingressus … imperatoris (IV[10]30.4), but his description is suggestive of a triumph, albeit praising Constantine for inverting the ceremony's usual tropes: barbarians were not imprisoned, but ex-consuls were freed; Rome did not receive the spoils of victory, but ceased to be despoiled; captive enemy troops were not paraded, but a series of imagined personified vices was, including Perfidia, Audacia and Crudelitas (Pan. Lat. IV[10]31.1–3).⁵⁶ Yet Nazarius stops short of presenting Constantine as a triumphator—the emperor is conspicuously absent from his parade and instead the focal point of the procession is the head of Maxentius (31.4).

The orator of 313 had already considered these same issues. His account of Constantine's entry into Rome and of the celebrations is much more succinct that Nazarius’, and is confined to two principal actions: Constantine's entry (18.3–19.6) and subsequent acts in the Senate (20.1–2), followed by a set of historical comparisons (20.3–21.3). Those comparisons begin with the famous exclamation O tandem felix ciuili, Roma, uictoria! (‘Oh Rome, for the first time fortunate in a civil-war victory!’, 20.3), often seized upon as evidence for Constantine's unashamed wish to celebrate a victory against a Roman enemy.⁵⁷ But this exclamation opens the way for the orator to recall a poignant aspect of Rome's Republican history—as a city that had repeatedly been the victim of civil war, with slaughter on the streets when Cinna, Marius and Sulla captured the city (20.3–4).⁵⁸ He goes out of his way to identify the parallels with 312: Cinna and Marius, we are reminded, displayed the head of the consul Octavius (20.3; cf. Maxentius’ at 18.3). Constantine does compare favourably with these Republican figures by not taking vengeance on the defeated (at iste uictor non modo hostium sed etiam uictoriae suae, quidquid militum bello superfuit, tibi reseruauit, ‘but this man [Constantine], victor not only over the enemy but even over his own victory, preserved for you whatever soldiers survived the war’), but this series of Republican comparisons presents the entry into the city in 312 as one of capture, not of liberation, and, as with the example of Cocles, Constantine as a hostile attacker (albeit one who acts nobly).

The orator resumes his theme of Rome's place within a sequence of celebration. If he suggests that Milan had been first to celebrate Constantine's triumph in 312, then the entry to Rome itself (Pan. Lat. XII[9]19) replays similar literary celebrations in Rome and elsewhere, for this section contains a dense pocket of allusions to earlier speeches in the Gallic Panegyrici Latini corpus. At the initial entrance of Constantine, tecta ipsa, ut audio, commoueri … uidebantur (‘the very houses, I hear, seemed … to move’, XII[9]19.1), just as they had done for Maximian and Diocletian when they entered Milan as narrated in a speech delivered in Trier in 291: tecta ipsa se, ut audio, paene commouerunt (‘the very houses, I hear, almost moved themselves’, XI[3]11.3). The population in 312 was an eager audience: senatus populusque Romanus … oculis ferre gestiuit (‘the Senate and the People of Rome … were eager to carry you with their eyes [wherever Constantine went]’, 19.5), just as they had done for Maximian (later rival of Constantine, and father of the newly defeated Maxentius) in 298: [populus Romanus] oculis ferre gestiret (‘the People of Rome were eager to carry you with their eyes [to the temple of Jupiter]’, VII[6]8.7). And their intent gaze upon Constantine allows them to recognize for the first time qui tuus esset fulgor oculorum (‘what flashing of the eyes you had’, XII[9]19.6), an observation the inhabitants of Trier had made three years earlier, in the wake of the defeat of Maximian by Constantine, in quo hic fulgor oculorum (‘in whom [Constantine] there was this flashing of his eyes’, VI[7]17.1).⁵⁹ The cumulative effect of these allusions suggests that, whereas this may be Constantine's first visit to Rome, the celebrations appear rather conventional from a Gallic perspective, where they have all happened before, and the image of a celebrating emperor was familiar to the Gallic audience. And as these quotations already indicate, there is another significant shift in comparison to Nazarius’ later speech: the focal point of the ingressus is not Maxentius’ head but Constantine himself, on whom the inhabitants of Rome repeatedly gaze.⁶⁰ They do so not just during the procession itself but also during the rest of his stay in the city, even inverting the usual visual dynamics of spectacles in the theatres and the circus (where the stage or the arena should be the focus of everyone's attention), instead nec quidquam aliud homines diebus munerum aeternorumque ludorum quam te ipsum spectare potuerunt (‘and during the days of exhibitions and eternal games, men could gaze at nothing but you yourself’, 19.6). On the one hand, the orator of 313 praises Constantine with the familiar trope of the ciuilis princeps, open and accessible to all his people (the opposite, we should note of Maxentius, the princeps clausus of 14.6);⁶¹ but the reaction of the Romans contrasts starkly with the final (and only true) triumph narrated in the sequence of three celebrations (after Milan and Rome), the celebration at which our orator actually spoke:

nam quid hoc triumpho pulchrius, quo caedibus hostium utitur etiam ad nostrum omnium uoluptatem, et pompam munerum de reliquiis barbaricae cladis exaggerat tantamque captiuorum multitudinem bestiis obicit, ut ingrati et perfidi non minus doloris ex ludibrio sui quam ex ipsa morte patiantur?

What is more beautiful than this triumph [in Trier], in which he [Constantine] employs the slaughter of his enemies for all our delight, and enlarges the procession of the games with the survivors of the massacre of the barbarians; and in which he throws such multitude of the captives to the beasts in order that the ungrateful and treacherous men could endure the pain of the sport made of them than from death itself?

Now in Trier at the end of the speech we find a true triumph, properly so called and with the proper accoutrements: foreign enemies captured and turned into ludibria for the spectators. Constantine provides a spectacle for his people, rather than acting as a spectacle himself. There is no need to look at Constantine: he was already well known among the Treveri.⁶²

CONCLUSIONS

From the perspective of its aftermath, Constantine's reign naturally appears to be one of incremental eastwards progression, from its beginning in Britain, via Gaul, Italy and the Balkans, finally to the foundation of Constantinople and control of the whole Empire from the East.⁶³ This article has argued that we can detect in Pan. Lat. XII(9) the perspective of those who would ultimately be left behind by this progression.⁶⁴ The orator spoke at a moment of anxiety when geopolitics were in flux and Constantine's plans for his continued relationship with Trier were unclear. There is no doubt that he replicates the main tenor of Constantinian propaganda but, via a series of allusions (cued in the exordium by his explicit reference to the themes of imitatio and aemulatio) and by careful arrangement of his narrative, he uses that propaganda to carry a message of Trier's continued cultural and political relevance back to Constantine.

The idea that panegyrics could pose requests to the emperor as well as disseminate imperially endorsed messaging is not new, but we might now draw a distinction between types of entreaty from the orator.⁶⁵ Panegyric frequently contains explicit requests; for example, an Aeduan orator who addressed Constantine in Trier in 310 concluded his speech by asking Constantine to visit his native Autun (Pan. Lat. VI[7]22.7). Constantine did so the following year, and it is tempting to see this type of explicit request as staged—the decision to visit had already been made, but it suited Constantine to appear responsive to local petitions.⁶⁶ By contrast, we might suppose that the more subtle but no less insistent plea about Constantine's relationship with Trier in Pan. Lat. XII(9) was exclusively the orator's creation, and he knew that it would at least be unanticipated if not possibly unwelcome to its recipient. Advice suggestively articulated via allusion and narratological orientation proved a more attractive mode for this type of genuine and unsolicited request.

Finally, the recent rehabilitation of panegyric as historical source material has been predicated on the observation that it was produced in temporal and geographical proximity to its subject matter, especially when contrasted with that other great genre that also related the res gestae of emperors, namely imperial historiography. Even if it produced a highly partisan view of recent history, panegyric none the less is invaluable for tracing how an emperor and his associates wanted that recent history to be understood.⁶⁷ The orator of 313, however, draws attention to a situation that must have held for most late antique panegyrists: at the moment of his initial performance, our orator was one of several speakers to address the emperor on the same subject or even on the same occasion.⁶⁸ More often than not those successive speeches must have replayed in broad terms material that had recently been performed. To their earliest audiences, they were of most interest for the seemingly minor variations in phrasing and presentation rather than for the dominant theme of imperial messaging that they reiterated.