A.D. 381 heretics, pagans, and the dawn of the monotheistic state ( PDFDrive )

VI
THE SWANSONG OF FREE SPEECH: THE THEOLOGICAL
ORATIONS OF GREGORY OF NAZIANZUS
THEODOSIUS’ edict reached Constantinople in January or February 380. By
then the city had enjoyed the status of an imperial capital for fifty years,
although its history, as the Greek city Byzantium, went back a thousand years
earlier. Situated at the end of a peninsula at the extreme eastern edge of Thrace,
surrounded on three sides by the sea and defensible from land attacks by its great
walls, it was virtually impregnable. Even if the land routes were blocked, it
could be supplied by sea. In the AD 190s the emperor Septimius Severus took
two years to subdue a rival who held it, and it was to be another thousand years,
in the Fourth Crusade of 1204, before it fell to invaders again.
There was much more to Constantinople than its impregnability. It overlooked
the Bosporus, the shortest sea crossing between Europe and Asia, through which
flowed an ancient and always busy trade route between the Aegean and the
Black Sea. It was also comparatively close to the Danube and Euphrates borders,
a vital consideration now that the Roman Empire was under such threat. Major
land routes ran west - the Via Egnatia to Thessalonica and then across Greece,
from where a sea route led to Italy and Rome - and east through Asia Minor
towards the Persian frontier or southwards towards Syria and Egypt.
Constantinople was, in short, the linchpin of the eastern empire.
The founding of Constantinople illustrates how Constantine, whatever his
personal commitment to Christianity, distanced himself from the Church. The
emperor himself inaugurated the building programme by marking the new limits
of the city with a spear as in traditional Greek ritual. An imperial palace and
hippodrome followed Roman models; the hippodrome was a smaller copy of the
Circus Maximus in Rome. Among the ceremonies of the official foundation on
11 May 330, a chariot bearing a statue of Constantine, which itself carried a
statue of Tyche, ‘good fortune’ personified as a goddess, was paraded in the
hippodrome, watched by the bejewelled emperor himself from the imperial box
he had installed at the edge of the palace. Every year the ceremony was repeated
on the anniversary of the city’s foundation.