BIOGRAPHYCAL UNIVERSAL LIBRARY

CONSTANTINE THE GREAT

XIII

THE FOUNDATION OF CONSTANTINOPLE

WE come now to the greatest political achievement of Constantine's reign—the foundation of a new Rome. Let us ask at the outset what led him to take a step so decisive as the transference of the world's metropolis from the Italian peninsula to the borders of Europe and Asia. The assignation of merely personal motives will not suffice. We are told by Zosimus that Rome was distasteful to Constantine, because it reminded him of the son and the wife who had fallen victims to his savage resentment. He was uneasy in the palace on the Palatine, whose very stones suggested murder and sudden death, and whose walls were cognizant of unnumbered treasons. What Zosimus says may very well be true. Constantine’s conscience was likely to give him less peace in Rome than elsewhere. But the personal wishes of even the greatest men cannot bind the generations which come after them. There have been cities founded by the caprice of royal tyrants which have flourished for a season and then vanished. Seleucia is perhaps the most striking example, and scarcely a mound remains to mark its site. But most of the historic cities of the world owe their greatness and their permanence not to the whims of royal founders, but to geographical and strategic position. Rome was not uncrowned by Constantine because he could not forget within its walls the crimes which had stained his hands with blood.

It is also to be remembered that others had already set the example of despoiling of her dignities the ancient Queen of the Nations. We have seen how in the western half of the Empire great Imperial cities had been rising within easy reach of the frontiers. In far-off Britain London might be the most opulent city, but York was the chief residence of the Cesar of the West when he visited the island. In Gaul Treves had outstripped Lyons in dignity and wealth, and was now the centre of military and administrative power. Even in Italy Milan had grown at the expense of Rome; it was nearer to the frontier and, therefore, nearer to the armies. Rome lay out of the way. Diocletian, again, had favoured Nicomedia in Bithynia. In other words, Rome was ceasing to be the one centre of gravity of the ancient world, or, to express the same truth in another form, the Roman world was ceasing to be one. Diocletian had practically acknowledged this when he founded his system of Augusti and Caesars. With the subdivision of administrative and executive power there naturally ceases to be one supreme metropolis. It would be a mistake to suppose that Constantine, in founding a new Rome, deliberately hastened the rapid tendency towards separation. The very name of New Rome which he gave his city indicates his belief that he was merely moving Rome from the Tiber to the Bosphorus—merely changing to a more convenient site. But the fact that this name dropped out of use almost at once, and that the city was called after him, not in Latin but in Greek, shows how strongly the current was flowing towards political division.

But what attracted Constantine towards Byzantium? Precisely, of course, those advantages of situation which have attracted modern statesmen. Everyone knows the story of how, after the Peace of Tilsit, the Tsar Alexander constantly pressed Napoleon to allow him to take Constantinople. Napoleon at length told his secretary, M. de Meneval, to bring him the largest map of Europe which he could procure, and, after poring over it for some time, he looked up and exclaimed, “Constantinople! Never! It is the Empire of the world”. Was Napoleon right? The publicists of today return different answers. The Mediterranean is not the all-important sea it once was, and the strategical importance of Constantinople has been greatly modified by the Suez Canal and the British occupation of Egypt. But if Napoleon's exclamation seems rather theatrical to us, it would not have seemed so to Constantine, whose world was so much smaller than ours and presented such different strategical problems calling for solution. Constantine had won the world when he defeated Licinius and captured Byzantium: he determined to keep it where he had won it.

It is said by some of the late historians that he was long in coming to a decision, and that he carefully weighed the rival claims of other cities. There was his birthplace, Naissus, in Pannonia, though we cannot suppose that Constantine seriously thought of making this his metropolis. There was Sardica on the Danube, the modern Belgrade and capital of Servia, a city well adapted by its position for playing an important role in history, and conveniently near the most dangerous frontier of the Empire. “My Rome is at Sardica”, Constantine was fond of declaring at one period of his career, according to a tradition which was perpetuated by the Byzantine historians. Another possible choice was Nicomedia, which had commended itself to Diocletian, and, finally, there was Salonica, which even now has only to fall into capable hands to become one of the most prosperous cities of eastern Europe.

According to Zosimus, even when Constantine had determined to found his new city at the point where Europe and Asia are divided by the narrow straits, he selected first the Asiatic side. The historian says that he actually began to build and that the foundations of the abandoned city were still to be seen in his day between Troy and Pergamum. But the story is more than doubtful. Legend has naturally been busy with the circumstances attending the Emperor's final choice of Byzantium. Was it inspired, as some say, by the flight of an eagle from Chrysopolis towards Byzantium? Or, while Constantine slept in Byzantium, did the aged tutelar genius of the place appear to him in a dream and then become transformed into a beautiful maiden, to whom he offered the insignia of royalty? Interesting as these legends are, we need seek no further explanation of Constantine's choice than his own good judgment and experience. He was fully aware of the extraordinary natural strength of Byzantium, for his armies had found great difficulty in taking it by assault; the supreme beauty of the site and its many other qualifications for becoming a great capital were manifest to his eyes every time he approached it. Byzantium had long been one of the most renowned cities of antiquity. Even in the remotest times the imagination of the Greeks had been powerfully affected by the stormy Euxine that lay in what was to them the far north-east, guarding the Golden Fleece and the Apples of the Hesperides, a wild region of big rivers, savage lands, and boisterous seas. Daring seamen of Megara, in the seventh century BC, had effected a landing at the mouth of the Bosphorus, where Io had fled across from Europe to Asia, turning their galleys up the smooth estuary that still bears its ancient name of the Golden Horn. Apollo had told them to fix their habitation "over against the city of the blind," and this they had rightly judged could be no other than Chalcedon, for men must needs have been blind to choose the Asiatic in preference to the European shore.

The little colony founded by Byzas, the Megarian, had prospered marvellously, though it had experienced to the full all the vicissitudes of fortune. It had fallen before the Persian King Darius; it had been wrested from him after a long siege by Pausanias, the hero of Plataea, when the Greeks rolled back the tide of invasion. In turn the subject and successful rival of Athens, Byzantium gained new glory by withstanding for two years the assaults of Philip of Macedon. Thanks to the eloquence of Demosthenes, Athens sent help in the shape of ships and men, and, in commemoration of a night attack of the Macedonians successfully foiled by the opportune rising of the moon, Byzantium placed upon her coins the crescent and the star, which for four centuries and a half have been the familiar symbols of Turkish sovereignty. Byzantium grew rich on commerce. It was the port of call at which every ship entering or leaving the Bosphorus was bound to touch; no craft sailed the Euxine without paying dues to the city at its mouth. Polybius, in a very interesting passage, points out how Byzantium occupied “the most secure and advantageous position of any city in our quarter of the world, as far as the sea is concerned”. Then he continues:

“The Pontus, therefore, being rich in what the rest of the world requires to support life, the Byzantines are absolute masters in this respect. For the first necessaries of existence, cattle and slaves, are admittedly supplied by the region of the Pontus in better quality and greater profusion than elsewhere. In the matter of luxuries, they supply us with honey, wax, and salt fish, while they take our superfluous olive oil and wines”.

It was Byzantium, therefore, which kept open the straits, and Polybius speaks of the city as a common benefactor of the Greeks. When the Romans began to appear on the scene as a world-power, Byzantium made terms with the Senate. It well suited the Roman policy to have a powerful ally on the Bosphorus, strong in the ships in which Rome was usually deficient. As a libera et federata civitas, Byzantium enjoyed a more or less prosperous history until the days of Vespasian, who stripped it of its privileges. These were restored, but a shattering blow overtook the city at the close of the second century, when Septimus Severus took it by storm. Angry at its long resistance, Severus levelled its fortifications to the ground,—a work of endless toil, for the stones and blocks had been so clamped together that the walls were one solid mass. However, before he died, he repented him of the destruction which he had wrought and gave orders for the walls to be built anew. It was the Byzantium as rebuilt by Severus that Constantine determined to refound on a far more splendid scale.

No subsequent historian has improved upon the glowing passage in which Gibbon summarizes the incomparable advantages of its site, which appears, as he well says, to have been "founded by Nature for the centre and capital of a great monarchy." We may quote the passage in full from his seventeenth chapter:

“Situated in the forty-first degree of latitude—practically the same, it may be noted, as that of Rome, Madrid, and New York—the imperial city commanded from her seven hills the opposite shores of Europe and Asia; the climate was healthy and temperate; the soil fertile; the harbour secure and capacious; and the approach on the side of the continent was of small extent and easy of defence. The Bosphorus and Hellespont may be considered as the two gates of Constantinople; and the prince who procured those important passages could always shut them against a naval enemy and open them to the fleets of commerce. The preservation of the Eastern provinces may, in some degree, be ascribed to the policy of Constantine, as the barbarians of the Euxine, who, in the preceding age, had poured down their armaments into the heart of the Mediterranean, soon desisted from the exercise of piracy and despaired of facing this insurmountable barrier. When the gates of the Hellespont and Bosphorus were shut, the capital still enjoyed, within their spacious enclosure, every production which could supply the wants, or gratify the luxury, of its numerous inhabitants. The seacoasts of Thrace and Bithynia, which languish under the weight of Turkish oppression, still exhibit a rich prospect of vineyards, of gardens and plentiful harvests; and the Propontis has ever been renowned for an inexhaustible store of the most exquisite fish, that are taken in their stated seasons without skill and almost without labour. But, when the passages of the Straits were thrown open for trade, they alternately admitted the natural and artificial riches of the North and South, of the Euxine and the Mediterranean. Whatever rude commodities were collected in the forests of Germany and Scythia, as far as the sources of the Tanais and the Borysthenes, whatever was manufactured by the skill of Europe and of Asia, the corn of Egypt and the gems and spices of the farthest India, were brought by the varying winds into the port of Constantinople, which, for many ages, attracted the commerce of the ancient world”.

From a strategical point of view, it was of inestimable advantage that the capital and military centre of the Empire should be within striking distance of the route taken by the nomad populations of the East as they pressed towards the West, at the head of the Euxine. The Scythians, the Goths, and the Sarmatae had all crossed that great region; the Huns were to cross it in the coming centuries. Placed on shipboard at Constantinople, the legions of the Empire could be swiftly conveyed into the Euxine, and could penetrate up the Danube, Tanais, or Borysthenes to confront the invaders where the danger threatened most.

The story of how Constantine marked out the boundaries of his new capital is well known. Not content with the narrow limits of the ancient city—which included little more than the district now known as Seraglio Point—Constantine crossed the old boundary, spear in hand, and walked with his attendants along the shores of the Propontis, tracing the line as he went. His companions expressed astonishment that he continued so far afield, and respectfully drew the Emperor’s attention to the enormous circuit which the walls would have to enclose. Constantine rebuked them. “I shall still advance,” he said, “until He, the invisible guide who marches before me, thinks it right to stop.” The legend is first found in Philostorgius, and it is not of much importance. But Constantine, as usual, took care to foster the belief that his will was God's will, even in the matter of founding Constantinople, and that he had but obeyed the clearly expressed command of Heaven. In one of his edicts he incidentally refers to Constantinople as the city which he founded in obedience to the mandate of God. It is a phrase which has meant much or little according to the character of the kings who have employed it. With Constantine it meant much, and, above all, he wished it to mean much to his subjects.

Archaeologists have not found it an easy task to trace the line of the walls of Constantine, especially on the landward side. It followed the coast of the Propontis from Seraglio Point, the Emperor adding height and strength to the wall of Severus and extending it to the gate of St. Emilianus, which formed the south-west limit of his city. This section was thrown down by an earthquake and had to be rebuilt by Arcadius and Theodosius II. From St. Emilianus the landward wall, with seven gates and ninety-five towers, stretched across from the waters of the Propontis to those of the Golden Horn, which was reached, it is supposed, at a point near the modern Djubali Kapou. This was demolished when the city had outgrown it, and Theodosius erected the new great wall which still stands almost unimpaired. The course of the old one can hardly be traced, but it is generally assumed that it did not include all the seven hills of Constantinople, though New Rome, like Old Rome, delighted in the epithet of Septicollis, the Seven-Hilled. Along the Golden Horn no wall was built until five centuries had elapsed. On this side Constantine considered that the city was adequately protected by the waters of the estuary, closed against the attack of an enemy by a huge iron chain, supported on floats, which stretched from the Acropolis of St. Demetrius across to the modern Galata. Confidence in the chain—some links of which are still preserved in the Turkish arsenal—seems to have been thoroughly justified. Only once in all the many sieges of Constantinople was it successfully pierced, when, in 1203, the Crusading Latins burst in upon the capital of the East.

Within the area we have described, great if compared with the original Byzantium, but small in comparison with the size to which it grew by the reign of Theodosius II, Constantine planned his city. Probably no great capital has ever been built so rapidly. It was finished, or so nearly finished that it was possible to hold a solemn service of dedication, by May, 33o—that is to say, within four years. Throughout that period Constantine seems to have had no thought for anything else. He urged on the work with an enthusiasm equal to that which Dido had manifested in encouraging her Tyrians to raise the walls of Carthage.

The passion for bricks and mortar consumed him. Like Augustus, he thought that a great imperial city could not be too lavishly adorned as a visible proof of present magnificence and a guarantee of future permanence. Nor was it in Constantinople alone that he built. Throughout his reign new public buildings kept rising in Rome, Jerusalem, Antioch, and the cities of Gaul. His impatience manifested itself in his letters to his provincial governors. “Send me word”, he wrote imperiously to one of them, “not that work has been started on your buildings, but that the buildings are finished”. To build Constantinople he ransacked the entire world, first for architects and builders, and then for art treasures. With such impetuous haste there was sure to be scamped work. Some of the buildings crumbled at the first slight tremor of earthquake or did not even require that impulse from without to collapse into ruin. It is by no means impossible that the havoc which seems to have been wrought in Constantinople by earthquakes during the next two or three centuries was largely due, not to the violence of the seismic disturbances but to insecure foundations and bad materials. The cynical Julian compared the city of Constantine to the fabled gardens of Adonis, which were planted afresh each morning and withered anew each night. Doubtless there was a substantial basis of fact for that bitter jibe.

Yet, when all allowances are made, it was a marvellous city which Constantine watched as it rose from its foundation. Those who study the archaeology of Constantinople in the rich remains which have survived in spite of Time and the Turk, are surprised to find how constantly the history of the particular spot which they are studying takes them straight back to Constantine. Despite the multitude of Emperors and Sultans who have succeeded him, each anxious to leave his mark behind him in stone, or brick, or marble, Constantinople is still the city of Constantine. In the centre, he laid out the Augusteum, the ancient equivalent, as it has well been pointed out, of the modern Place Imperiale. It was a large open space, paved throughout in marble, but of unknown shape, and historians have disagreed upon the probability of its having been circular, square, or of the shape of a narrow rectangle. It was full of noble statuary, and was surrounded by an imposing pile of stately buildings. To the north lay the great church of Sancta Sophia; on the east the Senate House of the Augustum, so called to distinguish it from the Senate House of the Forum; on the south lay the palace, entered by an enormous brazen gate, called Chalce, the palace end of the Hippodrome, and the Baths of Zeuxippus. The street connecting the Augustum with the Forum of Constantine was known as or Middle­street, and was entered on the western side. In the Augustum, which later Emperors filled with famous statues, there stood in Constantine's day a single marble column known as the Milion—from which were measured distances throughout the Empire,— a marble group representing Constantine and Helena standing on either side of a gigantic cross, and a second statue of Helena upon a pedestal of porphyry. It was in this Augustum, moreover, that was to stand for a thousand years the huge equestrian statue of Justinian, known through all the world and described by many a traveller before the capture of the city by the Turks, who broke it into a thousand pieces.

To the west of the Augustum lay the Forum of Constantine, elliptical in form and surrounded by noble colonnades, which terminated at either end in a spacious portico in the shape of a triumphal arch. In the centre, which, according to an old tradition, marked the very spot on which Constantine had pitched his camp when besieging Licinius, stood, and still stands, though in sadly mutilated and shattered guise, the Column of Constantine, which has long been known either as the Burnt Pillar, owing to the damage which it has suffered by fire, or as the Porphyry Pillar, because of the material of which it was composed. There were eight drums of porphyry in all, brought specially from Rome, each about ten feet in height, bound with wide bands of brass wrought into the shape of laurel wreaths. These rested upon a stylobate of white marble, some nineteen feet high, which in turn stood upon a stereobate of similar height composed of four spacious steps. Sacred relics were enclosed—or are said to have been enclosed—within this pediment, including things so precious as Mary Magdalene's alabaster box, the crosses of the two thieves who had suffered with Christ upon Mount Calvary, the adze with which Noah had fashioned the Ark out of rough, primeval timber, and—in strange company—the very Palladium of ancient Rome, transported from the Capitol to an alien and a rival soil. At the foot of the column there was placed the following inscription: “0 Christ, Ruler and Master of the world, to Thee have I now consecrated this obedient city and this sceptre and the power of Rome. Guard and deliver it from every harm”.

At the summit of the column was a colossal statue of Apollo in bronze, filched from Athens, where it was believed to be a genuine example of Pheidias. But before the statue had been raised into position, it suffered unworthy mutilation. The head of Apollo was removed and replaced by a head of Constantine. This may be interpreted as a confession of the sculptors of the day that they were unable to produce a statue worthy of their great Emperor; but the fact that a statue of Apollo was chosen for this doubtful honour of mutilation is worth at least passing remark, when we remember that before his conversion Constantine had selected Apollo for special reverence. It is certainly strange that the first Christian Emperor should have been willing to be represented, on the site which was ever afterwards to be associated with his name, by a statue round which clustered so many pagan associations. He did not even disdain the pagan inscription, “To Constantine shining like the Sun”; nor did he reject the pagan attribute of a radiated crown around the head. In the right hand of Apollo the old Greek artist had placed a lance; in the left a globe. That globe was now surmounted by a cross and lo! Apollo had become Constantine; the most radiant of the gods of Olympus had become the champion of Christ upon earth. The fate of this statue—which was held in such superstitious reverence that for centuries all horsemen dismounted before passing it, while below it, on every first day of September, Emperor, Patriarch, and clergy assembled to chant hymns of prayer and praise—may be briefly told. In 477 the globe was thrown down by an earthquake. The lance suffered a like fate in 541, while the statue itself came crashing to earth in 1105, killing a number of persons in its fall. The column was then surmounted by a cross, and fire and time have reduced it to its present almost shapeless and unrecognizable mass.

Close to the Augustum there began to rise the stately magnificence of the Imperial Palace, the Great Palace, as it was called to distinguish it from all others. This was really a cluster of palaces spread over an enormous area, a self-contained city within itself, strongly protected with towers and walls. Here were the Imperial residences, gardens, churches, barracks, and baths, and for eight hundred years, until this quarter was forsaken for the palace of Blachernae in another region of the city, Emperors continued to build and rebuild on this favoured site. In later years the Great Palace consisted of an interconnected group of buildings bearing such names as Chrysotriklinon, Trikonchon, Daphne,—so called from a diviner’s column brought to Constantinople from the Grove of Daphne near Antioch,—Chalce, Boucoleon, and Manavra. One at least of these dated back to Constantine. This was the Porphyry Palace, with a high pyramidal roof, constructed of porphyry brought especially from Rome. It was dedicated to the service of the ladies of the Imperial Family, who retired thither to be away from the vexations, intrigues, and anxieties of everyday life during the time of their pregnancy. In the seclusion of this Porphyry Palace they were undisturbed and secure, and the children born within walls thus sacred to Imperial maternity were distinguished by the title of “Porphyrogeniti”, which plays so prominent a part in Byzantine history.

Constantine built below ground as well as above. One of the principal drawbacks—perhaps the only one—to the perfect suitability of the site of Constantinople was that it contained very few natural springs. Water, therefore, had to be brought into the town by gigantic aqueducts and stored in cisterns, some small, some of enormous size, which must have cost fabulous sums. The two greatest of these are still in good preservation after nearly sixteen centuries of use. One is the Cistern of Philoxenos, called by the Turks Bin Bir Derek, or the Thousand and One Columns. The columns stand in sixteen rows of fourteen columns each, each column consisting of three shafts, and each shaft being eighteen feet in height, though all the lower and most of the middle tiers have long been hidden by masses of impacted earth. Philoxenos, whose name is thus immortalized in this stupendous work, came to Constantinople from Rome at the request of the Emperor, and lavished his fortune upon the construction of this cistern in proof of his public spirit and in order to please his master. Assistance was also invited from the public. And just as in our own day subscriptions are often coaxed out of reluctant purses by deft appeal to the harmless vanity which delights to see one's own name inscribed upon a foundation stone, so in this Cistern of Philoxenos there are still to be deciphered upon the columns the names of the donors, names, as Mr. Grosvenor points out in his most interesting account of these cisterns, which are wholly Greek. “It is a striking evidence”, he says, “how little Roman was the Romanized capital, that every inscription is in Greek”. The second great cistern is the Royal or Basilike Cistern, begun by Constantine and restored by Justinian, which is called by the Turks Yeri Batan Serai, or the Underground Palace. This is supported by three hundred and thirty-six columns, standing twelve feet apart in twenty-eight symmetrical rows. The cistern is three hundred and ninety feet long and a hundred and seventy-four feet wide, and still supplies water from the Aqueduct of Valens as fresh as when its first stone was laid.

The chief glories of Constantinople, however, were the Hippodrome and the churches. With the latter we may deal very briefly, the more so because the world- renowned St. Sophia is not the St. Sophia which Constantine built, but the work of Justinian. Constantine's church, on which he and many of his successors lavished their treasures, was burnt to the ground and utterly consumed in the tumult of the Nika which laid half the city in ashes. Nor had St. Sophia been intended to be the metropolitan church. That distinction belonged to the church which Constantine had dedicated not to the Wisdom but to the Peace of God, to St. Irene. It, too, shared the fate of the sister church in the tumult of the Nika, and was similarly rebuilt by Justinian. This was regarded as the Patriarchal church and called by that name, for here the Patriarch conducted the daily services, since the church had no clergy of its own. It was at the high altar of St. Irene that the Patriarch Alexander in 335 prayed day and night that God would choose between himself and Arius; while the answer— or what was taken for the answer—was delivered at the foot of Constantine's Column. It was in this church nearly half a century later that the great Arian controversy was ended in 381, and here that the Holy Spirit was declared equal to the Father and the Son. Since the Ottoman conquest this church—the sole survivor of all that in Byzantine times once stood in the region of what is now the Seraglio—has been used as an arsenal and military museum. On its walls hang suits of armor, helmets, maces, spears, and swords of a bygone age, while the ground floor is stacked with modern rifles. The temple of “the Peace that Passeth Understanding” has been transformed into a temple of war. Mr. Grosvenor well sums up its history in the fine phrase, “Saint Irene is a prodigious hearthstone, on which all the ashes of religion and of triumph and surrender have grown cold”.

There is yet another church in Constantinople which calls for notice. It is the one which Constantine dedicated to the Holy Trinity, though its name was soon afterwards changed to that of the Holy Apostles, in honour of the remains of Timothy, Andrew, and Luke, the body of St. Mathias, the head of James, the brother of Jesus, and the head of St. Euphemia, which were enshrined under the great High Altar. So rich a store of relics was held to justify the change of name. It was from the pulpit of this Church of the Holy Apostles that John Chrysostom denounced the Empress Eudoxia, but the chief title of the building to remembrance is that it was for centuries the Mausoleum of Constantinople's Emperors and Patriarchs. None but members of the reigning house, or the supreme Heads of the Eastern Church, were accorded burial within its walls. Constantine built a splendid Heroon at the entrance, just as Augustus had built a magnificent Mausoleum on the Field of Mars. When it could hold no more, Justinian built another. Each monarch, robed and crowned in death as in life, had a marble sarcophagus of his own; no one church in the world's history can ever have contained the dust of so much royalty, sanctity, and orthodoxy. Apart from the rest lay the tombs of Julian the Apostate and the four Arian Emperors, as though cut off from communion with their fellows, and removed as far outside the pale as the respect due to an anointed Emperor would permit. It was not the conquering Ottoman but the Latin Crusaders, the robbers of the West, who pillaged the sacred tombs, stole their golden ornaments, and flung aside the bones which had reposed there during the centuries.

We pass from the churches to the Hippodrome, a Campus Martius and Coliseum combined, which now bears the Turkish name of Atmeidan, a translation of its ancient Greek name. Its glories have passed away. It has shrunk to little more than a third of its original proportions, and is merely a rough exercise ground surrounded by houses. But it preserves within its attenuated frame three of the most famous monuments of antiquity, around which it is possible to recreate its ancient splendours. These three monuments are the Egyptian obelisk, the Serpent Pillar, and a crumbling column that looks as though it must snap and fall in the first storm that blows. They preserve for us the exact line of the old spina, round which the charioteers used to drive their steeds in furious rivalry. The obelisk stood exactly in the centre of the building, which was shaped like a narrow magnet with long arms. From the obelisk to the middle of the sphendone—that is to say, the curving top of a magnet, or the loop of a sling—was 695 feet, while the width was 395 feet. The Hippodrome, therefore, was nearly 1409 feet long by 400 wide, the proportions of three and a half to one being those of the Circus Maximus at Rome. It lay north-north-east, conforming in shape to the Augustum. The Hippodrome had been begun in 203 by Severus, to whom belongs the credit of having conceived its stupendous plan, but it had remained uncompleted for a century and a quarter.

At the northern end, reaching straight across from side to side, was a lofty structure, raised upon pillars and enclosed within gates. Here were the stables and storehouses, known to the Romans by the name of Carceres and to the Greeks as Mangana. Above was a broad tribunal, in the centre of which, and supported by marble pillars, stood the Kathisma, with the throne of the Emperor well in front. This, in modern parlance, was the Royal Box, and, when the Emperor was present, the tribunal below was thronged with the high dignitaries of State and the Imperial Bodyguard, while, in front of the throne, but at a rather lower level, was the pillared platform, called the Pi, where stood the royal standard-bearers. Behind this entire structure, fully three hundred feet wide and so spacious that it was dignified with the name of palace and contained long suites of royal apartments, was the Church of St. Stephen, through which, by means of a spiral stairway, access was obtained to the Kathisma. It was always used by the Emperor on his visits to the Hippodrome, and was considered to be profaned if trodden by meaner mortals. The palace, raised as it was over the stables of the Hippodrome and looking down the entire length of the arena, had no communication with the body of the building, and on either side the long arms of the Hippodrome terminated in blank walls. The first tier of seats, known as the Bouleutikon or Podium, was raised thirteen feet above the arena. This was the place of distinction. At the back rose tier upon tier, broken half-way by a wide passage, while at the very top of all was a broad promenade running right round the building from pole to pole of the magnet.

This was forty feet above the ground, and the benches and promenades were composed of gleaming marble raised upon arches of brick. There was room here for eighty thousand spectators to assemble in comfort, and one seems to hear ringing down the ages the frenzied shouts of the multitudes which for centuries continued to throng this mighty building, of which now scarce one stone stands upon another. Mr. Grosvenor very justly says that “no theatre, no palace, no public building has today a promenade so magnificent. Within was all the pomp and pageantry of all possible imperial and popular contest and display; without, piled high around, were the countless imposing structures of that city which for more than half a thousand years was the most elegant, the most civilized, almost the only civilized and polished city in the world. Beyond was the Golden Horn, crowded with shipping; the Bosphorus in its winding beauty; the Marmora, studded with islands and fringing the Asiatic coast, the long line of the Arganthonius Mountains and the peaks of the Bithynian Olympus, glittering with eternal snow—all combining in a panorama which even now no other city of mankind can rival”.

In the middle of the arena stood the spina, a marble wall, four feet high and six hundred feet long, with the Goal of the Blues at the northern end facing the throne, and that of the Greens facing the sphendone. The spina was decorated with the choicest statuary, including the three surviving monuments. Of these the Egyptian obelisk, belonging to the reign of Thotmes III, had already stood for more centuries in Egypt than have elapsed since Constantine transported it to his new capital. When it arrived, the engineers could not raise it into position and it remained prone until, in 381, one Proclus, a prefect of the city, succeeded in erecting it upon copper cubes. The shattered column belongs to a much later epoch than that of Constantine. It was set up by Constantine VIII Porphyrogenitus, and once glittered in the sun, for it was covered with plates of burnished brass. The third, and by far the most interesting monument of the three, is the famous column of twisted serpents from Delphi. Its romantic history never grows dull by repetition. For this is that serpent column of Corinthian brass which was dedicated to Apollo by the thankful and exultant Greeks after the battle of Plataea, when the hosts of the Persian Xerxes were thrust back from the soil of Greece never to return. It bears upon its coils the names of the thirty-one Greek cities which fought for freedom, and there is still to be seen, inscribed in slightly larger characters than the rest, the name of the Tenians, who, as Herodotus tells us, succeeded in proving to the satisfaction of their sister states that they deserved inclusion in so honourable a memorial. The history of this column from the fifth century before the Christian era down to the present time is to be read in a long succession of Greek, Roman, medieval, and modern historians; and as late as the beginning of the eighteenth century the three heads of the serpents were still in their place. But even in its mutilated state there is perhaps no relic of antiquity which can vie in interest with this column, associated as it was in the day of its fashioning with Pausanias and Themistocles, with Xerxes and with Mardonius. We have then to think of it standing for seven centuries in the holiest place of all Hellas, the shrine of Apollo at Delphi. There it was surmounted by a golden tripod, on which sat the priestess who uttered the oracles which, in important crises, prompted the policy and guided the development of the cities of Greece. The column is hollow, and it is possible that the mephitic exhalations, which are supposed to have stupefied the priestess when she was possessed by the god, mounted up the interior of the spiral. The golden tripod was stolen during the wars with Philip of Macedon; Constantine replaced it by another when he brought the column from Delphi to Constantinople. And there, surviving all the vicissitudes through which the city has passed, still stands the column, still fixed to the pedestal upon which Constantine mounted it, many feet below the present level of the Atmeidan, still an object of superstition to Christian as well as to the Turk, and owing, no doubt, its marvellous preservation to the indefinable awe which clings, even in ruin, to the sacred relics of a discredited religion.

To the Hippodrome itself there were four principal entrances. The gate of the Blues was close by the Carceres or Mangana, on the western side, with the gate of the Greens facing it. At the other end, just where the long straight line was broken and the building began to curve into the sphendone, was a gate on the eastern side which bore the ill-omened name of the Gate of the Dead, opposite another, the name of which is not known. The gate of the Blues—the royal faction—was the grand entrance for all state processions. Such was the outward form of the famous Hippodrome, and Mr. Grosvenor justly dwells on the imposing vastness and beauty of its external appearance.

“The walls were of brick, laid in arches and faced by a row of Corinthian pillars. What confronted the spectator's eye was a wall in superposed and continuous arches, seen through an endless colonnade. Seventeen columns were still erect upon their bases in 1529. Gyllius, who saw them, says that their diameter was three and eleven­-twelfths feet. Each was twenty-eight feet high, and pedestal and capital added seven feet more. They stood eleven feet apart. Hence, deducting for the gates, towers, and palace, at least two hundred and sixty columns would be required in the circuit. If one, with the curiosity of a traveller, wished to journey round the entire perimeter, he must continue on through a distance of three thousand and fifteen feet, before his pilgrimage ended at the spot where it had begun; and ever, as he toiled along, there loomed into the air that prodigious mass, forty feet above his head. No wonder that there remained, even in the time of the Sultan Souleiman, enough to construct that most superb of mosques, the Souleimanieh, from the fallen columns, the splintered marbles, the brick and stone of the Hippodrome”.

But it was not merely the shell of the Hippodrome that was imposing by reason of its size and magnificence. It was filled with the choicest art treasures of the ancient world. Constantine stole masterpieces with the catholicity of taste, the excellence of artistic judgment, and the callous indifference to the rights of ownership which characterized Napoleon. He stripped the world naked of its treasures, as St. Jerome neatly remarked. Rome and its conquering proconsuls and proprtors had done the same. Constantine now robbed Rome and took whatever Rome had left. Greece was still a fruitful quarry. We have already spoken of the Serpent Column, which was torn from Delphi. The historians have preserved for us the names of a number of other famous works of art which adorned the spina and the promenade of the Hippodrome. There was a Brazen Eagle, clutching a writhing snake in its talons and rising in the air with wings outspread; the Hercules of Lysippus, of a size so heroic that it measured six feet from the foot to the knee; the Brazen Ass and its driver, a mere copy of which Augustus had offered to his own city of Nicopolis founded on the shores of Actium; the Poisoned Bull; the Angry Elephant; the gigantic figure of a woman holding in her hand a horse and its rider of life size; the Calydonian Boar; eight Sphinxes, and last, but by no means least, the Horses of Lysippus. These horses have a history with which no other specimens of equine statuary can compare. They first adorned a temple at Corinth. Taken to Rome by Memmius when he laid Corinth in ashes, they were placed before the Senate House. Nero removed them that they might grace his triumphal arch; Trajan, with juster excuse, did the same. Constantine had them sent to Constantinople. Then, after nearly nine centuries had passed, they were again packed up and transported back to Italy. The aged Dandolo had claimed them as part of his share of the booty and sent them to Venice. There they remained for almost six centuries more until Napoleon cast covetous eyes upon them and had them taken to Paris to adorn his Arc de Triomphe. On his downfall Paris was compelled to restore them to Venice and the horses of Lysippus paw the air once more above the roof of St. Mark's Cathedral.

We have thus briefly enumerated the most magnificent public buildings with which Constantine adorned his new capital, and the choicest works of art with which these were further embellished. The Emperor pressed on the work with extraordinary activity. No one believes the story of Codinus that only nine months elapsed between the laying of the first stone and the formal dedication which took place in the Hippodrome on May 11th, 330, but it is only less wonderful that so much should have been done in four years. The same untrustworthy author also tells a strange story of how Constantine took advantage of the absence of some of his officers on public business to build exact models of their Roman mansions in Constantinople, and transport all their household belongings, families, and households to be ready for them on their return as a pleasant surprise. What is beyond doubt is that the Emperor did offer the very greatest inducements to the leading men of Rome to leave Rome for good and make Constantinople their home. He even published an edict that no one dwelling in Asia Minor should be allowed to enter the Imperial service unless he built himself a house in Constantinople. Peter the Great issued a like order when he founded St. Petersburg and opened a window looking on Europe. The Emperor changed the destination of the corn ships of Egypt from Rome to Constantinople, established a lavish system of distributions of wheat and oil and even of money and wine, and created at the cost of the treasury an idle and corrupt proletariate. He thus transported to his new capital all the luxuries and vices of the old.

XIV

ARIUS AND ATHANASIUS